Northmen

“ Had he known of the discovery of America by the northmen, he might have had in his thoughts some gigantic Brown, or Erio, or Harold. The old northman is shot through with an Indian's poisoned arrow; his body is dying, as the tight pressed limbs express; but the strong soul still rules the face, which smiles grandly in death. If you had objected that there was too much mind shining through the features, the sculptor might have answered that the closed eyes saw in prophetic vision that men of his race would one day rule where he had lain down to die. ”

“ I feel that these old Northmen were looking into Nature with open eye and soul: most earnest, honest; childlike, and yet manlike; with a great-hearted simplicity and depth and freshness, in a true, loving, admiring, unfearing way. A right valiant, true old race of men. ”

“ He believed that there were still settlements on the inaccessible east coast of Greenland where descendants of the old Northmen lived, cut off from all the world, sunk into ignorance and godlessness,—men and women who had once known the true light,—and his heart yearned to go to their rescue. ”

“ Northmen or Norsemen, the name given in the Middle Ages to the sea-roving, adventure-loving inhabitants of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark; in their sea-rovings they were little better than pirates, but they had this excuse, their home was narrow and their lands barren, and it was a necessity for them to sally forth and see what they could plunder and carry away in richer lands; they were men of great daring, their early religion definable as the consecration of valour, and they were the terror of the quieter nations whose lands they invaded ”

“ The Northmen became Christians and Normans. It is not uncommon to speak of them as if they retained their Norwegian characteristics in "the pleasant land of France," and were in the habit of looking back to the home of their youth, or of their fathers, with that sort of fondness and regret which were felt by those Englishmen who founded the American nation. This is all wrong. The Northmen had left the North for the same reason that other men leave their countries,—the only reason that ever causes them to do so,—because the North did not afford them means of support. ”

“ Archælogical remains of the Northmen abound in Greenland, all the way from Immartinek to near Cape Farewell; the existence of one such relic on the North American continent has never yet been proved. Not a single vestige of the Northmen's presence here, at all worthy of credence, has ever been found. ... The most convincing proof that the Northmen never founded a colony in America, south of Davis Strait, is furnished by the total absence of horses, cattle and other domestic animals from the soil of North America until they were brought hither by the Spanish, French and English settlers. ”

“ Half a century has now elapsed since the sagas have been accessible to the English reader in his own language. No labor has been spared by the most careful, painstaking, and conscientious historians in seeking for remains which can be reasonably identified as the work of the Northmen. None whatever have been found, and we may safely predict that none will be discovered, that can bear any better test of their genuineness than those to which we have just alluded. ”

“ The intruders became known as “the army,” and the appearance of “the army” in any district filled the inhabitants with terror. Our first definite story of the Northmen in England is connected with the appearance of “the army” in Yorkshire A.D. 867. We learn from the English chronicles that violent internal discord was troubling Northumbria at this time. The king of the Northumbrians was Osbert,14 but the people had risen up and expelled him, we know not for what reason,2 and had placed on the throne a man named Ælla, “not of royal blood,” who seems to have been the leader of the people. ”

“ Think of those clumsy little ships out on such a journey with their single masts and long oars! Think of the stories that must have been told from town to town after these strange, wild Northern foes had come and gone! They were like hawks that came swooping down out of the sky, and though [Pg021] Spain and Rome and Greece were well enough acquainted with wars, they must have felt when the Northmen came, as we should feel if some wild beast from the heart of the forest came biting and tearing its way through a city street at noontime. ”

“ The chaste and uncorrupted Northmen have by means of legitimate intermarriage with the best of the enervated inhabitants of the land, raised up an almost new race, who combine in their nature the humanizing effects of the old civilization with the love of independence and the temperate virtues of the northern conquerors, a race willing to benefit by the experience of the past, and resolved to carve out for itself a new and independent future. ”

“ It is indeed vain for us to hope for evidence of the same definite kind as that which establishes beyond question the presence of the Northmen on the sites of their long-settled colonies in Greenland. ”

“ Tested by the canons that the most judicious scholars have adopted in the investigation of all early history, we cannot doubt that the Northmen made four or five voyages to the coast of America in the last part of the tenth and the first part of the eleventh centuries; that they returned to Greenland with cargoes of grapes and timber, the latter a very valuable commodity in the markets both of Greenland and Iceland; that their abode on our shores was temporary; that they were mostly occupied in explorations, and made no preparations for establishing any permanent colony ”

“ Mixing with the early Saxon or English settlers, and with the still more primitive Celtic inhabitants, the Northmen founded a race extremely like that which now inhabits our own country. To this day, the Norman peasants of the Cotentin retain many marks of their origin and their half-forgotten kinship with the English race. ”

“ They would kill all the men and steal all the women. Then they would sail away in their fast-sailing ships and when the soldiers of the king or emperor arrived upon the scene, the robbers were gone and nothing remained but a few smouldering ruins.
During the days of disorder which followed the death of Charlemagne, the Northmen developed great activity. Their fleets made raids upon every country and their sailors established small independent kingdoms along the coast of Holland and France and England and Germany, and they even found their way into Italy. The Northmen were very intelligent. ”

