Ill] AND HISTORIC TIMES 421 



brown, and chestnut) * Celtic ' ponies which lack hock callosities 

 may derive this feature from a double line of ancestry. 



On the other hand, it is plain, as we have shown (p. 346), 

 from the mention of black horses in the early literature that 

 the best horses of Scandinavia were saturated with Libyan 

 blood long before the colonisation of Iceland. This blood was 

 probably derived through Germany, where the Frisians already 

 possessed, in the fourth century, the famous breed of black 

 horses still known by their name, and whose pedigree can be 

 traced back to the horses owned by the Tencteri in the first 

 century A.D., and still earlier to the horses imported by the 

 Gauls from Mediterranean lands. It is therefore clear that in 

 the best horses brought from Norway to Iceland and the Faroes 

 there may have been a fair proportion of Libyan blood. The 

 presence of black, brown, chestnut, or striped dun animals in 

 Iceland and also in the Faroes may therefore be due not only 

 to the horses brought from Ireland, but also to those direct 

 from Scandinavia. But Prof. Ewart informs me that, as far as 

 he has seen, "Iceland and Faroe ponies in their ears, heads, 

 manes, and tails are never like the large Barbs and Arabs, 

 though Hebridean horses in which there is Spanish blood 

 (introduced in the eighteenth century) frequently are like 

 long-eared Arabs." 



But it by no means follows that all the horses brought by 

 the first colonists, or even those which came in later, were of 

 a superior breed. On the contrary, the descriptions of the black 

 and grey steeds of Cuchulainn, of Otkell's dun horses with dorsal 

 stripes, and of the chestnut and brown horses of Starkad and 

 Gunnar, all of which are commended for their peculiar ex- 

 cellence, show clearly that there were plenty of inferior 

 animals, either of the old thick-set, heavy-limbed, large-jointed 

 European- Asiatic horse, or possibly derived from an ancient 

 horse of lighter build Ewart's * Celtic ' pony itself, the de- 

 scendant of the slender-built horse whose remains are found 

 in the Brighton 'elephant bed.' 



That ponies with large heads and of a heavy build were 

 familiar in Iceland in medieval times is proved by an old 

 picture preserved in Iceland and reproduced by Bruun. But as 



