Vikings

“ The vikings on board the Svart-Alf laughed at that. The spray flew from the curved black prow of the great galley, and the wake danced in the dazzle—the sea-cream that they loved to see.
Tall men they were, and comely. Their locks of yellow or golden or ruddy hair, sometimes braided, sometimes all acurl like a chestnut-tree bud-breaking in April, sometimes tangled like sea-wrack caught in a whirl of wind and tide, streamed upon their shoulders. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Its great business is full of vigor, daring and danger. Here is the great land-home of the Vikings of the nineteenth century; the indomitable men who walk the roaring and crested billows of this Northern Ocean in their black, tough sea-boats and bring ashore the hard-earned spoils of the deep. ”

“ Later again came the Northmen, against whose attacks the Angles prayed in vain. A true sea-faring race were these Vikings of old, and they could boast, as their lineal descendants in Norway boast to-day, that they possessed more ships than any other nation in the world. ”

“ Is it for nothing that the splendid Scandinavian race, who have converted their rugged and rock-strewn peninsula into a group of prosperous and stable States, which are an example to Europe, and have infused the great Anglo-Saxon stock with something of their sane but noble idealism, have the blood of Vikings in their veins? Is there no place for the free play of all the best qualities of the Viking and the soldier in a world still sadly in need of men with courage enough, for instance, to face the truth, however difficult it may seem, however unkind to our pet prejudices? ”

“ Proud were we Vikings, for was not ours the blood of the bold races of the forest who had swept up the Elbe five hundred years ago and, dividing into kindred tribes, Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, had seized upon all Jutland and, from hunters and river fishers, had become most bold and skilful sailors and the most adventurous of rovers of the sea? Already there came dread to the dwellers at the riversides and all along the Gallic coast and, sometimes, even to the shores of Britain, when our shield ships showed their sails against the distant sky. ”

“ Vikings who were not content to ravage England, France and more distant shores, but they turned to Norway to vent their spite upon the hated Harald. The old fire was not quenched in the blood of Norway’s King. In 880 he came with a great host, bearing fire and sword, determined to utterly rout the Vikings and all their followers from their island fastnesses. He followed his foes into creek and over cliff, wherever sailor could go or landsman climb, from Orkney south to the Isle of Man he put them utterly to rout and freed forever his native lands from the pirates west-over-the-sea. ”

“ OOM for the Vikings! the sons of the creek, the bluff, stalwart rovers who love the salt sea with a consuming passion, and shout with glee as the waves foam beneath them and tempest roars about them. Mighty warriors are they, wild and untamed as the element they love, swift as the falcon, remorseless as the vulture, fierce as the wolf. ”

“ Harald Halfdanson!"
"Ah! the bite of the sword is sweeter than the kiss of your mother," he said to Olaf one day. "When shall I stand in the prow of a dragon and feast on the fight? I am hungry to see the world. Ivar the Far-goer tells me of the strange countries he has seen. Ah! we vikings are great folk. There is no water that has not licked our boats' sides. This cape of mine came in a viking boat from France. ”

“ History is plain and authentic on the subject, and the same chivalric blood ebbs through the veins of the Vikings today as of yore. They have shared and do share the burdens of adventure, discovery and colonization. ”

“ In an after age, however, when the roving Vikings had become formidable, many of the eminences originally selected, from their inaccessibility, as sites for hill-forts, would come to be chosen, from their prominence in the landscape, as stations for beacon-fires. ”

“ The wild men of the wilder North, the Danes, the Scandinavian Vikings—turbulent, adventurous and fierce, to whom fear was a word unknown—animated by the virile yet mystic mythology of the North, and inspired by the love of conquest and travel, now began to play their part in the world’s naval history. ”

“ Harald—a name common in Scandinavian history—we may suppose to be a Norwegian Viking. The Vikings of old Norway were the most terrible men that ever lived, but they were also among the grandest and noblest. Their trade was war, their religion was war, their idea of happiness after death was still war—eternal war in heaven, ghostly fighting on the side of the gods. Such an idea of life requires many great qualities as well as natural fearlessness and great physical strength. ”

“ There are many other tales of these visits of the Vikings to the New World, but they cannot be written here; but you must remember that hundreds of years before anything was known of America to the rest of Europe, the bold Norse sea-kings came here—Erik the Red, Leif the Lucky, Biarni, Thorvald, and Thorfinn—and that Greenland, Newfoundland, Cape Cod, Nova Scotia, and Rhode Island were well known to the Northmen at a time when the rest of the world had never dreamed of a country lying on the other side of the great Atlantic. ”

“ We now know that they were not only a warlike race, whose male members toward the end of the olden time, in the capacity of dreaded vikings, undertook expeditions in the North and far beyond its borders, seeking battle and booty, but that same mythology, which gives us so vivid a picture of this side of their character, also ascribes to them a high rank in intelligence and morality, and reveals a most weird and profound interpretation of the world and the things about them ”

“ The activities of the Vikings were all-embracing, and before any attempt can be made to estimate their influence in the various countries which came permanently under their rule, or were brought more or less closely into touch with them, some account, however slight, must be given of Scandinavian civilisation at this time, both on its spiritual and on its material sides. For the former aspect we must turn chiefly to the poems and sagas of old Norse literature, for the latter to the results of modern archaeological research. ”

“ The Vikings when they settled in England and elsewhere showed that their previous roving life did not hinder them in the least from settling down as peaceful traders, farmers, or peasant-labourers, while the figure of Ohthere or Óttarr, to give him his Norse name, who entered the service of king Alfred, may serve to remind us that many a landed gentleman was not above carrying on a good trade with the Finns or undertaking voyages of exploration in the White Sea. ”

