| Suhm. | Snorro. | |
| A.D. | B.C. | |
| Frode I. | 35 | 17 |
| Fridlief | 47 | -- |
| Havar | 59 | -- |
| Frode II. | 87 | -- |
| Wermund | 140 | -- |
| Olaf | 190 | -- |
| A.D. | ||
| Dan Mykillate | 270 | 170 |
| Frode III. | 310 | 235? |
| Halfdan I. | 324 | 290 |
| Fridlief III. | 348 | 300 |
| Frode IV. | 407 | 370 |
| Ingel | 436 | 386 |
| Halfdan II. | 447 | " |
| Frode V. | 460 | " |
| Helge and Roe | 494 | 438 |
| Frode VI. | 510 | " |
| Rolf Krake | 522 | 479 |
| Frode VII. | 548 | " |
| Halfdan III. | 580 | 554 |
| Ruric | 588 | " |
| Ivar | 647 | 587 |
| Harald Hildetand | 735 | " |
| Sigurd Ring | 750 | -- |
| Rajnar Lothbrog | 794 | -- |
| Sigurd Snogoge | 803 | -- |
| Herda Canute | 850 | -- |
| Eric I. | 854 | -- |
| Eric II. | 883 | -- |
| Harald Harfagar | -- | 863 |
| Gorm the Old (died?) | 941 | -- |
| Harald Blatand | 991 | -- |
| Sweyn | 1014 | -- |
[CHAPTER VIII.]
FRANCE.
It is only in very recent times that the French have turned their attention to the study of their Rude-Stone Monuments; but since they have done so, it has been in so systematic and scientific a manner that, had it been continued a few years longer, little would have been left to be desired by the students of that class of antiquities in France. War and revolution, however, intervened just as the results of these labours were about to be given to the world, and how long we may now have to wait for them, no one can tell. The Musée de St.-Germain was far from being complete in July last, and only the first parts of the great 'Dictionnaire des Antiquités celtiques' had been published at that time. We can now hardly hope that the necessary expenditure will be continued which is indispensable to complete the former, and it is difficult to foresee in what manner the materials collected for the dictionary can now be utilised.
Even when much further advanced towards completion, it is hardly to be expected that the museums of St.-Germain and Vannes can rival the royal collections at Copenhagen; and if the French had confined themselves only to collecting, they would not have advanced our knowledge very much; but, while doing this, they have also gathered statistical information, and have been mapping and describing, so that our knowledge of their monuments is much more complete than of those of the Danes. To borrow a simile from kindred sciences, it is as if the Danes had attended exclusively to the mineralogy of the subject: collecting specimens from all parts, and arranging them according to their similarities or affinities, wholly irrespective of the localities from which they came. The French, on the other hand, have founded a science similar to that of geology on their knowledge of the minerals; they have carefully noted the distribution of the various classes of monuments, and, so far as possible, ascertained their relative superposition. The first is, no doubt, a most useful process, and one that must to a certain extent precede the other; but unless we map the various rocks on the surface and ascertain their stratification, it hardly helps us in studying the formation or history of our globe.
In 1864 M. Bertrand published in the 'Revue archéologique' a small map of France, showing the distribution of dolmens as then known; and three years afterwards another, on a much larger scale, intended to accompany the 'Dictionnaire des Antiquités celtiques,' and containing all that was then known. Were a second edition of this map published now, it would, no doubt, be much more full and complete; but the main outlines must still be the same, and are sufficient for our present purposes. From these maps and the text which accompanies them we learn that the greater number of the rude-stone monuments in France are arranged at no great distance on either side of a straight line drawn from the shores of the Mediterranean, somewhere about Montpellier, to Morlaix, in Brittany. There are none east of the Rhone, none south of the Garonne, till we come to the Pyrenees, and so few north of the basin or valley of the Seine that they may be considered as wanderers.
Referring to the table at the end of this chapter, which is compiled from that of 1864, we find that thirty departments contain more than ten monuments. Thirty others, according to M. Bertrand, contain from one to eight or nine; and the remaining twenty-nine either contain none at all or these so insignificant as hardly to deserve attention.
