A History of the Vikings
Chapter 1
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THE LANDS OF THE VIKINGS
CHAPTER I
EARLY SCANDINAVIA AND DENMARK
The Stone Age in Scandinavia and Denmark, in the formal sense of this term as a definitive era wherein the use of metal was everywhere unknown, was a long period that lasted according to present reckoning from about 7000 B.C. to about 1800 B.C., the date when bronze was first commonly employed in Denmark and Sweden. This immense stretch of time is divided into two periods, and of these the first extends from the beginning of the Stone Age until 4000 B.C., or thereabouts, and is considered by most archaeologists to have witnessed the initial population
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of the land. This was effected, it is thought, by a series of immigrations from the south and south-east, all these first adventurers to the north being tribes of hunters that were forced into the cold wilderness left bare after the retreat of the icecap by new races who were gradually driving them from their homes in Central and Eastern Europe.
Originally such a Central European folk, and the bearers of a late palaeolithic hunting-culture, were the Maglemose or Ancylus people (c. 6500 B.C.) who represent one of the first established Stone Age (1) folk in these northern lands. (2) To these succeeded in the sixth or fifth millennium B.C. the well-known Kitchen-Midden, or Ertebölle, people, who were as firmly established in Norway (3) and southern Sweden as in Denmark itself. That the Ertebölle folk were the direct descendants of the Ancylus people has been disputed, and the immigration of a new race invoked to explain the hiatus that is at present thought to separate the two cultures. But it is a fact that the likeness between the simple equipment of stone and bone tools utilized by both peoples is remarkable, and it is always to be remembered that the subsidence of the land that took place during the Ertebölle stage has occasioned the loss of the greater part of the ordinary trusty racial criteria, both archaeological and anthropological. Thus it seems that it is impossible as yet to reach a decision on this point, and that there is at least a likelihood, if not a probability, that the Ertebölle folk were in fact the direct descendants of the Ancylus people. (4) But here it is sufficient merely to record an advance in the arts of life in this Ertebölle culture, as notably in the first introduction of pottery.
1. Or 'Bone Age', as this early period might well be styled owing to the heavy preponderance of bone tools as against those of stone.
2. An earlier population of Denmark and the extreme south of Sweden, the Lyngby people, is posited by a small band of archaeologists led by Dr. G. Schwantes and Dr. Gunnar Ekholm. For this Lyngby Culture, see Ebert Reallexikon der Vorgeschichte, but cf. H. C. Broholm, Aarb., 1924, p. 138 (French trans. in Mem. Soc. Ant. du Nord, N.S., 1926-27, p. 120). For an excellent account and bibliography of the earliest Stone Age cultures of the north, including descriptions of some important and little-known industries, see G. Schwantes, Mitt. Museum Volkerkunde, Hamburg (Festschrift, 1928), p. 159.
3. The Nöstvet culture is held to be an independent but counterpart development of the same epipalaeolithic civilization.
4. See Friis Johansen, Aarb., 1919, p. 235 ff., and H. C. Broholm, ib., 1924, p. 142 (French trans. in Mem. Soc. Ant. du Nord, N.S., 1926-27, p. 124); also Mr. Miles Burkitt opinion in Our Early Ancestors, Cambridge, 1926, pp. 40, 45.