“ The Vikings were a terror to all their neighbors; but the two regions that suffered most from their attacks were the Island of Britain and that part of Charlemagne’s empire in which the Franks were settled.
Nearly fifty times in two hundred years the lands of the Franks were invaded. The Vikings sailed up the large rivers into the heart of the region which we now call France and captured and pillaged cities and towns. ”

“ Doubtless Norse vikings, venturing far southward from outlying colonies in Iceland and Greenland, first coasted New France, and beached their sturdy ships on the shores of New England. But five centuries passed without result, and we cannot properly call them pioneers of American civilization. ”

“ We can hardly, therefore, assume, like the monkish chronicles of antiquity, which naturally breathe both fear and hatred of the Scandinavian heathens, that the Norwegians and Danes were merely barbarous Vikings, who procured themselves a footing in the western countries only through brute force. ”

“ Christian enterprise in this field is mainly one of pilgrimage, and the pilgrims only cease to be important when the Northmen, first Heathen, then Christian, begin to lead, in a very different manner, the expansion of Europe. Into this folk-wandering of the Vikings, the first great outward movement of our Europe in the Middle Ages, is absorbed the reviving energy of trade, as well as the ever-growing impulse of pilgrimage. The Vikings are the highest type of explorers; they do not merely find out new lands and trade with them, but conquer and colonise them. ”

“ It is a matter of course that arms and ornaments should be at times dug up in England that belonged to Scandinavian Vikings, who found either death or a new habitation on the English shore. In the rivers on the eastern coast, where the Vikings’ ships showed themselves so regularly, and where remains of these ships are supposed to be now and then discovered, iron swords have been found, as for instance in the Thames, of undoubted Scandinavian origin. ”

“ When we remember how thoroughly the Vikings harassed the shores of France and England sailing up the Seine and the rivers and creeks of our own land, committing piracy on the sea and pillage ashore, and finally settling down and conquering the territory, it is not to be wondered that their sway in naval architecture and construction should have been universal in northern Europe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Handsome they are not, but quite the reverse, and the most of them have an awkward and uncouth air; but it is refreshing to look at their broad shoulders, their brawny chests, and the massive muscles of their legs and arms. During the whole voyage, I saw but one man who appeared to be diseased. Such men, I suspect, were the Vikings—rough, powerful, ugly, dirty fellows, with a few primitive virtues, and any amount of robust vices. We noticed, however, a marked change for the better in the common people, as we advanced northward. ”

“ The Vikings made a fierce attack; we raised a furious storm, the flame ran over the dwellings of men, we laid the bleeding corses to rest in the gates of the city.18
And at the end, like Ragnar Lodbrok captured and dying in the pit of serpents, he can tell his tale of feeding the eagle and the she-wolf since he first reddened the sword at the age of twenty, and end his life undaunted to the ever-recurring refrain, “We hewed with the sword”:
Death has no terrors. ”

“ How they fought and drove [11] the Viking; how that the Viking led them along the coast till, our men weary with rowing, there came two fresh ships from a bay, hidden, friends of the Viking; and how that Lord Sigmund died in the fight, and how that our men fled north, while the Vikings shouted; and our ship ye have seen!
“On the sixth day after this, at the sunrise, let the ship be ready with new oars; the ship’s men will stay here to rest. I shall take the men that I call my guard; those who hunt bears with me in the forest. ”

“ The Vikings, or Sea-Rovers, who kept their long ships in the viks, or fjords, of Norway, made vigorous attacks all along the coast of Europe, and in several cases formed stable governments, and so made, in a way, a sort of crust for Europe, preventing any further shaking of its human contents. ”

“ Three marks for a whole fishing-smack with golden sails, and a fisherman with a golden beard, blue eyes, stalwart body, and whose remote grandparents had certainly been Vikings! I got into his dinghy without further argument, and was rowed across to the smack. A small Viking, appropriately beardless, he being only ten, but with freckles, put his head out of the cabin as we drew alongside, and was presented to me as the eldest of five sons. Father and son made a comfortable place for me in a not too fishy part of the boat, hauled up the huge poetic sail, and we glided out beyond the jetty. ”

“ Men with frames and muscles strong as iron; at home both on the sea and on the battle-field; fair-haired, blue-eyed men, guarded by helmet, breast-plate, and shield, armed with heavy weapons, because at that date the art of the smith was not equal to making them sharp, light, and strong at once. So these mighty warriors hewed their way through the field of battle with great strokes, and when their foes fled in terror, the vikings took back to their ships all the treasure they could find, and away they went across the sea again. ”

“ On the lake-docks [71] and in lumber-camps the big fellows of the North in their Mackinaw coats and close-fitting knit caps impart a heroic note to the landscape. In January, 1917, having gone to St. Paul to witness the winter carnival, I was struck by the great number of tall, fair men who, in their gay holiday attire, satisfied the most exacting ideal of the children of the vikings. They trod the snow with kingly majesty, and to see their performances on skis is to be persuaded that the sagas do not exaggerate the daring of their ancestors. ”

“ It seems strange that almost no other traces of the strong vikings are found in America. ”

“ As a consequence of the Danish-Norwegian immigrations, the art of ship-building must also have necessarily developed itself in a similar manner in England, on whose eastern and north-western coasts the descendants of the Vikings had everywhere spread themselves, both by the sea and on the rivers. Christianity certainly put an end to the life of the Viking. ”