Scandinavians

“ The mythology of the Scandinavians embraces, as we have shown, among its symbols all the great phenomena of Nature, the continual struggle between the two opposite principles, creation and destruction. ”

“ No class of people or nation deserves the title, cosmopolitan, better than the Vikings. Their names mingle with the history of England, France, Russia and Italy, and in the Western Hemisphere we find them all over. To trace up the first Scandinavian that touched the shore of Washington is difficult, if not impossible. No doubt but Scandinavians made stoppings along the coast on their fishing expeditions to the north before any white man had dreamt to pin his hopes to the North Pacific. ”

“ The war-songs of the Northmen shew that such expeditions were the paths to honour as well as to wealth; nor was it till the milder tenets of Christianity had superseded the warrior-creed of Thor, that their plundering voyages came to an end. But unlike the British and Irish, the Scandinavians have a Pagan literature, contemporary with those scenes of adventure and bold deeds of arms: and so much the more valuable that it preserves a picture of the period uninfluenced by that corporate spirit which detracts so much from the contemporary monkish annals of our own and other countries. ”

“ Scandinavians are not too busy thus to recognize our common humanity. I like the custom well.
“Vaer saa god” is a polite expression which one hears everywhere in Scandinavia. The words as I have given them are Danish, but they are the same in Sweden or Norway, except for slight variation in spelling and, consequently, in pronunciation. We have no single equivalent in English for the expression, which literally means “Be so good”; but its use is very similar to the German “Bitte.” ”

“ The barbarous tribes from the northern part of Europe at different times invaded the southern sections, conquering various other tribes, occupying their territory, and thus mingling with all the people from whom originated the present nations of Europe. Thus, in remote ages, the Scandinavians, among others, by their conquests and their emigration, have contributed largely to the modern elements of society. With this explanation we will look at Scandinavia in detail, beginning with Norway. ”

“ The Scandinavians are immortalized by the exploits of the Vikings and Normans, whose conquests over man and Nature extended from the sun-baked shores of Sicily to the glacial wastes of Greenland, even attaining our own distant Vinland across the sea. ”

“ The happy Scandinavians sent to their northern friends such attractive reports of the beautiful land, with its fine pasture grounds and affluent rivers, which was now the home of their adoption, that the desire for emigration was kindled on all hands, especially among the agricultural population of Sweden and Finland. ”

“ This was the rise of the new lords of the sea—the Scandinavians—who were to wrest commerce from Frisians and Gauls, and open a new trade for northern Europe.
The Scandinavians got their training in a hard school. They had a thousand miles of stormy shores to practice seamanship, fishing along their mountain coasts, and sailing against Arctic tempests round the [75] North Cape. They had to build better ships than anyone else, and to sail them better. They invented a new kind of vessel where both oars and sails were used. ”

“ The ninth century indeed saw a wonderful extension of Scandinavian dominion far to the east and far to the south. But it was neither ordinary conquest nor ordinary settlement. No new Scandinavian people was planted, as in Orkney and Iceland. Nor were Scandinavian outposts planted, as in Ireland. ♦Scandinavians in Russia.♦ But Scandinavian princes, who in three generations lost all trace of their Scandinavian origin, created, under the name of Russia, the greatest of Slavonic powers. The vast results of their establishment have been results on the history and geography of the Slaves ”

“ Three works deal with the history of the Scandinavian immigration in a large-spirited, comprehensive way, and by these characteristics stand out from the mass of less important works. O. N. Nelson (compiler and editor) , History of the Scandinavians and Successful Scandinavians in the United States (2 vols., 2nd revised ed., 1904) , is made up of specially prepared articles, reprinted articles, statistical tables, a bibliography, and some two hundred and eighty biographies of men in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa. ”

“ This series of Scandinavian Classics is published by The American-Scandinavian Foundation in the belief that greater familiarity with the chief literary monuments of the North will help Americans to a better understanding of Scandinavians, and thus serve to stimulate their sympathetic coöperation to good ends. ”

“ It is a fair question, then, whether our Scandinavians represent the flower of their people as well as the root and stalk. No doubt in venturesomeness they surpass those in like circumstances who stayed at home. ”

“ Home, yet feel that all who have not had opportunity to read the early history of the Scandinavians in this part of the country, will derive a great deal of pleasure in being able to refresh their memories, and to those Scandinavians who have recently settled in this part of the country, the book will no doubt be the means of many re-unions of friendship formed in other parts of the world. ”

“ These two conceptions became the foundation of the learned view and representation of the world, and consequently also of the North, throughout the greater part of the Middle Ages. It was the age of speculation, not of observation. The Scandinavians were the first innovators in geography, [Pg 183] by going straight to nature as it is, unfettered by dogmas. The Italian and Catalan sailors followed later with their portulans (sailing-books) and compass-charts. ”

“ Furthermore, up to 1890, there was certainly plenty of land for all the American, or native-born, laborers who desired to devote themselves to that sort of work by which the Scandinavians were gaining their independence. ”

“ The People.—Northmen, Norsemen, Scandinavians, are different names applied in a general way to the early inhabitants of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. These people formed the northern branch of the Teutonic family. ”

