Norsemen

“ It is this deep longing for Balder that every year brings thousands of Norsemen to alight upon our shores and scatter themselves to their numberless settlements in these United States. Still every Norse emigrant, if he has aught in him worthy of his race, thinks he shall once more see those weird, gigantic, snow-capped mountains, that stretched their tall heads far above the clouds and seemed to look half anxiously, half angrily after him as his bark was floating across the deep sea. ”

“ Again he was a Norseman; and more, he was king of the Norsemen. He was the strong, subduing viking, and no sentiment must conquer him. He lifted the bronze horn and drained the ale to the last drop, though it burned his choking throat. ”

“ The Norsemen surrounded them, binding up wounds, exchanging rough jests on the battle, and examining with awe and wonder these vikings whose name was so famous, and who had fought so stoutly against such great odds. ”

“ Such were the gods, and such the heroes of the Norseman; who, like his own gods, went smiling to death under the weight of an inevitable destiny. But that fate never fell on their gods. Before this subjective mythological dream of the Norsemen could be fulfilled, the religious mist in which they walked was scattered by the sunbeams of Christianity. A new state and condition of society arose, and the creed which had satisfied a race of heathen warriors, who externally were at war with all the world, became in time an object of horror and aversion to the converted Christian. ”

“ III.—THE EASTERN VIKINGS—THE BEGINNINGS OF LITERATURE.
We have watched, in the dim twilight preceding the dawn of history, the coming of the first Norsemen to the sea. They are a spirited and fearless people, and they have chanced, if chance it is, to come to that sea on which navigation is most hazardous and difficult. We marvel they so quickly learn the arts of seamanship, and make the fierce new element their dwelling place. ”

“ Before they could collect themselves or form any plan for defense, the Norsemen were upon them, and then there followed an awful scene of carnage. The clash of steel, the hoarse shouts and cries of the Saxons, the shrieks and groans of the women, mingled with the exultant yells of the Danes. High above all, rose the Norse battle song which contained a covert sneer at the English religion:
“We have sung the mass of the lances. ”

“ The Norsemen arrived in the Scandinavian peninsula, as we have seen, a century or two before the Christian era, and the whole body of their beliefs and legends, comprised in the Eddas, was written down mainly in the 14th century, so their gradual conception and evolution occupied several centuries. The lives of these people were passed in a hard struggle with Nature, in wild adventures by fjord and forest, and in constant warfare. ”

“ You will find that simple and martial religion which gave the Norsemen that restless unconquerable spirit, apt to take fire at the very mention of subjection and constraint; that religion which forged the instruments that broke the fetters manufactured by the Roman emperors, destroyed tyrants and slaves, and taught men that nature having made all free and equal, no other reason but their mutual happiness could be assigned for making them dependent. ”

“ The Norsemen have passed into credible history as the most hardy and venturesome of races. That they colonized Iceland and Greenland is indisputable. That their eager and daring nature should have deserted them at this point is hardly conceivable. Skirting the Greenland shores and inuring themselves to the hardships and excitements of northern voyaging, there was not a long stretch of open sea before they could strike the Labrador coast. ”

“ The Norse mythology is related to the Greek mythology to the same extent that the Norse language is related to the Greek language, and no more; and comparative mythology, when the scholar wields the pen, is as interesting as comparative philology.
The Greeks have their chaos, the all-embracing space, the Norsemen have Ginungagap, the yawning abyss between Niflheim (the nebulous world) and Muspelheim (the world of fire) . The Greeks have their titans, corresponding in many respects to the Norse giants. The Greeks tell of the Melian nymphs; the Norsemen of the elves, etc. ”

“ The Norse mythology reflects, then, the religious, moral, intellectual and social development of our ancestors in the earliest period of their existence. We say our ancestors, for we must bear in mind that in its most original form this mythology was common to all the Teutonic nations, to the ancestors of the Americans and the English, as well as to those of the Norsemen, Swedes and Danes. Geographically it extended not only over the whole of Scandinavia, including Iceland, but also over England and a considerable portion of France and Germany. ”

“ But we should ill understand the spirit of the Norsemen, if we supposed that these transformations into beasts were all that the national heart has to tell of beasts and their doings, or that, when they appear, they do so merely as men-beasts, without any power or virtue of their own. From the earliest times, side by side with those productions of the human mind which speak of the dealings of men with men, there has grown up a stock of traditions about animals and their relations with one another, which forms a true Beast Epic, and is full of the liveliest traits of nature. ”

“ So says Arnor, the earls' skald:—
"Where battle-storm was ringing, Where arrow-cloud was singing, Harald stood there, Of armour bare, His deadly sword still swinging. The foeman feel its bite; His Norsemen rush to fight, Danger to share, With Harald there, Where steel on steel was ringing." ”

“ Norsemen's thralls plowed the soil and planted crops and herded cattle, and gold flowed into their masters' treasure-chests. Norse warriors walked up and down the land, and no man dared to say them nay.
These men did not forget Norway. In the summers they sailed back there and harried the coast. They took gold and grain and beautiful cloth back to their homes. In Norway they left burning houses and weeping women.
Every summer King Harald had out his ships and men and hunted these vikings. There are many little islands about Norway. They have crags and caves and deep woods. ”

“ In short, the Norsemen of old were magnificent seamen, and there can be no question that much of the ultimate success of Britain on the sea is due, not only to our insular position, but also to the insufficiently appreciated fact that the blood of the hardy and adventurous vikings of Norway still flows in our veins. ”

