THERE ARE FEW PHYSICAL FEATURES in our Europe today more impressive than the remains of those Roman roads which once traversed every land owning the Roman sway, and which have withstood so wonderfully the wear of time. In every western country of Europe traces of these roads are to be found still recognizable, though in most they have been absorbed into a more modern system. Such has been the case with us as in France. But still the ancient highways can be well made out — our Watling Street, Fosse Way, Icknield Street, Ermine Street. In many parts of Spain these Roman roads remain untouched, but grass-grown and half-ruined, while beside them run the mule-paths, which are all that the indolent country now cares to keep in repair and use. Each one of these roads is a natural symbol of the state which brought it into existence, in its directness of purpose, its unswerving determination and contempt of obstacles, and likewise in a certain prosaic plainness. Yet we cannot call these roads prosaic in the sum, so inimitable are they in their vast, undaunted length, and even in the uniformity of their plan. Standing upon them you realize better than in any other way the long arm of Roman justice. If you put your ear to them, and the cloud-gates of Time will roll aside for a moment for you, you may still hear along all their length the tramp of legionaries, the challenges of the guard, the hurrying feet of merchants or of slaves; and you will reflect, with pleasure or the reverse of it according to your bent, how these were once the iron girdles which bound together all the members of a mighty empire in an unchanging rule of justice and of law.
From Italy into France these roads made their way by the Riviera, or by the valleys of the two Doras (Durias), by Mont Genèvre to Briançon, or by the Little St. Bernard; and either way at last to Lyons, which was the heart of all the Roman rule in Gaul. From Lyons again they led on by Chalons, Auxerre, Troyes, the other Chalons, to Rheims; from Rheims by Amiens to Boulogne; and then with but a narrow strip of intervening sea to Lymne, or Dover, or Richborough, or Ramsgate;[1] thence to Canterbury. When there they turned into that greatest of our highways, Watling Street, as the English came to call it; for it had its counterpart in the great highway which runs through the heavens. Watling Street leads on through London to Wroxeter; thence to Chester; and from near Chester the Roman road runs due north past Manchester as far as Carlisle, that is to say, as far as Hadrian’s wall. On the east side there is a corresponding road which runs past Lincoln to the ford across the Humber, to many other chesters in the north, Binchester, Lanchester, Ebchester and Chester le Street (the Castrum on the Roman road), up likewise to Hadrian’s wall and beyond it.
Across the Pyrenees and into Spain these roads penetrated on either side where the great mountain range dips down to the sea; on the east from Narbonne to Figuéras, from Figuéras to Gerona; on the west from Bayonne to St. Jean de Luz and Tolosa. There was likewise on this west side another way from Dax, north of Bayonne, almost due south, through a pass in the Pyrenees to Pampeluna. The pass thus formed became in later years very famous as the pass of Roncesvalles. Once beyond the Pyrenees the Roman roads spread out a network over all the Spanish peninsula.
Through the Eastern Alps, too, the roads made their way, over the Brenner and over the Splügen and down the Swiss valley of the Rhine. Ammianus Marcellinus, describing the dark, swampy, and forbidding character of this last region — the approach to Lake Constance — adds that nevertheless ‘the Romans, with their usual good sense, have made a good road thither’[2] — that is, to Brigantia, or Bregenz. East of the Upper Rhine and south of the Upper Danube, at Ulm, at Regensburg, these roads are still to be found. But as we travel northward the Rhine more and more becomes the dividing line between Rome and not-Rome, and you come to the true German Germany (deutsches Deutschland), a region into which the Romans looked, and in which their armies marched and countermarched, but which never bent to their imperial sway.
Those who are all for classing us with the rest of the Teutonic nationalities cannot get over the existence of these Roman roads in England, and all that they imply. These roads were the veins along which flowed into Western Europe, first, the laws and customs of Rome, afterwards its religion, though this last probably never reached the extremities. It was vigorous in Gaul Proper, where all national life centred around the great altar of Rome and Augustus at Lyons; but it was weak by comparison in the German provinces (Germania Superior, Germania Inferior[3]), and in Britain. When the religion of Rome changed from Paganism to Christianity, Christianity in its turn travelled by the same routes, but made its way further than Paganism had ever done.
It was only for a short time that Britain was cut off from connection with the Continent. When the great age of Sturm und Drang — the age of what are called the Folk-wanderings (Volkerwanderungen), and of the fall of Rome — had passed, these shores were again brought into connection with Gaul, were once more visited by Gaulish vessels and Gaul by English. Only in the interval both lands had been overrun by a Teutonic conqueror. Gaul was on the highway to change into Francia — France; and Britain was becoming, or had become, England.
