The Viking Age (Vol. 1&2) - Paul B. Du Chaillu

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which we learn that the tribes who inhabited the shores of the Baltic and the present Scandinavia had at the time the above was written reached a high degree of civilisation. We find in their graves and hoards, coins of the early Roman Empire not in isolated instances, but constantly and in large numbers, and deposited side by side with such objects as coats of mail, damascened swords and other examples of articles of highly artistic workmanship.

      Three kinds of swords are often mentioned by the Northmen—the mœkir, the sverd, and the sax, while among the spears there is one called frakki, or frakka.

      The double-edged sword was the one that was in use among the Romans, and they, seeing bodies of men carrying a weapon unlike theirs—single-edged, and called Sax—may have named them after it, and the Franks, in like manner, may have been called after their favourite weapon, the Frakki; but we see that neither the sax nor the frakki was confined to one tribe in the North. There is a Saxland in the Sagas—a small country situated east of the peninsula of Jutland, about the present Holstein—a land tributary to the Danish or Swedish Kings from the earliest times, but far from possessing the warlike archæology of the North, it appears to have held an insignificant place among the neighbouring tribes.

      In the Bayeux tapestry the followers of William the Conqueror were called Franci, and they always have been recognised as coming from the North.

      The very early finds prove that the Sax was not rare, for it occurs in different parts of the North and islands of the Baltic. The different swords and spears used were so common and so well known to everybody, that we have no special description of them in the Sagas, except of their ornamentation; but in the Saga of Grettir there is a passage which shows that the Sax was single-edged.

      Gretti went to a farm in Iceland to slay the Bondi Thorbjorn and his son Arnor. We read—

      “When Gretti saw that the young man was within reach he lifted his sax high into the air, and struck Arnor’s head with its back, so that his head was broken and he died. Thereupon he killed the father with his sax.”

      Whatever may be the origin of local names employed by the Roman writers we must look to the North for the maritime tribes described by them; there we shall find the home of the earlier English people, to whose numerous warlike and ocean-loving instincts we owe the transformation which took place in Britain, and the glorious inheritance which they have left to their descendants, scattered over many parts of the world, in whom we recognise to this day many of the very same traits of character which their ancestors possessed.

      CHAPTER III.

       THE SETTLEMENT OF BRITAIN BY NORTHMEN.

       Table of Contents

      The Notitia—Probable origin of the name England—Jutland—The language of the North and of England—Early Northern kings in England—Danes and Sueones—Mythical accounts of the settlements of England.

      Britain being an island could only be settled or conquered by seafaring tribes, just in the same way as to-day distant lands can only be conquered by nations possessing ships. From the Roman writers we have the only knowledge we possess in regard to the tribes inhabiting the country to which they gave the vague name of Germania. From the Roman records we find that these tribes were not civilised and that they were not a seafaring people.

      Unfortunately the Roman accounts we have of their conquest and occupation of Britain, of its population and inhabitants, are very meagre and unsatisfactory, and do not help us much to ascertain how the settlement in Britain by the people of the North began. Our lack of information is most probably due to the simple reason that the settlement, like all settlements of a new country, was a very gradual one, a few men coming over in the first instance for the purpose of trade either with Britons or Romans, or coming from the over-populated North to settle in a country which the paucity of archæological remains shows to have been thinly occupied. The Romans made no objection to these new settlers, who did not prove dangerous to their power on the island, but brought them commodities, such as furs, &c., from the North.

      We find from the Roman records that the so-called Saxons had founded colonies or had settlements in Belgium and Gaul.

      Another important fact we know from the records relating to Britain is that during the Roman occupation of the island the Saxons had settlements in the country; but how they came hither we are not told.

      In the Notitia Dignitatum utriusque imperii, a sort of catalogue or “Army List,” compiled towards the latter end of the fourth century, occurs the expression, “Comes litoris Saxonici per Britannias”—Count of the Saxon Shore in Britain. Within this litus Saxonicum the following places are mentioned:—Othona, said to be “close by Hastings”; Dubris, said to be Dover; Rutupiæ, Richborough; Branodunum, Brancaster; Regulbium, Reculvers; Lemannis, West Hythe; Garianno, Yarmouth; Anderida, Pevensey; Portus Adurni, Shoreham or Brighton.

      This shows that the so-called Saxons were settled in Britain before the Notitia was drawn up, and at a date very much earlier than has been assigned by some modern historians.

      The hypothesis that the expression “litus Saxonicum” is derived from the enemy to whose ravages it was exposed seems improbable. Is it not much more probable that the “litus Saxonicum per Britannias” must mean the shore of the country settled, not attacked, by Saxons? The mere fact of their attacking the shore would not have given rise to the name applied to it had they not settled there, for I maintain that there is no instance in the whole of Roman literature of a country being named after the people who attacked it. If, on the other hand, the Saxons had landed and formed settlements on the British coasts, the origin of the name “Litus Saxonicum” is easily understood.

      Some time after the Romans relinquished Britain we find that part of the island becomes known as England; and, to make the subject still more confusing, the people composing its chief population are called Saxons by the chroniclers and later historians, the name given to them by the Romans.

      That the history of the people called Saxons was by no means certain is seen in the fact that Witikind, a monk of the tenth century, gives the following account of what was then considered to be their origin17:—

      “On this there are various opinions, some thinking that the Saxons had their origin from the Danes and Northmen; others, as I heard some one maintain when a young man, that they are derived from the Greeks, because they themselves used to say the Saxons were the remnant of the Macedonian army, which, having followed Alexander the Great, were by his premature death dispersed all over the world.”

      As to how Britain came to be called England the different legends given by the monkish writers are contradictory.

      The Skjöldunga Saga, which is often mentioned in other Sagas, and which contains a record down to the early kings of Denmark, is unfortunately lost: it would, no doubt, have thrown great light on the lives of early chiefs who settled in Britain; but from some fragments which are given in this work, and which are supposed to belong to it, we see that several Danish and Swedish kings claimed to have possessions in England long before the supposed coming of the Danes.

      Some writers assert that the new settlers gave to their new home in Britain the name of the country which they had left, called Angeln, and which they claim to be situated in the southern part of Jutland; but besides the Angeln in Jutland there is in the Cattegat an Engelholm, which is geographically far more important, situated in the land known as the Vikin of the Sagas, a great Viking and warlike land, from which the name Viking may have been derived, filled with graves and antiquities of the iron age. There are also other Engeln in the present Sweden.

      In the whole literature of the North such a name as Engeln is unknown; it may have been, perhaps, a local name.

      In the Sagas the term England was applied to a portion only of Britain, the inhabitants of which were called Englar, Enskirmenn. Britain itself is called Bretland, and the people Bretar.

      “Öngulsey

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