VIII
THE EXPANSION OF THE NORDICS
The men of Nordic blood to-day form practically all the population of Scandinavian countries, as also a majority of the population of the British Isles and are almost pure in type in Scotland and eastern and northern England. The Nordic realm includes nearly all the northern third of France with extensions into the fertile southwest; all the rich lowlands of Flanders; all Holland; the northern half of Germany with extensions up the Rhine and down the Danube; and the north of Poland and of Russia. Recent calculations indicate that there are about 90,000,000 of purely Nordic physical type in Europe out of a total population of 420,000,000.
Throughout southern Europe a Nordic nobility of Teutonic type everywhere forms the old aristocratic and military classes or what now remains of them. These aristocrats, by as much as their blood is pure, are taller and blonder than the native populations, whether these be Alpine in central Europe or Mediterranean in Spain or in the south of France and Italy.
The countries speaking Low German dialects are almost purely Nordic but the populations of High German speech are very largely Teutonized Alpines and occupy lands once Celtic-speaking. The main distinction between the two dialects is the presence of a large number of Celtic elements in High German.
In northern Italy there is a large amount of Nordic blood. In Lombardy, Venice and elsewhere throughout the country the aristocracy is blonder and taller than the peasantry, but the Nordic element in Italy has declined noticeably since the Middle Ages. From Roman times onward for a thousand years the Teutons swarmed into northern Italy, through the Alps and chiefly by way of the Brenner Pass. With the stoppage of these Nordic reinforcements this strain seems to have grown less all through Italy.[[3]]
[3]. Procopius tells a significant story which illustrates the contrast in racial character between the natives and the barbarians. He relates that, at the surrender of Ravenna in 540 A. D. by the Goths to the army of the Byzantines, “when the Gothic women saw how swarthy, small men of mean aspect had conquered their tall, robust, fair-skinned barbarians, they were furious and spat in their husbands’ faces and cursed them for cowards.”
In the Balkan Peninsula there is little to show for the floods of Nordic blood that have poured in for the last 3,500 years, beginning with the Achæans of Homer, who first appeared en masse about 1400 B. C. and were followed successively by the Dorians, Cimmerians and Gauls, down to the Goths and the Varangians of Byzantine times.
The tall stature of the population along the Illyrian Alps from the Tyrol to Albania on the south is undoubtedly of Nordic origin and dates from some of these early invasions, but these Illyrians have been so crossed with Slavs that all other blond elements have been lost and the existing population is essentially of brachycephalic Alpine type. They are known as the Dinaric race. What few remnants of blondness occur in this district, more particularly in Albania, as well as the so-called Frankish elements in Bosnia, may probably be attributed to later infiltrations.
The Tyrolese seem to be largely Nordic except in respect to their round skull.
In Russia and in Poland the Nordic stature, blondness and long skull grow less and less pronounced as one proceeds south and east from the Gulf of Finland.