Only a short time did the interruption of intercourse between Britain and the Continent endure. But still there was an interruption; and it so happens that the mythology of that interval has left us a precious relic which typifies what in the eyes of men who still made part of the ‘world’ of the Roman Empire was the condition of those who had been separated from it. The relic I speak of is the myth current among the fishermen of Northern Gaul touching the mysterious island ‘Brittia’; a place as they deemed to which souls were wafted after death, where, as Claudian thought,[4] Ulysses had invoked the shades from Hades and poured blood into his trench —
Est locus, extremum pandit qua Gallia littus,
Oceani praetentus aquis, ubi fertur Ulixes
Sanguine libato populum movisse silentem.
Illic umbrarum tenui stridore volantum
Flebilis auditur questus. Simulacra coloni
Pallida defunctasque vident migrare figuras.
The same myth, as Procopius relates it in prose, is of an island, ‘Brittia,’ half of which was a habitation for the living, but the other half was set apart to be the home of ghosts. Between the two regions stretched a wall which none could pass and live; whoever did cross it, instantly fell dead upon the other side, so pestilential was the air. But serpents and all venomous things dwelt on the other side, and there the air was dark and spirit-haunted. The fishermen upon the Gaulish coast were made the ferrymen of the dead, and on account of this strange duty, we are assured, they were exempt from the ordinary incidence of taxation. Their task fell upon them in rotation; those villagers whose turn had come were awakened at dead of night by a gentle tap upon the door, and a whispering breath calling them to the beach. There lay their boats, empty to all appearance, and yet weighed down as if by a heavy load. Pushing off, the fishermen performed in one night a voyage which else they could hardly accomplish, rowing and sailing, in six days and nights. When they had arrived at the unknown coast, they heard names called over and voices answering as if by rotation, while they felt their vessels gradually growing light; at last when all the souls had landed the boats were wafted back to the habitable world.[5]
This description has often been quoted before. The great value for our purpose of this piece of mythology lies in its boldly attaching itself — or with the faintest disguise — to a land formerly so well known as Britain was to the Romans — Britain, the birthplace of Constantine. The shores about which the Gaulish fishermen themselves entertained so strange a belief, whither they imagined that some of their villagers were set apart to ferry the dead, must have been the shores of Britain known to them; and therefore in the popular mythology of our near neighbours our island must have been altogether a home of the dead.[6] And something of this superstition long attached to us — the land of the Angli was in later centuries confused with the home of the Angeli.[7] If, however, we limit ourselves strictly to the myth as given by Procopius, it is only the country beyond the wall, i.e., the Roman Wall, that has so ghastly a reputation. Granting, I mean, that this wild myth concerning ‘Brittia’ could never have sprung up save when our island and our Roman roads were cut off from the great system of Europe; still it was not so wild as quite to forget the difference between conquered Britain and those unknown unconquered regions in the far north. It was at the wall where the Roman roads came to an end, that all that was natural and human too, ended, and we approached the borders of the Earth. This region beyond the wall is that same Caledonia which one of its own chieftains was made by Tacitus to speak of as the end of all territories and of all freedom.
Such was, I deem, the attitude in which the Roman subject stood — not to all the rest of the world — but to those parts of Northern Europe which lay outside the domains of Rome. To the commoner people, at any rate, all those regions were strange, misformed, monstrous, inhuman, ghostlike. And when Christianity walked along the paths which had been prepared for her by Rome, Christendom, too, looked upon this part of the unchristian world in the same way. In time, as Christianity cast her net over many people beyond the Roman pale, they began to look with her eyes, and to regard as she did their unconverted brethren. That feeling has been crystallized and preserved (by chance partly, no doubt) in our word, heathen, the German Heide, from heath, Heide. Partly by chance, because heath at one time might mean an enclosure in the country, heathen is no more than a translation of the Latin paganus, villager. But the earliest signification of heath was very soon forgotten, and the word very soon came to mean what it means with us, a moor, a wild, uncouth, uncultivated region, remote from human kind. The associations in popular imagination with all such places were necessarily far more terrible than they are with us: what was unknown was always then uncouth, that is to say, monstrous, terrifying.
The German races, though they were, as compared to the classical peoples, essentially rustics, had in their minds as vivid a picture of the horror of deserted regions as any that speaks in classical poetry. Side by side with that myth of the Gauls about Britain, side by side with the above-quoted passage from Claudian, or even with the more awful nekuia of the Odyssey which suggested it, we might place some pictures drawn from our earliest poem Beowulf, of that arch-heathen Grendel, and of the land in which he dwelt. I call him an arch-heathen, for he is the embodiment of all terrors attaching to the moors and misty fells, the marshes and the dark peat-pools, to whatever, in fact, lay far-off from human dwellings. He himself is a ghoul or a giant, a giant just of the same kind as the giant of our folk-tales; only that unfortunately we cannot realize what likeness such beings put on in days when men really believed in their existence. There is a giant in the Edda called Hraesvelg, Corpse-devourer: Grendel, too, feeds on human flesh; he lives far from mankind in the dwellings of the Fifel-race; but at night he stalks along under the misty hills, till he comes to men’s habitations, where he can find some food for his cannibal mouth, ‘Came from the moor, under the misty hills,/ Grendel stalking...’
