Nordics

“ The slow but long-continued physical development of the Nordics has culminated in a powerful skeleton and musculature in sharp contrast to that of the Mediterranean race, to which the Nordic is more closely related than to any other. In fact, the mixture of Nordic and Mediterranean in the British Islands may possibly be one of the few advantageous racial crossings. ”

“ The first is the Nordic or Baltic subspecies. This race is long skulled, very tall, fair skinned with blond or brown hair and light colored eyes. The Nordics inhabit the countries around the North and Baltic Seas and include not only the great Scandinavian and Teutonic groups, but also other early peoples who first appear in southern Europe and in Asia as representatives of Aryan language and culture. ”

“ The chronic turmoil of both the mediæval and modern periods imposed a perpetual drain on the Nordic stock, while the era of discovery and colonization which began with the sixteenth century further depleted the Nordic ranks in Europe, since it was adventurous Nordics who formed the overwhelming majority of explorers and pioneers to new lands. ”

“ The continental Nordics, however, who moved westward to settle around the Baltic and North Seas, retained the more generalized characters of brown hair of various shades, and eyes which tend to either brown, gray, or, to a less extent, blue. The light eyes of the Nordics include light brown or hazel, and may be of any and all shades of gray and green to the deepest violet blue. ”

“ We shall be able to judge better if we look at the actions of Nordics in later times. At the downfall of the Roman empire it was not unusual for quite small bands of Nordics to become masters of even large territories ”

“ The Nordic is a picturesque and romantic figure, with many admirable qualities, but is seldom clever, skilful with his hands or patient in research. Lastly, an examination of the physical types, as they exist to-day in Germany, shows us that outside the former kingdom of Hanover, the Nordic type is rare. [433] There are probably as many pure Nordics in France, distributed over the northern departments from Dunkirk almost to the west of Brittany, as will be found in the German empire. ”

“ The Nordic Habitat The Nordics appear in their present centre of distribution, the basin of the Baltic, at the close 38of the Paleolithic, as soon as the retreating glaciers left habitable land. This race was probably at that time in possession of its fundamental characters, and its extension from the plains of Russia to Scandinavia was not in the nature of a radical change of environment. The race in consequence is now, always has been and probably always will be, adjusted to certain environmental conditions, chief of which is protection from a tropical sun. ”

“ While the Alpines were everywhere overwhelmed and driven to the fastnesses of the mountains, the warlike and restless nature of the Nordics has enabled the more stable Alpine population to reassert itself slowly, and Europe is probably much less Nordic to-day than it was fifteen hundred years ago. ”

“ THE EXPANSION OF THE NORDICS The men of Nordic blood to-day form practically all the population of Scandinavian countries, as also a majority of the population of the British Isles and are almost pure in type in Scotland and eastern and northern England. ”

“ This map shows that the vitality of Scandinavia was far from exhausted after sending for upward of two thousand years tribe after tribe across to the continent and that it was now producing an extraordinarily vigorous type, the Vikings in the west and the equally warlike and energetic Varangians in the east, who migrated back to the motherland of the Nordics and laid the foundations of modern Russia. ”

“ The vigor and power of the Nordic race as a whole is such that it could not have been evolved 170in so restricted an area as southern Sweden although its Teutonic or Scandinavian section did develop there in comparative isolation. The Nordics must have had a larger field for their specialization and a longer period for their evolution than is afforded by the limited time which has elapsed since Sweden became habitable. For the development of so marked a type there is required a continental area isolated and protected for long ages from the intrusion of other races. ”

“ Although the Revolution grew out of economic and political causes, it represents primarily one of those costly and unfortunate internecine wars in which the Nordics have been prone to indulge at intervals for two or three thousand years, and which have done so much to weaken them as a race. ”

“ We see the Nordics again confronted across the Pacific by their immemorial rivals, the Mongols. ”

“ The Mongol is not inferior to the Nordic in intelligence, as is the Negro, but represents such a divergent type that the mixture between Nordics and Chinese or Japanese is not a good one. The overflow of these Asiatics into our Pacific Coast might have Mongolized the States there, had not the Amer [Pg 38] ican laboring man taken alarm and secured legislation forbidding their immigration. ”

“ While I had learned in America to esteem the vigor, the intelligence and the worth of our Scandinavian immigration, no finer race contributing to the citizenship of the Republic, yet it has been only when I have met the Dane and Norsk and Swede upon their native soil, and beheld their noble cities, so alert and clean and modern, and traversed their hills and valleys, and climbed their mountain heights and floated upon their fjords, that I have learned fitly to admire and appreciate the grandeur and greatness of Scandinavia. ”

“ Her writers first put in shape the Norse mythology; and many of the most distinguished families of Norway and Denmark are now proud to trace their origin back to the old freedom-loving jarls and sea-kings who founded a nation upon a rock which had been forced up by terrestrial fires into an atmosphere so cold and forbidding that the snows gathered upon its lofty summits, while volcanic heat wrestled in the bowels of its mountains. ”

“ From the northwestern coast of Europe projects the rock-ribbed Scandinavian peninsula. The scenery is grand and picturesque, but the soil is sterile and the climate severe. In this bleak, beautiful country and on the adjacent islands of the Baltic Sea, there lived, a thousand years ago, the people called the Norsemen or Northmen. ”

“ If Norway is glorious, Greenland is in truth no less so. When one has once seen it, how dear to him is its recollection! I do not know if others feel as I do, but for me it is touched with all the dream-like beauty of the fairyland of my childish imagination. It seems as though I there found our own Norwegian scenery repeated in still nobler, purer forms.
It is strong and wild, this Nature, like a saga of antiquity carven in ice and stone, yet with moods of lyric delicacy and refinement. It is like cold steel with the shimmering colours of a sunlit cloud playing through it. ”

