20; Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. [sess. 
court named Eric and came with a great following to the Faroes. 
Naalsoe had been utterly depopulated by the Black Death, which 
raged in the islands at that date, and so the princess and her 
followers settled there. There she bore a son to Eric. Years later 
her father followed her, and when he came to Naalsoe he saw his 
grandson, whom he recognised because he was very like her, 
playing on the shore. Struck by the boy’s beauty and manly 
appearance, he offered to forgive his daughter and her lover if 
they would return to Scotland with him. This they refused to do,, 
remaining in the Faroes and having many other children there. 
The first-born son fell on a knife with which he was playing and 
killed himself, then the king of Denmark confiscated half the 
island from the princess because she was a Roman Catholic, but 
she and her other children, her followers and their descendants, 
peopled the island, and some of her descendants still refuse to 
marry outside the families who claim her as their ancestress. The 
present amptmand of the Faroes, the first native to be appointed 
to this position by the Danish Government, is of her kin. The 
whole story is, from the point of history, ridiculous, but I am in- 
clined to agree with Robert Chambers (7), who heard the outlines of 
the tradition on a yisit to the Faroes in the middle of last century,, 
that in the main it may be true, any foreign lady of birth and 
wealth being easily transformed into a ‘king’s daughter’ in a 
region so remote as the Faroes. 
All these floating traditions, in any case, probably set forth a 
real fact, viz., that there was, subsequent to their original colonisa- 
tion, a considerable influx of blood other than Norse into the 
Faroes ; but whether the immigrants came as single individuals or 
in parties we cannot say with any more accuracy than we can give 
their advent an exact date. Throughout the later Middle Ages, 
and as late as 1874, the crown trading monopoly, instituted by the 
kings of Denmark, shut off the Faroes from commerce with Iceland 
on the one hand, and with the rest of Europe on the other; and 
though extensive smuggling doubtless occurred, smuggling is not a 
form of trade likely to lead to intermarriage. The fishermen of 
the Faroes met with fishing-smacks from Shetland on the high 
seas, and frequently hired themselves out to Shetland shipowners, 
learning to speak English from their mates, but they came home 