He bare ‘God’s anger on him,’ so writes our poet, a Christian telling a heathen legend.[8]
We have, then, in Beowulf, and its picture of Grendel, the due counterpart of Procopius’ imagery. That stands to us for the type of a place cut off from intercourse with Rome, a heathendom before Christianity, we might say; this stands to us for any place cut off from intercourse with humankind, and in a spiritual sense it typifies the idea of heathendom generally, as the descendants of the heathens themselves conceived it.
The Goths had another myth which illustrates the same thought. It is reported by the Christian Goth Jordanes — in days when the Gothic nation had all been Christianized — and relates to those beings of fear, the heathen Huns. Jordanes tells us that a former king of the Goths had banished from his dominions all the sorceresses,[9] that these had gone eastward and found a home in a certain wood.[10] There they cohabited with the wild beasts of the forest, and out of this unnatural connection sprang the obscene race of the Huns.[11]
In every legend such as this the feeling which underlies it is the same; it is the horror which mankind universally conceives of all that is mysterious and unknown. The description in Beowulf might have been written with equal force if the poem had been a purely heathen one; and the story which Jordanes retails may very well have had its origin in heathen days. It is only that Christendom adopted this strain of popular superstition and applied it to the part of the world to which it was specially applicable — that is to say, the heathen north. It would have been absurd to speak of the classical pagans in such a manner. No one could think of the descendants of Pericles, or the possessors of the primeval wisdom of the East as a wild, half-human people, haunting the ways of wolves. Thus heathen, when we apply the word to the unconverted northern nations, Germans or Scandinavians, has a meaning quite distinct from that of pagan, as the word was used in the early days of Christianity. And as paganism was pretty well disposed of before Christianity came in contact with heathenism, and Christianity itself had changed in the interval, the attitude of Heathendom and Christendom face to face with one another is a thing to be studied in and by itself, not confounded in one long history of the spread of Christianity over Europe.
No time would be wasted which should help us to gain that sense of the unknown in space which our forefathers could possess, but which is so strange to modern thought. In vain the philosopher tells us that our life is hemmed round with mystery; it is the physical expression of this mystery that we require, in order to realize the ideas of former ages on this matter. To think that nothing known lies beyond such a wood, that that far headland bounds the world of men; could that be possible to us in the present day, then we might have some conception of what heathen and its cognate words would mean to a Christian of the early Middle Ages. And we should through this knowledge also be halfway towards an understanding of the conflict which had to go on in the heathen German’s own soul before he could bring himself to cast out his early gods to wander through such desolate places; as Odin (Wuotan) and his following were cast out to become fiends, the Wild Huntsman and his crew; or as the same god was left alone upon the Harz transformed into the Prince of Darkness.
Such a conflict went on in each mind; and the epos of this mental struggle is typefied by the epos of visible warfare between Heathendom and Christendom, whereof again the battles and sieges of the first Viking Age (our more special study in this volume) form in the mass a single act. The details of this warfare are often very difficult to ascertain, and seem commonplace and uninteresting. But the conflict as a whole in its inward and outward phases was stupendous, and stupendous in its results.
We have been in a position to see how there was, in a certain sense, a heathendom before Christianity. Every northern country which was cut off from connection with Rome (as Britannia was for a time) sank at once into this tenebrous condition. And all those lands whither the Roman roads had never reached and the Roman rule had never spread, dwelt in it perpetually. Such a land was Caledonia beyond the wall; such was Ierne, ‘gelid Ierne,’ as a Roman poet miscalls the land of warm mists and rains, a land which Agricola thought of conquering, but where, in fact, the Roman arms had never been seen. But the true home of this heathenism before Christianity (as of the heathenism after Christianity) lay not in these western extremities of the world, but in the eastern ones, in all the great German Germany beyond the Rhine, and in the Baltic countries of which the Romans had so faint a notion.
There was a Roman Germany. First, those provinces south of the Danube whereof we have spoken, Rhaetia, Noricum — now, roughly speaking, Würtemburg, Bavaria, Carinthia, German Austria, Styxia. There were the Decumates Agri (the ‘Tithe Lands’), which correspond with the modern Grand Duchy of Baden, and a small part of Würtemberg. In that region there was another wall of Hadrian, a vallum protected by a series of forts which ran due west from Albensberg on the Danube (a little above Regensburg), and was joined eventually by the wall of Trajan, running due north beyond the Main to the slopes of the Taunus. At this last range of mountains, for all the land east of the Rhine, begins unconquered Germany. You may stand today and look across towards those Taunus hills from Mainz or Worms, across that great plain which was once the Rhine’s bed, and which since history dawned has been the battlefield of so many nationalities and so many creeds; while a clear, starlit sky is over your head you will see, maybe, as I have seen, over there the flashes of sheet-lightning and hear the faint echoes of thunder. The sight of these hills, the roll of that thunder, cannot be without a deep significance for any traveller whose mind is in the least degree imbued with the lessons of history. The hills are for him a symbol of the beginning of the reign of Thorr and Odin. Of deeper significance still perhaps is another mountain range which lies farther to the north and to the east. This is the Harz, which gave, I suppose, its name to the Cherusci, the great champions of heathendom before Christianity. And we know what a reputation the Harz preserved all through the Middle Ages as the hearth on which smouldered the last embers of heathenism after Christianity as it died away in witchcraft.
