These Lapp troll drums must have been generally in use till the end of the seventeenth century. It was not, indeed, till the middle of the succeeding century that Christianity took a real hold on the population. That there has been a considerable survival of surreptitious heathenism among the Lapps, I myself was able to ascertain during two journeys undertaken with that object through Finnish and Russian Lapland in 1874, and again in 1876. It was specially interesting to observe that some of the traditional figures seen on the old troll drums are still engraved on the reindeer-horn spoons of that region.
The troll drums of the Lapps find their analogy in those of the kindred Samojed tribes to the East, which present figures of the same class. But the pictographs on these will be found to fit on to the rock-carvings or petroglyphs of Siberia, first described by Strahlenberg, of which a specimen is given in Fig. 12.[21] Similar rock carvings may be traced through a vast Finno-Ugrian or Mongolian region to the borders of China, and the Chinese characters themselves must have arisen from a branch of the same great Northern family.
This Finno-Tataric province of primitive pictography touches the Atlantic in Northern Norway. In the south of the Scandinavian Peninsula we have numerous examples of picture-writing in the shape of carving,[22] mainly belonging to the Bronze Age, either on rocks or on the slabs of sepulchral barrows. Of the latter class are the well-known examples from the Cairn of Kivik, on the east coast of Scania, and the rock-carvings extend through Southern Norway and Denmark. The most remarkable of all are probably those of Bohuslan, of which an example, in which ships figure largely, is shown in Fig. 13.[23]
In our own islands there is also evidence during the Bronze Age of the practice of engraving signs and pictographic figures on rocks and the slabs of sepulchral cists and chambers. Those found in England and Scotland consist for the most part of mere geometrical figures, such as concentric circles with connecting lines, the more elaborate figures found in the Fife Caves,[24] for example, certainly belonging to the Late Celtic Period. But in Ireland, then raised, by its abundant output of gold, to the position of a Western Eldorado, the field of primitive pictography is richer. The slabs of the chambered tumuli of Sleive-na-Calligha present groups of elaborate figures;[25] but a special interest attaches to those discernible in the great chambered barrow of New Grange. As was pointed out by Mr. Coffey,[26] one of the principal figures here carved represents in a degraded form a ship with its crew analogous to those so constantly repeated in the Scandinavian group (Fig. 14). This coincidence becomes the more suggestive when we recall the existence of a whole series of finds showing a connexion between Ireland and Denmark and its neighbour-lands during the Bronze Age.