“The Viking Age” had hardly been published in England, when a storm of protests and adverse criticisms arose from many quarters of that conservative country; for it is there that the old belief in the Angle and Anglo-Saxon descent of the modern English-speaking peoples is most rooted, having indeed become a religion with many Englishmen.
I fully expected opposition to the new views I propounded. Had not my former accounts of African travels been received with incredulity? Did not the people laugh when I told that I had seen a race of pigmies and been in their villages? Did they not doubt my descriptions of the great equatorial forest, of gorillas, cannibals, etc.? I was before the time. I was too young; and these circumstances were against me. But then, as in the case of “The Viking Age,” I found warm supporters and defenders in England itself.
I knew that it was bold on my part to attack the Saxon idol which had been worshipped so long among Englishmen, and to try to destroy the faith in which they and their fathers had believed. Was the glorious Anglo-Saxon name which the people had been shouting for so long, even in America, to be overthrown? What, then, would become of the sturdy qualities claimed as inherited from the so-called Anglo-Saxon race? The qualities are there, only the name of Anglo-Saxon ought to be changed to that of Norse.
Nothing but absolute conviction made me take this bold step. I had never been satisfied with the assertions of historians, and could see no evidence in their writings for the conclusions at which they had arrived in regard to the name Anglo-Saxon and as to who were the conquerors and settlers of Britain.
When I travelled in the Norselands, to the northern part of which I gave the name of “The Land of the Midnight Sun,” a name which has been generally adopted since, I became convinced that the conquerors of Britain were Norse; for while visiting their museums, which contained the Norse antiquities, I saw that these objects were the same as those called in England by antiquarians, Angle, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Roman, and in France, Frankish. These facts set me thinking, and ultimately produced “The Viking Age.”
As soon as I brought before the public the evidence I had collected, many voices rose and exclaimed: “Woe to him who tries to dispel our belief and destroy our faith!” The world is full of such examples in the treatment of new ideas. How could I escape hostility when I proclaimed that the antiquities called in England by archæologists and others, and classified in the museums as Angle, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Roman, are Norse, consequently that the ancestors of the English-speaking people are from the basin of the Baltic and present Scandinavia, and that it is only there that one sees the antiquities of a most warlike and sea-faring race of the period of the so-called Saxon maritime expeditions?
Many apply the name of Anglo-Saxon to the people who settled in Britain, without knowing why, except that they had been taught to believe it from their school and college days, or because the majority believe so. I maintain that the earlier England, popularly placed at the southern part of the peninsula of Jutland, is mythical; that such antiquities pointed out as Angle are not found there; that the word “eng” (Swedish äng) is a common appellation all over Scandinavia; that “england,” or “äng land,” to this day, is the name given to flat, grassy land by the Norse people, as it was in earlier times. The probability is, that the Norsemen, seeing the flat shores of Britain on the North Sea, called it “England,” or Land of Meadows; and the people, in the course of time, were called meadow-men, as we say mountaineers, in speaking of people inhabiting mountainous regions.