West of the Rhine lay two Roman Germanias, Germania Superior and Germania Inferior, the precursors of Alsace and Lorraine, that is to say, of Alsace and the greater Lorraine of early Middle Age history. To protect this Roman Germany were built the great camps or founded the great cities and colonies which lay along the banks of the stream or a little way behind it. There was Trèves (Augusta Treverorum) the most important of all. There was Castra Vetera on the Rhine itself, the chief of the Roman camps, but one of the few places which did not preserve its importance into Christian days; there was Colonia Ubiorum, or Colonia Agrippina, what we call Cologne; Moguntiacum (Mainz); Argentoratum (Strassburg); Vangiones (Worms), ‘celebrated,’ a Roman historian complacently says, ‘for many a defeat of the barbarians’ — there is no need to enumerate them all. Truth to tell, almost all the picturesque medieval towns which the traveller of today knows (knows and loves) alone the banks of the Rhine. Bonn, Remagen, Andernach, Oberwesel, Coblentz, and the rest have had a Roman origin.[12] In Christian days the greater of these military strongholds grew to be likewise strongholds of the faith, archbishops’ and bishops’ sees; the three greatest archbishoprics of Germany, the three great spiritual electorates, Trèves, Cologne, and Mainz, were all in this region of Roman Germania. Over against these strongholds stood in imperial days the wild forest haunts of the Germans, the Taunus or the Teutoberger Wald, places which were pregnant with great events.
There is one other river of Germany, one other river in Europe only, one may say, which has been fortified as a rampart against heathendom much as the Rhine has been. This river is the Vistula. Along all its banks which are German you find the fortified towns or convent fortresses, raised in the thirteenth century by the Teutonic knights as a bulwark, not now against heathen Germans, but against heathen Slavs. Marienburg, Marienwerder, Graudentz, Culm, Thorn, are the counterparts of Colonia Agrippina, Bonna, Confluentes, Moguntiacum, Argentoratum, and the rest. Only there is this difference, that whereas the greater number of the Roman forts upon the Rhine which Christendom inherited are upon the west bank, the fortresses of the Vistula stood within the heathen territory and defended the river already won by Christendom.
Beyond the boundaries, as we have traced them, of Roman empire you came to that land which the historian spoke of, in words which have been quoted a thousand times, as in universum, on the whole, either rugged with forest or dank with marshes, where people did not dwell together in towns, nostro more, but apart and scattered. Many centuries later it was said of the territory of the Saxons (between the Lower Rhine and the Elbe) that there a squirrel might travel for leagues (‘seven leagues’) without ever having need to touch the ground. These dark and trackless forests had a terror of their own. Two things, says a recent writer,[13] were, during their efforts to conquer Germany, strange and terrible to the Roman generals and the Roman legionaries — the Ocean with its tides and the endless stretches of dark woodland in the interior. Upon the one the ships were suddenly, as if by unseen hands, dragged from their moorings, hurried away, and tossed upon some rocky shore. In the other, as the legions were painfully struggling through the dense forest, not less suddenly, and again at the touch of unseen, but not superhuman, hands, the trees would begin falling to right and left and rear of the army, a network of fallen trees. They had been half felled through days before in anticipation of the advance. As the Romans pressed forward they were suddenly brought face to face with a huge abatis — broti it was called in Northern warfare. Behind it the enemy were entrenched; arrows and javelins began to fly out from behind the improvised stockade; the broti stretched great wings far into the forest; if this were carried by assault you came upon another and another, and the enemy scarcely visible all the while. Meantime other trees had been falling, falling, and fresh abatis had been growing up on other sides and to the rear to cut off all retreat. He was a lucky or a very skilful general who could bring his army out thence unbroken. Perhaps he had been wise enough to post supports to come up at the critical moment; if they could reach him, he was saved; if they failed to reach him he was destroyed. This is how Csesar was saved the day he overcame the Nervii,[14] and this is how Varus was destroyed.
Another favourite method of defence among the Germans was by means of trenches.[15] Sometimes they were mere traps into which an advancing line might precipitate itself; sometimes they concealed an ambush. Add to these terrors the wild and fearful howling, more like that of beasts than of men,[16] which echoed and re-echoed in the forest wilderness, and we have a picture of some of the physical terrors which dogged the advance of the Romans into this ancient land.