“ When we remember that the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria was conquered by Northmen, and was a Danish kingdom for about 200 years, until reduced in status to one of the great earldoms of the later Saxon period, we naturally expect to find more characteristic remains of Danes and Northmen than of the earlier Anglians. Some interesting evidence of the agricultural customs of Northmen connected with the old farmhouses called onsteads survived in Northumberland as late as 1827, and may still survive in part. The customs may be ancient, even if the farms are comparatively modern. ”

“ As the years went on, the Northern lands themselves became more peaceful, and the voyages of the pirates came to an end. Though the Northmen still waged wars enough, they were Danes or Norwegians against England and France, one realm against another, instead of every man plundering for himself. ”

“ This is so much the more natural, as, long before the Norman Conquest, the Northmen preponderated in many, perhaps in most, mercantile towns of the north of England, and particularly in the fortified towns occupied by the Danes. At the time of the Conquest, the population in some of the largest and most important cities towards the east coast, such as Lincoln and York, is said to have been almost exclusively of Scandinavian extraction ”

“ And while the Northmen had fish and game and were mighty hunters, and their rocks and mines helped forward their warlike enterprises, so the forests supplied them with ship timber, and they gained renown as sailors wherever their fame extended. ”

“ Coming of the Northmen.—Kenneth was followed in turn by Donald, his brother, and Constantine, his son. Their reigns were mainly taken up in fighting with the Northmen, a heathen people of Teutonic race, who infested the seas and plundered the seaboard. From the eighth century downwards they were the scourge alike of English and Celtic Britain, swooping down on the coasts, harrying the lands, and making off with their booty; or, at other times, seizing and settling on great tracts of country. Three countries of modern Europe—Denmark, Norway, and Sweden were peopled by the Northmen. ”

“ The exuberant fancy of the Northmen, which revels in their mythology and songs, would have constructed a very different tale had it been employed in the invention of a southern continent, or earthly Paradise fashioned from the dreams of Icelandic and Greenland rovers. ”

“ The Northumbrians succeeded in making a breach in the walls and entering the town; but, inspired by fear and necessity, the pagans made a fierce sally, cutting down their foes on all sides, inside and outside the walls alike. The city was set on fire, those who escaped making peace with the enemy. From that time onward the Northmen were seldom absent from Northumbria. York became one of their chief headquarters, and the constant succession of Norse ships along the coast gradually brought a considerable influx of Norse inhabitants to that part of England. ”

“ In the eighth century the Northmen began their incursions, and from spoilers ultimately became settlers. York prospered, being thronged with Danish merchants, and in the tenth century had thirty thousand population. In King Harold's reign the Northmen attacked and captured the town, when Harold surprised and defeated them, killing their leader Tostig, but no sooner had he won the victory than he had to hasten southward to meet William the Norman, and be in turn vanquished and slain. ”

“ The Northmen NORWAY (in the old Norse language Noregr, or Nord-vegr, i.e., the North Way) , according to archæological explorations, appears to have been inhabited long before the historical time. The antiquaries maintain that three populations have inhabited the North: a Mongolian race and a Celtic race, types of which are to be found in the Finns and the Laplanders in the far North, and, finally, a Caucasian race, which immigrated from the South and drove out the Celtic and Laplandic races, and from which the present inhabitants are descended. ”

“ It is hard to agree with the Earl of Dunraven in what he says in the passage that has been quoted a few pages back, as to the cause of the invasions and plunderings of the Northmen. The victories of Charlemagne over the Saxons could scarcely have caused the vast outpourings of Northmen on southern and western Europe. The Saxons were Germans, pure and simple; but there seems to have been a very great difference between Northmen and Germans. ”

“ For some years ships sailed from Norway to Iceland, from Iceland to Greenland, and from Greenland to North America, where a Northman finally settled with about one hundred and forty men and women. Snor ́ri, the son of this brave leader, was the first European child born [29] in America. He lived to grow up, and the great sculptor Thor ́wald-sen, as well as several other noted men, claimed him as one of their ancestors.
The Northmen, however, had a very hard time in America, for they were soon attacked by the Indians, whom they called Skrae ́lings. ”

“ A student of Scandinavian history may well inquire, not why the raids of the Northmen were terrible in the ninth and two following centuries, but why they had not begun long before. Here was a poor and hardy population, inhabiting a country so deeply indented by the sea that it was impossible for its sons to be mere landsmen; in fact a population which for more than a thousand years has been more enthusiastically seafaring than any other in the world. ”

“ But they soon became the flower of French races, and were regarded as Frenchmen in all the lands to which they were led by their valor, their enterprise, their ambition, and their avarice. They continued to avail themselves of the talents of other races long after Northmen had been converted into Normans, greatly to their own advantage, and considerably to the advantage of others. ”

“ In treating this subject we shall run into needless errors and difficulties, if we attempt the task of discovering monuments of the Northmen in New England. In Greenland these evidences of their occupation are abundant, because they were regularly established on the ground for generations, and formed their public and private edifices of the only material at hand, which was well nigh imperishable. But their visits to New England were comparatively few, and were scattered over many years. ”

“ The Northmen of Denmark and Norway, whose piratical adventures were the terror of all the coasts of Europe, and who established themselves in Great Britain and Ireland, in France and Sicily, were also geographical explorers in their rough but The Northmen. ”

“ The Northmen were to bring a new racial element into the life of Western Europe, but whether that element should adapt itself to the conditions of its new environment, or whether it should develop new forms of political association for itself, was a question determined by the pre-existing facts of history and geography. ”