Ivar the Viking / A romantic history based upon authentic facts of the third and fourth centuries

by Paul B. Du Chaillu

Some of my critics took up the question of language. The reason they gave for not agreeing with me was, that the English had the definite article “the,” and the Icelandic saga-writings did not possess it; this was, according to them, the most positive proof that the earlier English people were not Norse. One might as well have argued that the French language was not derived in great part from the Latin, as it has the definite article, and the Latin had not. Who can ever tell when the definite article was dropped or added in those languages?

I never expected that the appearance of “The Viking Age” would convert to my views men who had spent their lives in trying to prove, or in maintaining the belief in, the Anglo-Saxon myth, and who believed in the diffuse, contradictory, and often incomprehensible writings of Bede and Nennius, or in the earlier English chronicles, the authorship of which cannot be traced. But I have often wondered why no one has compared thoroughly the Norse archæology of that period with that of Britain, which is claimed as that of the Angle, Anglo-Saxon, as being the early settlers of Britain; and the only reason I could discover that anyone had for calling these antiquities by those names was because of blind confidence that these settlers were what the historians claimed them to be.

Those who cling to the Anglo-Saxon belief point to here and there a few graves in the ancient Friesland, similar to those found in England, as a proof that the earlier settlers of Britain did not come from the Baltic. As if it were possible that none of these Norsemen, who used to visit Friesland as far back as before the time of Tacitus, could have failed to die there during several centuries! They forget, also, that the Romans never mentioned the people of that country as sea-faring. On the contrary, the maritime tribes that harassed them “were living on the most northern shores of the sea—in the ocean itself.” The antiquities left by these sea-faring tribes are those that must give us light on the subject.

One might just as well assert one thousand years from now that the people of English descent of the present time living at the Cape of Good Hope were the ones that held sway over India, because they were nearer than England to India, or that the solitary graves or little English cemeteries found between England and India were those of the people who governed India. A little more research would prove to them that the great seat of power was in England. We learn from archæology where Egypt, Greece, Rome, and many other fallen empires held their sway. So we may know, from the traces left, where the Norsemen held theirs also, and that nowhere did they hold it more firmly than in Britain.

The controversy, to me, seems very plain. I have maintained in “The Viking Age,” and shall continue to do so, until I am shown to be mistaken, that: It is in the basin of the Baltic, and in the Norselands, that we see incontestable proofs as to who were the sea-faring people whom the Romans called first Sueones and then Saxons, as shown by the tens of thousands of graves of that period still existing; that these graves and their antiquities are the same, and of the same type, as those of a similar period in England; that in these Norse graves a great many Roman coins of gold and silver, and many Roman and Greek objects are found, showing that these sea-faring people had intercourse with Rome, Greece, and the Mediterranean. Nay, do not the coins antedating the Roman Empire, when patrician families of Rome coined their own money, tell the tale of how early Norsemen went into the Mediterranean? Are not Norse graves often seen on its shores, by the side of the graves of the Etruscans?

I also maintain that neither at the mouth of the Elbe, nor anywhere else out of the Norselands, do we see the remains of a dense, warlike, and maritime population—a population which has left traces in the number of its graves far greater than has Rome itself.

How could the host miscalled Saxon by the later Romans, which overran Europe, till the downfall of the empire, for four centuries, avoid leaving such traces? Their population must have been very dense in order to allow them to send forth such vast fleets to fight and conquer the Romans. How is it that the Saxons, whom we know as Saxons, were not a sea-faring people in the time of Charlemagne, as we know they were not? Simply because they never had been. How is it that in Charlemagne’s time, on the other hand, the Sueones who must have been the Saxons of the later Romans were dreaded by him as powerful at sea, just as they are described by Tacitus?

Have not the races which have disappeared in America or elsewhere left traces, and must we make an exception of the so-called Saxons of the Romans? This would be against the evidence of everything before us.

It is by comparing the graves and antiquities of the Norselands with those of England that we have the proof that the early settlers of Britain were Norsemen. The scene in this volume, of Ivar going to visit his kinsmen on the banks of the River Cam, in England, has been described, because there is a cemetery there whose antiquities show its Norse origin, and the Roman coins buried with them, of Trajanus, 98-117 A.D.; of Hadrianus, 117-138; Faustina, wife of Antoninus Pius, 138-161; Marcus Aurelius, 161-180; of Maximianus, 286-305, show how early Norse settlements began.

What are the objects found in that cemetery, and described in the beautiful work of the Honorable R. C. Neville, “Saxon Obsequies, Illustrated by Ornaments and Weapons Discovered in a Cemetery near Little Wilbraham, Cambridgeshire,” printed in 1852? Swords, axes, umbos, cinerary urns with burned bones, wooden buckets with bronze hoops, bronze tweezers, spear and arrow heads of iron, ear picks, iron knives, iron shears, brooches, beads of glass, and other material fired by cremation.