Prehistoric Remains
may not be complete at nightfall when men return to the funeral feast.
In a note to the “Corpus Poeticum Boreale,” Dr. Vigfusson mentions the interesting circumstance that “Funeral urns of steatite (and sometimes of sandstone) are especially characteristic of wicking funerals in the Orkneys, and in those parts of Norway from whence the wickings came and whither they went home to die; they are only met with in Norway just at the Wicking Period.” It may then have been that their intercourse with the people of the west, including the mainland as well as the isles, may have induced the Vikings to make a change in their funeral customs. As the burial rites of a people are the customs to which they usually most persistently cling, perhaps some other suggestion is needed to account for such a change.
In Shetland the barrows are found upon the hillside and by the seashore, and even
beside the refuse heaps of the early inhabit-
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