Historical Lectures and Essays | Page 3

as a well-known place, and because the
brothers are sent by the princess to slay American kings; but that Rime
has another value. It is of a beauty so perfect, and yet so like the old
Scotch ballads in its heroic conception of love, and in all its forms and
its qualities, that it is one proof more, to any student of early European
poetry, that we and these old Norsemen are men of the same blood.
If anything more important than is told by Professor Rafn and Mr.
Black {2} be now known to the antiquarians of Massachusetts, let me
entreat them to pardon my ignorance. But let me record my opinion
that, though somewhat too much may have been made in past years of
certain rock-inscriptions, and so forth, on this side of the Atlantic, there
can be no reasonable doubt that our own race landed and tried to settle
on the shore of New England six hundred years before their kinsmen,
and, in many cases, their actual descendants, the august Pilgrim Fathers
of the seventeenth century. And so, as I said, a Scandinavian dynasty
might have been seated now upon the throne of Mexico. And how was
that strange chance lost? First, of course, by the length and danger of
the coasting voyage. It was one thing to have, like Columbus and
Vespucci, Cortes and Pizarro, the Azores as a halfway port; another to
have Greenland, or even Iceland. It was one thing to run south-west
upon Columbus's track, across the Mar de Damas, the Ladies' Sea,
which hardly knows a storm, with the blazing blue above, the blazing
blue below, in an ever-warming climate, where every breath is life and
joy; another to struggle against the fogs and icebergs, the rocks and
currents of the dreary North Atlantic. No wonder, then, that the
knowledge of Markland, and Vinland, and Whiteman's Land died away
in a few generations, and became but fireside sagas for the winter
nights.
But there were other causes, more honourable to the dogged energy of
the Norse. They were in those very years conquering and settling nearer
home as no other people--unless, perhaps, the old Ionian
Greeks--conquered and settled.
Greenland, we have seen, they held--the western side at least--and held
it long and well enough to afford, it is said, 2,600 pounds of walrus'

teeth as yearly tithe to the Pope, besides Peter's pence, and to build
many a convent, and church, and cathedral, with farms and homesteads
round; for one saga speaks of Greenland as producing wheat of the
finest quality. All is ruined now, perhaps by gradual change of climate.
But they had richer fields of enterprise than Greenland, Iceland, and the
Faroes. Their boldest outlaws at that very time--whether from Norway,
Sweden, Denmark, or Britain--were forming the imperial life-guard of
the Byzantine Emperor, as the once famous Varangers of
Constantinople; and that splendid epoch of their race was just dawning,
of which my lamented friend, the late Sir Edmund Head, says so well
in his preface to Viga Glum's Icelandic Saga, "The Sagas, of which this
tale is one, were composed for the men who have left their mark in
every corner of Europe; and whose language and laws are at this
moment important elements in the speech and institutions of England,
America, and Australia. 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,
England, 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 motto on the sword of Roger Guiscard was a
proud one:
Appulus et Calaber, Siculus mihi servit et Afer.
Every island, says Sir Edmund Head, and truly--for the name of almost
every island on the coast of England, Scotland, and Eastern Ireland,
ends in either ey or ay or oe, a Norse appellative, as is the word "island"
itself--is a mark of its having been, at some time or other, visited by the
Vikings of Scandinavia.
Norway, meanwhile, was convulsed by war; and what perhaps was of
more immediate consequence, Svend Fork-beard, whom we
Englishmen call Sweyn--the renegade from that Christian Faith which
had been forced on him by his German conqueror, the Emperor Otto
II.--with his illustrious son Cnut, whom we call Canute, were just
calling together all the most daring spirits of the Baltic coasts for the
subjugation of England; and when that great feat was performed, the
Scandinavian emigration was paralysed, probably, for a time by the
fearful wars at home. While the king of Sweden, and St. Olaf

Tryggvason, king of Norway, were setting on Denmark