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“These great Nordic incursions were to result in the marginalization of the once semi-autonomous Pictish, English and North British Princedoms that had preceded the arrival of the Norsemen on British soil. And, as they disappeared beneath the onslaught of the Viking Hosts, the ancient bardic traditions, which had once been succoured by these previously distinct ethnic groups, gradually became intertwined with one another as a result of widespread migration, inter-marriage and cross fertilization; the ultimate legacy of which was the perpetuation of the fragmentary remains of the ancient traditions which were to come to adorn the ballads that the Laird of Abbotsford himself collected, amongst the eighteenth century descendants of these ancient peoples.” — Rupert Ferguson