WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 307 



Another haunting folk-song I heard here years ago I must 

 put it down to preserve it at Vibstadt, Namsen Valley, on 

 a hot midday I heard the bonders' daughters sing it 

 as they weeded lettuce in the blaze of light. They called it 

 Bar den 9 s Dod (The Death of the Bard), and we have the same 

 air in our Highlands ; it dates back to prehistoric times ; and 

 we call it " The Minstrel of the MacDonalds." No one that 

 I know sings or plays it now at home. But a year or two 

 ago, on the top of a mountain in Southern Norway, as we 

 rested at lunch, a Norse hunting companion began singing it, 

 and I started, and he smiled and explained his wife was one 

 of the little girls who had given it to me in Northern Norway 

 twenty years before. The Norwegian words, I am told 

 by a Norwegian antiquarian, belong to the Viking 

 period. 