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The end of the Ertebölle culture, about 4000 B.C., doses the first period of the Stone Age that thenceforward includes not only settlements of a folk who lived by hunting and fishing, but peoples who had added the profitable occupation of agriculture to their means of livelihood. Yet this introduction of agriculture does not seem to have involved, nor to have been caused by, a revolutionary and sudden change, and it is best explained as the most important of the new arts acquired in the course of the gradual introduction of the neolithic culture; for by this time the attractive and enviable advantages of neolithic civilization were becoming known among all the remaining hunting-peoples of Europe. Thus, some of the kitchen-middens of the Ertebölle culture themselves supply proof of the influence of these neolithic fashions on the Ertebölle folk, and such a midden is the Signalbakken, near Aalborg in Denmark, that yielded axes with pointed butts, and decorated potsherds with a white inlay to show off the pattern. (1) Again, many of the Stone Age dwelling-sites in Denmark show the same fusion between the Ertebölle and the 'full Neolithic' culture. (2)
It is, in fact, the dwelling-sites that first present the new agricultural civilization of Scandinavia in its developed form with an equipment of polished stone implements and well-made decorated pottery; indeed, in Sweden (as far north as Norrland) and in Denmark, and more doubtfully in Norway, a 'dwelling-site culture' is now recognized that is held by some archaeologists to represent the earliest stage of the full neolithic culture in Scandinavia, (3) but it is not by any means established that this 'dwelling-site' phase can really be differentiated in southern Scandinavia and Denmark as a chronologically distinct prelude to the full neolithic civilization which includes the earliest stage
1. A. P. Madsen and others, Affaldsdynger fra Stenalderen i Danmark, 1900, p. 157 (p).
2. C. A. Nordman, Skaldyngernes stenyxor, Aarb., 1918, p. 137.
3. In Norrland the counterpart 'dwelling-site culture' is at first sight different in character and seems to be linked with that of Finland on the one hand and of Norway on the other; formerly these northern Scandinavian sites, as opposed to those of southern Sweden and Denmark, were attributed to a special 'Arctic Culture', representing either an indigenous non-Indo-germanic people such as the Lapps or a distinct immigration from the east. It is now clear, however, that the apparent specialization of this culture is due merely to geographical remoteness and is a parallel development of the 'stone and bone' industries of southern Scandinavia rather than the token of a different race. Cf. H. Shetelig, Primitive tider i Norge, 1922, p. 272 ff., and Préhistoire de la Norvège, 1926, p. 26 ff.
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of the 'megalithic' culture. The remarkable stone-built tombs known in English archaeological jargon as megaliths, and that give this culture its name, begin in the north with the simple dolmen form, and there is a long and interesting series of them that from start to finish most certainly represents an established and prosperous people; their distribution shows that this megalithic culture was to be found at its most brilliant in the Danish islands, especially in Zealand, and is confined to southern Scandinavia, the megalithic area including, in addition to the whole of Denmark, all the provinces of Götaland in Sweden, and the islands of Öland and Gotland, while there is a north-western extension of the cist-graves (the latest megalithic tomb-type) into Norway in Ostfold and in the neighbourhood of the Oslo Fjord. But the influence of the megalithic culture extended far beyond those districts wherein the big stone tombs, that give the culture its name, are to be found. Throughout northern Scandinavia fashions plainly derived from the megalithic zone can be detected in the dwelling-sites of the agricultural neolithic population. In Norway, for instance, flint implements of Danish manufacture were imported in large quantities, not only axes and smaller tools, but also many of the magnificent flint daggers that are the most remarkable of the products of the astonishing megalithic flint-industry. To this may be added the certainty that it is to the inspiration of the megalithic culture in southern Scandinavia that must be attributed the real and effective propagation of the knowledge of agriculture in the northern and more remote districts of the peninsula. One thing alone the folk in northern Scandinavia did not copy from their neighbours in the south, and that was the custom of building communal burial-places; on the contrary, they remained true to their old-fashioned single interments which were frequently found on the sites of the habitation-places themselves.
The origin of the megalithic civilization in Scandinavia has been the subject of a considerable controversy, some regarding this surprising cultural development as the direct result of an invasion, or at least a strong cultural influence, from the outside world, while others deem it to be an auto-cthonous achievement that was itself the example that inspired the building of similar tombs elsewhere in Europe. This last view, however, although it has not lacked redoubtable exponents, is becoming increasingly difficult to defend. For this Scandinavian megalithic culture is but a part, albeit the most brilliant part, of a large North European megalithic culture extending from the river Weichsel to
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