But we should, I think, be estimating very wrongly if, because these difficulties were never overcome, we were to assume that they were insurmountable, or that they were felt to be so by the Romans either of Augustus’ or of Tacitus’s day. A few chance sayings of the Roman historians have been exaggerated by our vanity as Teutons and made to receive this interpretation. It is rather the opposite of this feeling which we have to try and realize. It is not easy for us who have been made wise by the event to understand how low a place the nations of Northern Europe held then in the estimation of civilized mankind. Our thoughts are naturally turned to the future, but theirs were necessarily concerned only with the past, that is to say, with the remains of Alexander’s Empire in the south and east, with the vast field of Hellenistic culture in Asia and Africa. ‘Who,’ as Tacitus says, ‘would ever leave Asia and Africa for those inclement Northern lands?’ The Romans had few thoughts to spare for the people whose small, one-roomed, wooden huts lay scattered among the German forests, or for those wilder people still, perhaps, of Caledonia and Ierne. India was far more interesting to them than heathen Germany or the flat lands at the mouth of the Rhine. The way Tacitus speaks of even the Gauls is very much the way we speak of the Hindus, or, at any rate, of the Mohammedans of India — as of a people who, no doubt, once were powerful, but whose day is over, and who are now sunk irretrievably in idleness and effeminacy. The same historian tells us how little the rebellion of Civilis — which arose on the Batavian island, and nearly lost to Rome Northern Gaul and the province of Germania Inferior — was noticed amid the excitement of civil dissensions in Italy.[17] It would be no unjust comparison to liken that rebellion to an abortive Indian mutiny, had such an one been set on foot by Sikhs and Nepalese. Agricola’s campaigns in Britain we might compare to the taking of Scinde. By such comparisons only can we arrive at some notion of the relation in which Rome stood to her northern subjects and neighbours.
Germany again — unconquered Germany, the Germany of Tacitus — we must compare to Afghanistan, and the great defeat of Varus to the destruction of General Sale’s force in the Kyber. The circumstances of the two defeats were not dissimilar, and their consequences were almost identical. Each begot in the mind of the greater nation something of a superstitious fear, an almost superstitious exaggeration of the dangers which lay in wait for the invader. The policy of Augustus that the Rhine should form the boundary of the Roman Empire was identical with our dominant policy in respect to Afghanistan, with no more and no less of reason for the one course than for the other. The forest warfare of Germany was difficult, as we have said; the woods, the brotis, the swampy ground, lay in wait for the legions and auxiliaries, as the Kyber or the Bolan lay in wait for our men. But I do not think it can be seriously maintained that in the one case or in the other there was anything like an insuperable difficulty in the way of conquest. It was not a reasonable, but far more a superstitious, fear which held back the Roman arms.
Drusus seemed born to play the part of Clive to this unconquered world. He made a fleet to sail upon the German Ocean, the first that ever dared its fitful tides.[18] But, alas, this fleet was destroyed by the treacherous ebb and flood: Germanicus suffered a like misadventure. During the commands of Drusus and Tiberius in Germany the Roman ramparts extended some way beyond the Rhine. Aliso, a strong fort on the Lippe (near the modern Paderborn), seemed to cover all the country between the Rhine and the Ems. Drusus cut a canal, navigable by his fleet, from the former river, through Friesland, to the ocean. Tiberius crossed the Weser and advanced as far as the Elbe. But after the ‘Great Defeat’ of Varus, Augustus undid their work and commanded the Rhine to flow as the boundary of the empire.
It may have been a sound policy[19] or it may have been a political superstition that governed the emperor’s decision in this case; but it was not any pressing danger, nor even any insuperable difficulty in the way of a conquest of Germany.
In the popular mind, for the common soldier or for the chance merchant adventuring into these territories, there would mingle, I doubt not, an element of superstition not political, connected with this land of enchantments. There the divine power dwelt unseen in the midst of awful groves; the women of this race were wonderfully given to the study of magic and enchantments. Is it not rather strange that the only pure relics of heathen Germany which have come down to us are in the form of two incantations?[20] As the camp story went, when Drusus had made his march over the Weser, and threatened the Elbe, one of these wise women, these Volvas, cast her spells upon him; as a gigantic female figure — the figure of Germania personified — she appeared to him in a dream and warned him to turn back. He did so; but still fate overtook him; he had a fall from his horse and died within the year. And almost from that time forward the empire of Rome beyond the Rhine began to shrink. It reached the limits of its flood when Tiberius in his fleet sailed to the mouth of the Elbe and there joined hands with an army which had marched thither overland, and awed the Germans upon the other bank so that they dared not attack.[21] It then began to ebb. As Tacitus writes: ‘The Elbe which formerly we knew, we now know by report only.’
We have already seen how some four centuries later the flood of empire ebbed from Britain, and ghosts and the creatures of popular superstition came in to occupy its room.