“ There is no page of modern history in which the influence of the Norsemen and their conquests must not be taken into account—Russia, Constantinople, Greece, Palestine, Sicily, the coasts of Africa, Southern Italy, France, the Spanish Peninsula, p. 74England, Scotland, Ireland, and every rock and island round them, have been visited, and most of them at one time or the other ruled, by the men of Scandinavia. ”

“ The common people seem to connect with them a deep feeling of melancholy, as if bewailing a half-quenched hope of salvation. Their sweet singing may occasionally be heard on summer nights out of their hills, when one stands still and listens, or, as it is expressed in the ballads, lays his ear to the elf-hill; but no one must be so cruel as by the slightest word to destroy their hopes of salvation, for then the spritely music will be turned into weeping and lamentation. The Norsemen usually call the elves hulder or huldrefolk, and their music huldreslaat. ”

“ Some turned their prows to the northward and settled in the Faroes or Iceland, or on the more distant American shore. These were, perhaps, the more peaceably disposed; they found lands waiting for settlement that became at once their own. Their descendants are Norsemen to-day, and among the most cultured of mankind. Others fared to the British Isles or the Continent of Europe or to the more distant Mediterranean Sea. These found lands that were richer, but to be gained only at the point of the sword. These set up powerful kingdoms, but none of them are Norse to-day. ”

“ Other scholars (Snorre Sturleson, Saxo Grammaticus, Suhm, Rask, and others,) give us what is called an historical interpretation, asserting that Odin, Thor, Balder, and the other deities that figure in the Norse mythology, are veritable ancestors of the Norsemen,—men and women who have lived in the remote past; and as distance lends enchantment to the view, so the ordinary kings and priests of pre-historic times have been magnified into gods. ”

“ The author first proceeds to set forth the evidence upon which the claims of the Norsemen rest. The author charges that the heads of the Roman Catholic church were early cognizant of this discovery of the Norsemen, but that they suppressed this information. The motives for this concealment are charged to their well-known reluctance to allow any credit to non-Catholic believers, under which head, at that time, the Norsemen were included. ”

“ The Norsemen love us not too dearly. They give their taxes none too gladly. There is a rumor on the winds of Olaf Tryggevesson sailing along the coasts of Denmark. Olaf of the race of Harold Fairhaired, whom the Norsemen worship. The scalds even say that this valiant, daring Olaf is Odin himself come again to Norway, as he comes, once in a hundred years. ”

“ The literature which blossomed in Iceland and flourished for two or three centuries wherever Norsemen made homes for themselves offers a unique intellectual phenomenon, for nothing like their record remains to us from any other primitive people. ”

“ Should it so be that something like what the Norsemen conceived as "the twilight of the gods" is coming upon the earth, and that there will be a temporary eclipse of the higher powers, we may at least prepare- for it in the spirit of the Norsemen, who, as the Ynglinga Saga tells us, deemed that whether God gave them victory or called them home to himself either award was good. ”

“ People.—The people of the peninsula are of Germanic race, with the exception of the small number of Finns and the Lapps in the north. The Norsemen of Norway, of middle stature, strong, generally blonde haired and blue eyed, seamen by choice, have adopted the Danish as the language of the towns and of literature, the modernized Old Norse being banished to the outlying country districts and unfrequented fiords. ”

“ The pagan Norsemen became soon after the curse and the terror of the Northumberland coasts. Their first descent was made exactly eleven centuries ago—in 789—and four years later they returned and ravaged Lindisfarne, as well as Jarrow and other churches; but the monks, on coming back to their ruined home, found the incorruptible body of their saint intact in its shrine. Still later, in King Alfred’s time, the Danes hove down upon the shores of England, and the brethren had again to flee for their lives from the marauders. ”

“ WILLIAM ALEXANDER, M.L.C.
THE roving life has been one of the great motors of civilisation; it discovered new worlds and founded nations. It is well for Great Britain that the strain of blood of the old Norsemen still runs strong within the veins of many of her children. The Norsemen were adventurous and enterprising, willing to brave many dangers and undergo great hardships, so that they might see new scenes and enrich themselves. ”

“ A large-hearted people reaching out in the dark towards ideals which were better than they knew. Ragnarok was to undo their gods because they had stumbled from their higher standards.
We have to thank a curious phenomenon for the [xv] preservation of so much of the old lore as we still possess. While foreign influences were corrupting the Norse language, it remained practically unaltered in Iceland, which had been colonised from the mainland by the Norsemen who had fled thither to escape the oppression of Harold Fairhair after his crushing victory of Hafrsfirth. ”

“ The Norsemen were far from being a literary race and it was not in the form of manuscript illuminations that Irish art was introduced into Norway and Denmark, but rather in the rich gold and silver jewellery with which the Viking chiefs adorned themselves, and also on a larger scale in the magnificently decorative reliefs which were carved on the wooden planks which formed the frames or architraves of the doors of the Scandinavian wooden churches in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, after the worship of the Thunderer had been replaced by the Faith of the White Christ. ”

“ It was only in upland Russia and in the farthest North that the Norsemen sensibly enlarged the Western world to east or north-east, as they did through their Iceland settlements on the north-west.
On the south and south-west no Vikings or Royalist followers of Vikings, like Sigurd the Crusader, sailed the seas beyond Norva's Sound and Serkland, [19] and as pilgrims, traders, travellers, and conquerors in the Mediterranean, their work was of course not one of exploration. They bore a foremost share in breaking down the Moslem incubus on southern Europe ”

“ Barely had Biorn sunk out of sight when the pursuing party appeared, three-score Saxons under two leaders. "Pick off the leaders, men," whispered Sigurd, and as the party came between the two bands of Norsemen, Biorn's horn sounded, and a cloud of arrows poured into the compact body of Saxons. At the same time the vikings seized their swords and axes and ran forward. ”