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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: knows, even superficially, the documents of that time. And I doubt
not that, in manners as well as in religion, the Norse were
humanised and civilised by their contact with the Celts, both in
Scotland and in Ireland. Both peoples had valour, intellect,
imagination: but the Celt had that which the burly angular Norse
character, however deep and stately, and however humorous, wanted;
namely, music of nature, tenderness, grace, rapidity, playfulness;
just the qualities, combining with the Scandinavian (and in Scotland
with the Angle) elements of character which have produced, in
Ireland and in Scotland, two schools of lyric poetry second to none
in the world.
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