Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE INVASIONS OF THE NORTHMEN (a.d. 825-1066) 1. The Vikings and their Ravages. The next wave of invaders were the Northmen or Vikings, who came from Norway and Denmark, the one a land of barren mountains penetrated by deep fjords, the other a land of sandy flats intersected by tortuous channels; 1 both therefore lands which naturally bred sailors. These Northmen were of Teutonic stock, but as distinct from the Germans as the British Celts were from the Gaelic Celts. They had taken no part in the earlier invasions of the Roman Empire, and we know nothing about their early history; for though they later developed a splendid literature, this was not until they had learnt the art from the Christian world, and especially from the Celts of Ireland. With inexplicable suddenness they burst out in all directions from their original homes towards the end of the eighth century. Their ravages and adventures extended over the whole of Western Europe during more than a century. Then great bands of them settled down in the British Islands and in France; those who remained at home organised civilised and Christian kingdoms; their piratical raids in Europe came to an end as suddenly as they had begun; and their extraordinary daring at sea showed itself instead in the exploration of Greenland and the shores of North America. In this later period they also produced, in the sagas, some of the finest poetry of war and adventure that has ever been written. It is impossible to exaggerate the energy and daring of these Vikings during the great Viking age, which may be said to extend from A.d. 789 (the date of the first recorded raid in England) to A.d. 913 (the date of their settlement in Normandy). Vikings from Sweden swept into Russia, and laid the foundations of th…