In the region beyond the Elbe, where the Romans never set foot, we might expect to lie the very strongholds of what I have called pre-Christian heathendom, the ancient beliefs of Germany which knew no touch of foreign influence. There the great confederation of the Suevi stretched from the shores of the Baltic down almost to the border of the Roman provinces in Southern Germany. It is from among the Suevi of Northern Germany[22] that come the few and slight pictures which Tacitus is able to draw for us of the religion of Germany in his day. Somewhere between the Elbe and the Oder, in the territory of the Suevian Semnones — maybe on the site of the Spreewald, where there survives today a people who seem to belong to a bygone heathen past — stood that grove, the most sacred in all Germany, where it was believed that the great god of the Teutonic nations had been born. This great god is without question the Wuotan or Odin of later times, a divinity who, whether or not he were the actual personification of the wind, had all the character of a god of tempests. To him alone among the German gods were human sacrifices offered. Tacitus tells us that they were offered in this grove. It was so holy a place that none might enter it but with a chain round his neck to show his subjection to the divinity. If a man fell down while in the wood he might not raise himself or be raised up again; he must crawl out on hands and knees.
Another picture still more impressive belongs to some of the Suevi farther to the north, whose territory lay upon the shore of the Baltic — very likely to the modern Mecklenburg and to the island of Rügen. This picture is of the worship of the chief female divinity, as the other of the chief male; her name was Nerthus or Mother Earth. Her home was in an island of the Baltic by the side of a lake surrounded by a wood. Every year she was brought out of this secret place, ferried over to the mainland, and there in a car drawn by white oxen she made her progress through the territories of her worshippers. None saw her face; her car was shrouded by rich tapestries, and none but her priest might approach it. The picture is almost like that of the Ark of the Lord when it was brought out to the armies of Israel.[23] But there is this difference in the two pictures — that whereas the latter came forth as an ensign of war, Nerthus, wherever she travelled, was an emissary of peace.
‘Happy is the place, joyful the day which is honoured by the entertainment of such a guest. No wars can go on, no arms are borne, the sword rests in its scabbard. This peace and rest continue till the priest takes back the goddess, satiate of converse with mortals.’ Yet even in this picture of primitive and simple rustic rites there lingered a something terrible. When the goddess returned to her island, the ‘chariot, the veil, and if you like to believe it, the goddess herself, are washed in a secret lake by slaves who immediately after are themselves drowned therein. Hence comes a mysterious horror and a holy ignorance of what has taken place, for that is beheld only by men who are themselves immediately to perish.’[24]
Of the northern parts of Germany, Tacitus can tell us little more than is contained in these two fragments of its creed. We have just the names of some of the people who dwelt east of the Suevi along the southern shore of the Baltic; of these the Guttones, dwelling by the mouth of the Vistula, were, we may believe, the fathers of the famous Goths, and the most nearly allied of all the German nations to the Scandinavians of later history. In truth, along all this northern stretch of Germany, from the Weser to the Vistula, we should find in these early days the people who effected most towards the carving out of Mediaeval Europe from the remains of the Roman Empire; the Lombards between the Weser and the Elbe, the Saxons at the foot of the Cimbric Chersonese; the Angli north of them, in Jutland along with the Jutes; the Burgundians, not close to the Baltic shore, but in Poland, Prussian and Russian, east of the Vistula; and finally the Goths (we may believe) in East Prussia. The Franks alone among the greater Teuton races are wanting from this category. And the Franks, if they were really none other than the ancient Sigambri, belonged to a similar and neighbouring region, the flat country of the Lower Rhine. When we first catch sight of them they are settled in the island of Batavia, the low island at the mouth of the Rhine and Saal, whence their name Salic Franks.[25] To Tacitus and the Romans of his day these nations, all but the Sigambri, were little more than names. Some of them, he tells us, were conspicuous for their loyalty to their kings — the Western Germans being more independent and republican.
Finally, we come to the Baltic itself, which the Romans heard of only as a part of the Northern Ocean. And beyond the Baltic Tacitus affords us one slight peep into the Scandinavian countries — a mere glance, but one not wanting in impressiveness. On the other side of that sea, he says, lies the island of the Suiones, a land rich in arms and ships and men; and beyond the Suiones’ land another sea, ‘sluggish and almost stagnant, which we may believe girdles and encloses the whole world. For here the light of the setting sun lingers on till sunrise bright enough to dim the light of the stars. More than that, it is asserted that the sound of his rising is to be heard, and the forms of the gods and the glory round his head may be seen. Only thus far, and here rumour seems truths does the world extend.’
The Cimbric Chersonese (Denmark), moreover, the Latin writers frequently confounded with the Homeric land of the Cimmerians at the edge of the world. Here, then, we come to the true counterparts of the lands upon the other side of the North Sea, which were the end of all land and of all liberty. And if the importance of these distant territories was small in the eyes of the Romans, we must own that to the imagination of those days an interest attached to them which it is no longer possible for us to attribute to any country. It is impossible for us to read without a strange emotion the passages which speak of lands like these supposed to lie upon the very borders of the earth. Illic usque tantum Natura (‘Here nature ends’). It is a tremendous phrase.