“ That the Scandinavians have readily outgrown much of their clannishness, perceptibly quickened their energies in the new environment, and developed notably in social, commercial, and political efficiency cannot be seriously questioned by any one who studies their activities as a whole, or who has observed them for two generations.
The immigrants from the North are decently educated, able-bodied, law-abiding men and women, not illiterates, paupers, or criminals. ”

“ The world undoubtedly has already lost very much because of the oppression of small nationalities. Scandinavian contributions to culture—not Kultur!—and to civilization are very substantial. They were made possible largely because the Scandinavians as nations have enjoyed an untrammelled development. ”

“ On weighing the preceding circumstances, and the simple natural language in which they are recorded, few men not born in Italy or Spain will deny to the Scandinavians the claim of having been the original discoverers of the New World. ”

“ The demand for these qualities will be steady; the supply on the part of the Scandinavians will not be readily exhausted. The intermarriage and amalgamation of two peoples so closely allied as the Scandinavians and Americans connotes much of promise and little of danger. ”

“ If this view be correct, the Scandinavian languages have had an existence of seven thousand years at least. But it is only from the beginning of the Christian era that we can get any information concerning the language of the old Scandinavians, which seems by that time not only to The Primitive Scandinavian language. have spread over Denmark and great parts of southern and middle Sweden and of Norway, but also to have reached Finland (at least Nyland) and Esthonia. ”

“ A blending of history and myth prompts Horn to say that 'some of the sagas were doubtless originally based on facts, but the telling and retelling have changed them into pure myths.' The unsympathetic stranger sees this in stories that the patriotic Scandinavians are over-anxious to make appear as genuine chronicles. ... The weight of probability is in favor of a Northman descent upon the coast of the American mainland at some point, or at several, somewhere to the south of Greenland ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The history of the Scandinavian countries does not really begin before the time when Christianity, with steadily increasing power, found its way beyond the borders of the North, that is to say, about the beginning of the ninth century. ”

“ It was now, that the three principal Scandinavian tribes, the Norwegians, Swedes, and the Danish Goths, got each their king.
We have thus seen how the antiquities and barrows serve to prove, that the flat fertile Denmark must have been peopled earlier, than the northern parts of Sweden and Norway, which were full of immense forests and mountains. The monuments shew the peopling of Scandinavia in a natural point of view; which view finds confirmation, and that in a remarkable degree, rather than contradiction, in the most ancient and trustworthy of our historical records. ”

“ The Scandinavian race survives in its descendants round the coasts of the British Isles, and the soul of the old Viking still burns in the seamen of the British fleet, in the Deal boatmen, in the fishermen of the Orkneys, and in that adventurous, bold, direct, skilful, mercantile class, that has encircled the world by its peaceful conquests. ”

“ Endowed with all the characteristics of the Scandinavian race, which we shall touch upon after, deeply infused with the blood of the Danes and Northmen, she has all the indomitable energy, all the systematic grasp of mind and sternness of purpose joined to the wise spirit of compromise and conservatism of the men of the far North; she, of all nations, has inherited their great power of expansion at sea, possessing all the roving propensities of the old Vikings, and the spirit of trade, enterprise, and colonization, of those old Phoenicians of the arctic circle. ”

“ If the literature of Scandinavia continues to develop during the present century with the strength and rapidity it has manifested during the last, it will present to the mind of the English race rich sources of enjoyment of a more congenial spirit than that of any other part of the European continent; and the more this literature Is cultivated the more it will be perceived that we are less an Anglo-Saxon than a Scandinavian race. ”

“ And yet in the midst of all the severe trials to which the Scandinavian North has been exposed in this respect in the course of time, its peculiar national life has preserved its germinating power, which has frequently given startling signs of life, and which finally in the fulness of time developed a surprising wealth of flowers that from the beginning of this century to the present day give the people in all the Scandinavian lands a literary individuality in the strictest sense their own. ”

“ The whole evidence of history manifestly leads to the conclusion that Britain long preceded the Scandinavian races in civilisation, nor was it till she had been enervated alike by Roman luxury and by the succeeding intestine jealousies and rivalries of native tribes, that Scandinavia, fresh in her young barbarian vigour, made of her a spoil and a prey. ”

“ As a farther proof, appeal is made to the circumstance that stone implements, of the same kind, are often found in all the three northern kingdoms of Scandinavia, consequently that the whole of Scandinavia has been inhabited by the same race, and what people could it be but the Fins, who have inhabited Sweden, and Norway, from the earliest times. ”

“ The fact that the northern peoples, from an intellectual standpoint, formed a national unity, that they were imbued and influenced by one and the same national spirit, was never for a moment lost sight of by the ancient inhabitants of the North; later it was somewhat obscured, though it was never utterly forgotten; and in our time the Scandinavian peoples have again become thoroughly conscious of their intimate kinship. ”

“ Upsala's Lord, Sigurd Ring, became King of Sweden and Denmark: so says the Saga, which sounded over the land and water from these coasts.
The memorials of olden times pass swiftly through our thoughts; we fly past the scene of manly exercises and great deeds in the olden times—the ship cleaves the mighty waters with its iron paddles, from Skjärgaard to Skjärgaard. ”