Fig. 709.—Cairn, Bohuslän, Sweden.
It is towards evening, before the twilight fades gradually into darkness, that the scene of this weird landscape is most impressive, and no one can really imagine its effects until he stands upon the spot and sees the view spread before him.
In some parts of Norway the contrast is often great in the extreme; the mounds there have huge mountains in the background with their summits clad in snow, and in the foreground the grand open sea. One of the bleakest spots in the country, where these have been erected, is on the flat gravelly coast of Lyster, which lies between the mountain and the sea;—there, over the last resting-places of those warriors, the wind blows most fearfully in winter-time, and the sea dashes on the shore in huge foamy white waves.
In Denmark and parts of Sweden there are places on the elevated points of the coast full of charms, looking over the Sound, the Cattegat, the Baltic, or the waters of some of the great lakes. Many of these resting-places of man are now covered by forests, and upon some of the mounds huge oaks sprung from the acorn of their sires tell forcibly of the centuries that have passed over them.
Fig. 710.—Grave, Einang, Norway; diameter, 50 feet; earlier iron age.
We can vividly realise why the people laid their dead to rest by that sea they loved so much during their lifetime, and upon which they had sailed so often. The mariner as he passed by could behold the graves of the dead and victorious champions, whose memory was always kept fresh by the scalds[[185]] who sang his exploits generation after generation, thus filling the youth of the country with pride, and making them wish to emulate the deeds of these men, often their kinsmen of old, who had gone to Valhalla.
The mounds and cairns are not always round, they are sometimes square, oblong, rectangular or triangular. The round mounds and cairns exist in different parts of the world, and in Scandinavia as far back as the stone and bronze ages; the vast number of bautastones seen all over the country shows also how well the injunctions of Odin were carried out by his followers in that respect. Some of these are very imposing, and their dark forms look weird enough against the landscape or the clear or gloomy sky. One of the finest stood in Brastod parish, Bohuslän, now lying prostrate and broken, its height being 26 feet; and its place was on one corner of a stone set of rectangular graves 40 feet in length and 28 feet in width.
