Then he must tell us about the Scritofinns of the Bothnia gulf; wild Lapps and Finns, who have now retreated before the Teutonic race. In Paul Warnefrid’s eyes they are little wild hopping creatures—whence they derive their name, he says—Scritofinns, the hopping, or scrambling Finns.
Scrattels, Skretles, often figure in the Norse tales as hopping dwarfs, half magical [158]. The Norse discoverers of America recognized the Skrællings in the Esquimaux, and fled from them in panic terror; till that furious virago Freydisa, Thorvard’s wife, and Eirek the Red’s daughter, caught up a dead man’s sword, and put to flight, single-handed, the legion of little imps.
Others, wiser, or too wise, say that Paul is wrong; that Skrikfins is the right name, so called from their ‘screeking’, screaming, and jabbering, which doubtless the little fellows did, loudly enough.
Be that as it may, they appear to Paul (or rather to his informants, Wendish merchants probably, who came down to Charlemagne’s court at Aix, to sell their amber and their furs) as hopping about, he says, after the rein-deer, shooting them with a little clumsy bow, and arrows tipt with bone, and dressing themselves in their skins. Procopius knew these Scritfins too (but he has got (as usual) addled in his geography, and puts them in ultima Thule or Shetland), and tells us, over and above the reindeer-skin dresses, that the women never nursed their children, but went out hunting with their husbands, hanging the papoose up to a tree, as the Lapps do now, with a piece of deer’s marrow in its mouth to keep it employed; and moreover, that they sacrificed their captives to a war-god (Mars he calls him) in cruel ugly ways. All which we may fully believe.
Then Paul has to tell us how in the Scritfin country there is little or no night in midsummer, little or no day in winter; and how the shadows there are exceeding long, and shorten to nothing as they reach the equator,—where he puts not merely Egypt, but Jerusalem. And how on Christmas days a man’s shadow is nine feet long in Italy, whereas at Totonis Villam (Thionville), as he himself has measured, it is nineteen feet and a half. Because, he says, shrewdly enough, the further you go from the sun, the nearer the sun seems to the horizon. Of all which if you answer—But this is not history: I shall reply—But it is better than history. It is the history of history. It helps you to see how the world got gradually known; how history got gradually to be written; how each man, in each age, added his little grain to the great heap of facts, and gave his rough explanation thereof; and how each man’s outlook upon this wondrous world grew wider, clearer, juster, as the years rolled on.
And therefore I have no objection at all to listen to Paul in his next chapter, concerning the two navels of the ocean, one on each side Britain—abysses which swallow up the water twice a day, and twice a day spout it up again. Paul has seen, so he seems to say, the tide, the ’Ωκεανοιο ροας, that inexplicable wonder of the old Greeks and Romans, running up far inland at the mouths of the Seine and Loire; and he has to get it explained somehow, before he can go forward with a clear conscience. One of the navels seems to be the Mahlstrom in Norway. Of the place of the other there is no doubt. It is close to Evodia insula, seemingly Alderney. For a high noble of the French told him so; he was sucked into it, ships and all, and only escaped by clinging to a rock. And after awhile the margins of that abyss were all left bare, leaving the Frenchman high and dry, ‘palpitating so with fear,’ says Paul, ‘that he could hardly keep his seat.’ But when all the water had been sucked in, out and up it came pouring again, in huge mountains, and upon them the Frenchman’s ships, to his intense astonishment, reappeared out of the bottomless pit; into one of which he jumped; being, like a true Frenchman, thoroughly master of the situation; and got safe home to tell Paul the deacon. It is not quite the explanation of the tides which one would have wished for: but if a French nobleman of high rank will swear that he saw it with his own eyes, what can Paul do, in common courtesy, but believe him?
Paul has observed, too, which is a fact, that there is a small tide in his own Adriatic; and suggests modestly that there may be a similar hole in the bottom of that sea, only a little one, the tide being very little. After which, ‘his prælibatis,’ he will return, he says, to his story. And so he goes back to the famous Langbard Saga, the old story, which he has turned out of living Teutonic verse into dead Latin prose, and calls De Woden et Frea quædam ridicula fabula; but can’t help for the life of him telling it, apologizing all the time. How the Winils (his own folk) went out to fight the Wendels, many more than them in number; and how Gambara, the Alruna-wife, cried to Freia the goddess, and Freia told her that whichsoever of the two armies first greeted Woden at the sunrise should win. But the Winils are far away on the war-road, and there is no time to send to them. So Freia bids her take the Winil women, and dress them as warriors, and plait their tresses over their lips for beards, and cry to Woden; and Woden admires their long beards, and thinks them such valiant ‘war-beasts,’ that he grants them the victory.
Then Freia tells him how he has been taken in, and the old god laughs till the clouds rattle again, and the Winils are called Langbardr ever after.
But then comes in the antiquary, and says that the etymology is worthless, and that Langbardr means long axes—(bard=an axe)—a word which we keep in halbert, a hall-axe, or guard’s pole-axe; and perhaps the antiquary is right.
But again comes in a very learned man, Dr. Latham [162], and more than hints that the name is derived from the Lange Börde, the long meadows by the side of the Elbe: and so a good story crumbles to pieces, and