The poets, and the poetically minded authors of the sagas, who are the only authorities, have told the story with many circumstances of romance.
His protest, it is needless to say, was unavailing, and all who respect his memory must regret that the sunset of life failed to give him that insight into the future which is poetically ascribed to it.
But the result of these conditions and of his own inadequate conception of the proper limits of his art is that his best poetry is clogged with a great mass of alien matter, which no treatment in the world could have made poetically endurable.
Yet, for the most part, they either relate to objects thoroughly incapable of poetic treatment, where the writer's endeavour is rather to expound the matter fully than to render it poetically beautiful, or else expend themselves on short isolated subjects, generally myths, and are erotic in character.
The name Scotland for this geographical area of northern Britain (the Caledonia of the ancients - a name still poetically used for Scotland) originated in the 11th century, when (from the tribe of Scots) part of it was called Scotia (a name previously applied to what is now Ireland); and the name of Scotland became established in the 12th and 13th centuries.