From this table we learn, at least approximately, several facts of considerable interest to our investigation. The first is that, of the three divisions into which Cæsar divides Gaul, the northern in his day belonged to a race who had had no stone monuments. There are none in Belgium proper, and so few in French Flanders, or indeed in any part of Gallia Belgica, that we may safely assert that the Belgæ were not dolmen-builders. In the next place, I cannot help agreeing with M. Bertrand in his conclusion that the Celts properly so called have as little claim to the monuments as the Belgæ.[379] We know something of the provinces occupied by the Celts six hundred years before Christ from Livy's[380] description of the tribes who, under Bellevesus, invaded Italy. Their capital was Bruges, and they occupied the departments immediately around that city; but they had not then penetrated into Brittany, nor north of the Seine, nor into any part of Aquitania.[381] But they occupied the whole of the east of Gaul up, apparently, to the Rhine and the country on the east bank of the Rhone. According to the French statistics, there are 140,000 barrows or tumuli in the departments of the Côte-d'Or, Vosges, Haut-Rhin, Bas-Rhin, Doubs, Jura, and Ain, but not one single dolmen;[382] and there are none to the east of the Rhine. As we proceed westward, the tumuli become rarer, and the dolmens are gradually met with. The Averni, for instance, were one of the Celtic tribes that accompanied Bellovesus, and in their country dolmens are found; but perhaps we need only infer from this that in a hilly country like Auvergne the older people still remained, and followed their old customs in spite of its partial occupation by the conquering Celts. We do not know at what period the Celts first invaded Gaul, but there seems no reason for supposing that it could not be very long before they first came in contact with the Romans; and if we may judge from the rate of progress which they made in subduing the rest of the country in historic times, their first invasion could hardly have been a thousand years B.C. All the tumuli in the east of France which have been dug into have yielded implements of bronze and metal,[383] and if they belonged to the Celts, this would fairly accord with the conclusions at which archæologists have arrived from other sources with regard to the Bronze age. It is not, however, worth while following up the question here; for unless it could be proved that the dolmens either succeeded or preceded the tumuli, it has no bearing on our argument. The fact of their occupying different and distinct districts prevents any conclusion of the sort being arrived at from geographical or external considerations. Their contents, if compared, might afford some information, but up to the present time this has not been done, and all we can at present assume is that there were two contemporary civilizations, or barbarisms, co-existing simultaneously on the soil of France. My impression is, however, that the Celtic barrow-builders were earlier converts to Christianity, and left off their heathenish mode of burial long before the less easily converted dolmen-builders of the west ceased to erect their Rude-Stone Monuments.
We are thus reduced to the third of the great provinces into which Gaul was divided in Cæsar's time, to try and find the people who could have erected the stone monuments of France, and at first sight it seems extremely probable that they were erected by the Aquitanians. Both Cæsar[384] and Strabo[385] distinctly assert that the people of the southern province differed from the Celts in language and institutions as well as in features, and add that they resembled more the Iberians of Spain than their northern neighbours. When, however, we come to look more closely into the matter, we find that the Aquitania of Cæsar was confined to the country between the Garonne and the Pyrenees, and where, however, few, if any, dolmens now exist. They are rather frequent in the Pyrenees[386] and the Asturias, where remnants of the dolmen-building races may have found shelter and continued to exist after their congeners were swept from the plains; and there are one or two on the left bank of the Garonne, but except these there are none in Aquitania proper. If, however, we apply the term Aquitania to the province as extended by Augustus up to the left bank of the Loire, we include the greater part of the provinces where dolmens are found; but here again, when we look more closely into it, we find that the northern districts of this great province were, in Augustus' time, inhabited by Celts, or, at all events, that Celts formed the governing and influential bodies in the states. Indeed, the fact seems to be that, during the six centuries which elapsed between the invasions of Italy by the Gauls and the return invasion of Gaul by the Romans, the Celts had gradually extended themselves over the whole of central France from the Garonne to the Seine, and had obliterated the political status of the people who had previously occupied the country, though there is no reason to suppose they had then at least attempted to exterminate them. It must thus be either that the Celts were the builders of the dolmens, which appears most improbable, or that there existed in these provinces a prehistoric people to whom they must be ascribed.