The Scandinavian ‘island’ which the ancients knew, and which they called sometimes Scanzia, sometimes Scandia or Scania, sometimes Scandinavia, did not signify the whole of the Scandinavian peninsula, but probably only that lower bulge of Sweden, part of which still bears one of these names, Scania, Skane; while another name has been extended to include a vast stretch of territory, of whose existence the Romans had no idea.[26]
This original Scandinavia (Skane, Halland, Smaland), with Jutland and the Danish islands, belongs to the low-lying deeply-wooded region of the Baltic shores far more than to upland Sweden and Norway, the lands farther to the north, which fall away from the great backbone of Scandinavia. The traveller of today, who passes along the well-known canal route from Gotenborg to Stockholm — the most familiar of northern highways — passes not far from the dividing line, between the Baltic Lowlands and Scandinavia Proper. Geologically speaking, it is but a day or two since all was dry land, where now lies the bed of the Baltic;[27] only since the territory which should unite the Baltic shores sank beneath the waves, the forests of pine and birch have, over a great part of the remaining dry land, given place to forests of hard-wood trees, chiefly beech. A poet, a Hans Andersen, might speak of the buried lands still weeping to rejoin their brethren who feel the upper air, and sending up through the water golden tears, that amber, namely, which is such a noted product of the Baltic, and has brought it so large a share of whatever wealth it at any time has gained.
Amber and furs were the staple of such trade as existed between the Baltic lands and Rome. The Swedes are described by a writer of late Roman days as great hunters of the animals valued for their fur, ‘whose skins,’ says our author, ‘find their way through countless hands to Rome.’ It is said that a certain knight of Nero’s day was the first Roman who ever looked upon the Baltic. He was a civil, peaceable knight, engaged in the amber trade.[28] But we ought not to omit to say that, according to one theory, there was in much earlier times a Greek trade to the Baltic lands, travelling by a more easterly route. This, mounting the Borysthenes (Dnieper), might navigate to no great distance from the sources either of the Dwina or the Vistula, and then descending these streams, might debouch into the Baltic. We are not without evidence in support of this theory; and it is quite possible that to this early Greek trade, rather than to the Roman, the Baltic nations were indebted for the most priceless of all gifts, the gift of letters.[29]
Out of the vast ocean which covers three-quarters of our globe there are three portions connected in a special degree with the history of the world. The first is the Mediterranean, on which the light of history first shines, and round which almost all the peoples of the ancient world were grouped — Egyptians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians. Very striking is it to see the dawn of history breaking over that sea, in Egypt first, then over the Eastern shores, passing westward to Greece and Italy and the Mediterranean coasts of Gaul, and on to Spain. The third of these ocean regions is the Atlantic, which, as we know, through the lands to which it leads the way, has redressed the balance of the Old World. But the middle region is certainly the Baltic, which is a sort of antithesis of the Mediterranean. The western portion of the Baltic, dotted over with its countless isles, which seem to invite men to the art of seafaring, is as a Northern Aegean or ant-Aegean:[30] for as the Aegean was the first sea in which true history begins, so the Baltic is the last almost of European seas to which that light has reached. We, Angles and Saxons, and even the Lombards and Burgundians, may look upon ourselves as belonging to this Baltic region, as well as the Goths, and the Scandinavian nations proper. For there is no natural boundary separating the different peoples of the great northern plain. Not so the Hoch Deutsch people who were so long in contact with Roman civilization, and have in their veins so large an infusion of Roman blood, whose country, too, is utterly different in character from the sandy plain of the north.[31]
We imagine the Scandinavian lands proper as desolate beyond almost all other lands of Europe in this remote past. And yet Tacitus speaks of them as rich in arms and ships and men. With regard to the ships there is no doubt he is right. There must have existed in the Baltic countries from most antique days, certainly for as much as five hundred years before Tacitus’s day an art of ship-building. For on certain stone carvings — hallristingar, hill-carvings, as they are called — found in Sweden and in Denmark, we have pictures of ships; and the pictures here presented must date from at least half a millenium before Tacitus wrote.[32] The boats there shown, as far as we can judge of them, nearly answer to the descriptions by Tacitus of the boats in use on the Baltic in his day; and curiously enough they correspond very closely to the build of boats in use among the Vikings many centuries later. Only that Tacitus tells us one fact, which distinguishes in a marked degree the Scandinavian ships of his age from the Viking ships — namely, that they had no sails. Of the Viking ships we will speak again at the proper place.
That the Baltic countries were once rich in arms we might judge from the remains of the Bronze Age in these countries. For in no other part of Europe do we find such beautiful bronze weapons as in Denmark and South Sweden — unless it be in those prehistoric cities and treasure-houses of the Greek race, which recent excavations have brought to light — the excavations at Ilium, I mean, or Tiryns.[33]
In these two particulars, therefore, Tacitus’s almost solitary item of information about the Scandinavian lands seems confirmed. The third statement, that they were rich in men, is the hardest to give credence to. Yet one fact, at any rate, may be alleged in support of it: among those powerful German nationalities which became the overthrowers of the Roman Empire, the greater number kept the tradition of a migration by their forefathers from the Scandinavian peninsula to the mainland of Europe. The Goths had this belief. We know how they and the Gepidae were supposed to have come over in three keels (Ostrogoths, Visigoths, and Gepidae), to the mouth of the Vistula — those three keels which unfortunately figure in many a Teutonic migration myth, our own among the number. The Lombards, too, believed that they had come from Scandinavia.[34] Jordanes had the same belief as Tacitus about the prolificness of the Scandinavian land. He calls it (the ‘island’ of Scanzia) ‘the workshop of races,’ officina gentium sive vagina nationum. All this points to a common belief in the teeming soil of Scandinavia, which Tacitus only retails.
