Historical Lectures and Essays | Page 4

during Cnut's
pilgrimage to Rome, and Cnut, sailing with a mighty fleet to Norway,
was driving St. Olaf into Russia, to return and fall in the fratricidal
battle of Stiklestead--during, strangely enough, a total eclipse of the
sun--Vinland was like enough to remain still uncolonised. After Cnut's
short-lived triumph--king as he was of Denmark, Norway, England,
and half Scotland, and what not of Wendish Folk inside the Baltic--the
force of the Norsemen seems to have been exhausted in their native
lands. Once more only, if I remember right, did "Lochlin," really and
hopefully send forth her "mailed swarm" to conquer a foreign land; and
with a result unexpected alike by them and by their enemies. Had it
been otherwise, we might not have been here this day.
Let me sketch for you once more--though you have heard it, doubtless,
many a time--the tale of that tremendous fortnight which settled the
fate of Britain, and therefore of North America; which decided--just in
those great times when the decision was to be made--whether we
should be on a par with the other civilised nations of Europe, like them
the "heirs of all the ages," with our share not only of Roman
Christianity and Roman centralisation--a member of the great comity of
European nations, held together in one Christian bond by the Pope--but
heirs also of Roman civilisation, Roman literature, Roman Law; and
therefore, in due time, of Greek philosophy and art. No less a question
than this, it seems to me, hung in the balance during that fortnight of
autumn, 1066.
Poor old Edward the Confessor, holy, weak, and sad, lay in his new
choir of Westminster--where the wicked ceased from troubling, and the
weary were at rest. The crowned ascetic had left no heir behind.
England seemed as a corpse, to which all the eagles might gather
together; and the South-English, in their utter need, had chosen for their
king the ablest, and it may be the justest, man in Britain--Earl Harold
Godwinsson: himself, like half the upper classes of England then, of
the all-dominant Norse blood; for his mother was a Danish princess.
Then out of Norway, with a mighty host, came Harold Hardraade, taller
than all men, the ideal Viking of his time. Half-brother of the now dead
St. Olaf, severely wounded when he was but fifteen, at Stiklestead,
when Olaf fell, he had warred and plundered on many a coast. He had
been away to Russia to King Jaroslaf; he had been in the Emperor's

Varanger guard at Constantinople--and, it was whispered, had slain a
lion there with his bare hands; he had carved his name and his
comrades' in Runic characters--if you go to Venice you may see them
at this day--on the loins of the great marble lion, which stood in his
time not in Venice but in Athens. And now, king of Norway and
conqueror, for the time, of Denmark, why should he not take England,
as Sweyn and Canute took it sixty years before, when the flower of the
English gentry perished at the fatal battle of Assingdune? If he and his
half-barbarous host had conquered, the civilisation of Britain would
have been thrown back, perhaps, for centuries. But it was not to be.
England was to be conquered by the Norman; but by the civilised, not
the barbaric; by the Norse who had settled, but four generations before,
in the North East of France under Rou, Rollo, Rolf the
Ganger--so-called, they say, because his legs were so long that, when
on horseback, he touched the ground and seemed to gang, or walk. He
and his Norsemen had taken their share of France, and called it
Normandy to this day; and meanwhile, with that docility and
adaptability which marks so often truly great spirits, they had changed
their creed, their language, their habits, and had become, from heathen
and murderous Berserkers, the most truly civilised people of Europe,
and--as was most natural then--the most faithful allies and servants of
the Pope of Rome. So greatly had they changed, and so fast, that
William Duke of Normandy, the great-great-grandson of Rolf the wild
Viking, was perhaps the finest gentleman, as well as the most
cultivated sovereign, and the greatest statesman and warrior in all
Europe.
So Harold of Norway came with all his Vikings to Stamford Bridge by
York; and took, by coming, only that which Harold of England
promised him, namely, "forasmuch as he was taller than any other man,
seven feet of English ground."
The story of that great battle, told with a few inaccuracies, but told as
only great poets tell, you should read, if you have not read it already, in
the "Heimskringla" of Snorri Sturluson, the Homer of the North:
High feast that day held the birds of the air and