Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/304

278 The question has been debated whether the vikings at their solemn festivals ever, in reality, drank from the skulls of their conquered foemen; but it cannot be denied that the custom was followed by both Teutonic and Celtic nations in the days of unameliorated barbarism; and it is indubitable that long after the petition relative to the fury of the Northmen had become out of date in the medieval liturgies, Christians continued to employ the crania of their saints, and their malefactors, as cups from which to imbibe health-securing draughts: those of the saints, one may suppose, from the idea that there went a virtue out of them, and those of the sinners, it may be, because in the days of far-off eld, men who died by solemn decree were most commonly neither violent transgressors against social duties as then understood, nor pitiful scoundrels, but valiant foemen whose gore-imbrued career excited admiration rather than horror, or noble blood-offerings yielded up to the gods to ensure favourable seasons and prosperity.

Examples of blood-sacrifice and of cruel burial-ceremonies are to be discovered in the early history of all the Indo-European races; these traces of savagery invariably tending to disappear as each nation is observed to advance along the path of civilisation, and to gain in humanity from contact with peoples less rude than itself. Every earnest desire, and every novel undertaking of European barbarism appears to have had its success safe-guarded by a gory tribute, but it has yet to be settled whether the life-stream of the condemned was applied remedially, although it is certain that as late as the period of the viking-raids human sacrifices were still resorted to by Scandinavian kings to lengthen their own life. Of the