That the belief was founded on fact I do not mean to maintain. It may have had its rise in mythology. There may have been some peculiar sacredness attaching to the Scandinavian ‘island,’ or some special myth connected with it, which made it the origin of the first human pair, in the same sense that that sacred grove of the Semnones was the birthplace of Wuotan. Old Teutonic belief related how three of the great gods, walking through the world, had found two trees or two logs of wood, ash and elm, and out of these had created the first human pair.[35] If that was supposed to have happened in Scanzia, this myth would be enough to make Scanzia the officina gentium of later tradition, and enough to hand on to Tacitus a history of the number of nations who had proceeded thence. For I think that the traditions just related of the origins of the Goths and the Lombards, and so forth, instead of precisely confirming Tacitus’ statement, only account for it.
At the head, or near the head, of many Teutonic genealogies we find the name of a mythic being called Sceáf, Skef — which is Sheaf.[36] And the fragments of myth obtainable about Sceáf show him to have been a half-divine being, a demi-god or lesser god, to whom was entrusted a mission not unlike the mission given to Triptolemus by Demeter, the duty of scattering abroad among mankind the seeds of a higher culture. In the myth of Sceáf a ship takes the place of the serpent-chariot of Triptolemus. At the dawn of the world’s history this divine child was wafted in a boat to the coast of Scandinavia or Denmark. He was found sleeping with his head upon a sheaf (whence his name, say the myths, speaking obviously in a late Euhemeristic fashion), and the boat, too, was full of weapons till then unknown to mankind. According to a recent writer on Teutonic mythology, this Sceáf is identical with a certain Norse god, Heimdal, who was himself one of the creators of the human race.[37] This last identification is of secondary importance here. Sceáf lived to be a very old man, and reigned peaceably in the land of his adoption. Under him mankind entered upon a new and higher life. When very old he was carried down and placed once more in the boat which had borne him to those shores, ‘by no less gifts accompanied than when a child he had come thither,’ men knew not whence. This is what our poem Beowulf tells us of his end.[38]
I trust I shall not be accused of extravagance if I surmise in this history of Sceáf some reminiscence of a culture brought to the Baltic from Greece or from Rome in prehistoric ages. It may be that some new kind of corn was introduced into the north then; it is far from improbable that the ships which made their way down the Vistula to the Baltic were the first ships — as distinguished from rude canoes — which ever plied in that sea. And the unmistakable resemblance between some of the prehistoric bronze weapons of Greece and the Bronze Age weapons of Scandinavia might suggest that these weapons were those on which the Sheaf was sleeping when he came to the far north.
Or, to put the matter more plainly, suppose Greek wanderers to have come northward to see what they could pick up in the way of trade. Suppose them to have brought with them a sheaf or sheaves of corn never seen in those parts before, and along with them weapons of new kinds; how easily might this history turn into the legend of the mysterious being Sceáf carried in a boat, sleeping upon his arms.
I do not mean that the Triptolemus myth was necessarily carried north. In fact, I scarcely think that that could have been the case. For how would the dragon-drawn chariot have been converted into a ship? Yet even this is possible; it is just possible that the Dragon-ship had its origin in the ship of Sceáf. The boats of the hallristningar are shaped like the Viking ships. They have the same long curved stems and stern-posts which seemed to invite the boat builders of the Viking days to carve them into the likeness of a dragon or worm.[39]
This, I know, is mere speculation. What remains is this myth of Sceáf — the boat-borne, the father of men (Heimdal?), or at the least the father of a new civilization. His myth, his worship, if he ever were actually a god, cannot be unconnected with the worship of the Demeter of the North, the Earth Mother who was brought from some island of the Baltic to be borne around among her worshippers in Germany. And there is, I think, enough in this myth — taken in connection with Tacitus’s account of Nerthus — to explain the belief current among so many of the great Teutonic nations that they had sprung from Scandinavia.[40]
This belief, whatever its origin, gives, it will be acknowledged a special interest to the Scandinavian countries, even from the days when we first catch sight of them. Long before their inhabitants actually come into the field as the last champions of heathendom, they stand at the background of the nearer Teutons; a dark and mysterious background, giving, if I may say so, a sort of religious sanction to their existence. The Teutons did not really all spring from Scandinavia. But they thought they had done so; they thought they had come from the borders of that sluggish sea which girdled and enclosed the whole earth. In some way that we cannot quite understand this belief was founded upon their religious creed.