“ The tree of freedom grows more vigorous amid its granite hills. And as it grows in the Northern States of America, grows it also in our Scandinavian North. But what this North possesses, and which America possesses not, is an antiquity full of song and saga, of glorious prophecy and symbolism, of gods and heroes who gave to Scandinavia so large, so peculiar, so romantic a life. It is this antiquity, its significance for the present time, its life in our scenery, and our every-day life which attracts me once more to my native land, as powerfully as my mother's voice. ”

“ The people who emigrated to Iceland were for the most part the flower of the nation. They went especially from the west coast of Norway, where the peculiar Norse spirit had been most perfectly developed. Men of the noblest birth in Norway set out with their families and followers to find a home where they might be as free and independent as their fathers had been before them. No wonder then that they took with them the cream of the ancient culture of the fatherland. ”

“ From the Viking voyages a millennium ago to the myriad Scandinavians who have come here in more recent times, the Nordic people have made an indelible contribution to the greatness that is America. Danes, Finns, Icelanders, Norwegians and Swedes landed on our East coast and went West, expanded our frontier, tamed the prairie and helped make America the great Nation it is today. ”

“ The Scandinavian Alps, which we crossed, remind me of my own Far Western High Sierras. They are not quite so rugged or majestic, but their beauty stirred me deeply, especially glorified as they were by the enchantment of the summer sun. The mountains not only offered the ever-attractive Scandinavian forests of evergreens and delicate birches and rowan with its cheerful bunches of red berries; there were also tender, golden-green ferns, strange sweet wild flowers—so near as almost to be plucked through the car windows—and trickling streams and waterfalls. ”

“ However, as I did not come to Sweden to inculcate my peculiar principles, I refrained from calling attention to the fact—which is very patent to all who have any sort of knowledge of Swedish history—that a large proportion of the men and women who have made Scandinavia the truly great land that it is, and whose memory all Scandinavians delight to honor, were of the so-called “common people.” ”

“ Before we proceed to the Norwegians’ great contributions to the exploration of the northern regions, we shall attempt to collect and survey what is known, and what may possibly be concluded, about the most northern people of Europe, the Finns, and the earliest settlement of Scandinavia. ”

“ They became the leaders in all directions, not only in war and politics, but also in art and literature. A general spirit of migration had taken possession of the inhabitants of the North. While the Danes especially directed their expeditions to England and France, where they at once founded cities and kingdoms, the Norwegians went chiefly to Ireland, Scotland, and to the islands north of Great Britain. But the country, which above all attracted them, when they abandoned Norway to found new homes, was Iceland. ”

“ The little people of Norway and Sweden—which together make Scandinavia—get so much night in winter and so much day in summer that it doesn't seem strange to them at all—this getting up by night and going to bed by day. ”

“ But since this country, by its closeness of language as much as of position, includes Sweden and Norway, I will record their divisions and their climates also as I have those of Denmark. These territories, lying under the northern pole, and facing Bootes and the Great Bear, reach with their utmost outlying parts the latitude of the freezing zone; and beyond these the extraordinary sharpness of the cold suffers not human habitation. Of these two, Norway has been allotted by the choice of nature a forbidding rocky site. ”

“ We enter a new world when in picture-galleries we pass to the Norwegian from the Swedish section. From the great city we are transported to nature, solemn and solitary, into a land of silence, where a rude, sparse population, a race of fishermen, snatches a scanty sustenance from the sea. The Norwegians also contributed for a time to the international market in works of art. They sent mainly genre pictures telling of the manners and customs of their country, or landscapes depicting the phenomena of Northern scenery. ”

“ At our Centennial Exhibition, in 1876, I spent many delightful days in the Swedish department, and I remember with still vivid interest its unequalled specimens of wood-carving, and the paintings in which the effect of moonlight on the water was reproduced with such marvelous fidelity and skill. The fair-haired people of the Scandinavian Peninsula have indeed stamped their impress upon the history, the literature, the arts, the industries, and the laws and government of the whole civilized world, and always the influence exerted by their teaching and example has been wholesome and beneficent. ”

“ The history of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden is as captivating as a romance, and it presents an astonishing variety of the most singular events, which would afford admirable subjects for epic and dramatic poetry, as well as for the historical novel. The English reader will perceive, likewise, that the Scandinavian mythology is the fountain head of many of the most popular tales, legends, and ballads of his own country. ”

“ On the bleak shores of the North Sea, where the fiords and creek-mouths of Scandinavia gave shelter not only from foreign enemies, but from each other, there had grown up a seafaring race of men, of Gothic ancestry, who had settled on the coasts of what are now Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. ”

“ In short, we know that throughout the whole iron age, in spite of all influences unlike those operating in the South, there prevailed a high state of culture, and the many traditions and songs from the various districts of the North, which, although they were not committed to writing until after the introduction of Christianity, still belong to a hoary antiquity, afford ample testimony that the spirit was wide awake in the ancestors of the present inhabitants of the North, and that they were not merely cruel vikings. ”

“ It is said that the Swedes are a little jealous of the favor with which the Norwegians are regarded by travellers, but one naturally spends much more time in Norway, as its scenery is much finer, and its attractions far greater and more varied than those of Sweden; and while travelling through the country in such a leisurely old-fashioned way, one grows to know its people far more intimately than the Swedes or the Danes. ”

“ But, except to the élite of the learned and literary world, those native authors, who have instructed or amused the inhabitants of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, have remained almost as much unknown as if these countries had been situated at the base of the Mountains of the Moon—shut in by swamps and deserts, guarded by tribes of savages, and the scarcely more ferocious wild beasts of nearly impervious forests. ”