Chapter 2
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The migration of certain sections of the Scandinavian peoples across the Baltic Sea in the pre-Roman Iron Age and at the beginning of this era is not a happening that must be regarded only as a curious and isolated episode in the early history of the north. For it was, in fact, a prelude to, if not actually a part of, that larger and much more significant movement of the German peoples that took place in what is commonly called the Migration Period.
This Migration Period (A.D. 400-800) was the time of the chief successes and maximum expansion of the Germans. Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Lombards were pressing into Italy; the Vandals, Burgundians, Franks, and others of the Visigoths conquered Gaul, Visigoths and Vandals invaded Spain, the Vandals continuing even into north Africa; the Alamanni founded a powerful state on the middle Rhine and in the Alplands, and the Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded Britain. The first half of the period, the two centuries between 400 and 600 A.D., witnessed this tremendous and shattering onslaught on the Roman world, and saw the inception and evolution of a novel and characteristic German culture. This was born of the recently established German confederacies in Central and Western Europe, but it spread rapidly among all the German peoples, and nowhere was it more vigorously developed than in the north itself.
The history of the North Germans, the ancestors of the vikings, in their homeland in Scandinavia and Denmark is fragmentary and difficult to follow in its earlier stages. Pytheas, already mentioned, can hardly be credited with the discovery of these northern lands, and the first assured information about them must have been that won by a Roman fleet that sailed in the reign of Augustus, probably about 25 B.C., to the furthest lands of the Cimbri, where, it is recorded, no Roman had ventured before. As a result of this enterprise the Cimbri, the Charydes, the Semnones, and other northern German tribes that are not actually named, sought the friendship of the Roman people. (1) Fuller details of this exploit of the fleet are given by the elder Pliny (d. A.D. 79)). The Romans, he says, (2) rounded the Cimbric peninsula (Jutland) and reached the Codanian Gulf (the Kattegat) wherein there
1. This is set forth on the Monumentum Ancyranum, the famous narrative of the public career of the Emperor Augustus that is inscribed both in Latin and in Greek on the walls of the temple of Augustus and Roma at Ancyra in Galatia, Asia Minor. C.I.L., III, 769; Mommsen, Res Gestae Divi Augusti, Berlin, 1883; cf. Sandys and Campbell, Latin Epigraphy, Cambridge, 1927, p. 258.
2. N.H., IV, 96.
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were many islands of which the most famous was Scatinavia. (1) The real size of this island, he goes on to say, was as yet undetermined, but in the part of it that was known there dwelt the Hilleviones who lived in five hundred villages in a land that they themselves deemed to be a separate (alterum) world.
That the Romans mistook the great Scandinavian peninsula for an island is not in itself remarkable, but it is certainly a curious thing that nothing further is heard of the Scandinavian people whom Pliny called the Hilleviones. It has accordingly been suggested (2) that Pliny's phrase Hillevionum gente is a misreading of the words illa Suionum gente, and, in consequence, that the folk to whom he was referring were none other than the Suiones, that is to say the Swedes. This ingenious emendation involves no extraordinary assumptions, for it is established that the Swedes were already known to the Romans about this time since they are described by Tacitus in the Germania (3) (written A.D. 98). The following passage is a translation of his account of the peoples of Scandinavia.
"Beyond these people (the Rugii and the Lemovii) are the states (civitates) of the Suiones, but these are in the ocean itself (i.e. on an island and not, like the Rugii and Lemovii, on the South Baltic coast of the mainland). The Suiones are distinguished not merely for their arms and men, but for their powerful fleets, though the style of their ships is unusual in that there is a prow at each end so that the boat can advance head-on in either direction. Moreover, they do not use sails, and the oars are not fixed in rows along the sides, but are detachable, and are removed on certain rivers; they can also be reversed, if occasion demands. (4) These people respect wealth, and one man among them is supreme, there being no limits to his power and no question as to the full obedience due to him. Promiscuous carrying of arms is not allowed here, as it is among the other Germans, but weapons are kept shut up in the charge of a
1. Scadinavia is a variant; other later readings are Sandinavia and Scandinavia. Scania (Scåne), the present name of the southernmost district of Sweden, is the same word in another form, although it must be observed that this equation has been opposed with some force by H. Lindroth , Namn och Bygd, 1915, p. 10. Note that Mela in his De Situ Orbis (III, 6, 54), written some thirty or forty years earlier than Pliny Natural History, did not give the word Scadinavia although it appears in some editions of his work. The name in the oldest text of Mela is Codannovia.
2. V. Grienberger, Zeitschr. f. deutsches Altertum, 46 (1902), p. 152.
3. Germania, 44, 45.
4. The fragmentary Als boat (? pre-Roman Iron Age) of Denmark and the Nydam boat of the third-fourth century A.D., also recovered from the peat in Denmark, are the surviving specimens of a northern ship nearest in date to those described by Tacitus, and to them the account in the Germania might well apply.
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slave who acts as guard. (1) This is because the sea prevents sudden inroads from enemies, and because bands of armed men who have nothing to do often become unruly. It is not found expedient for the king (regia utilitas) to place a nobleman or a freeborn man, or even a freedman, in charge over these arms. . . . Next to the Suiones are the tribes of the Sitones who resemble the Suiones in all respects except that the Sitones have a woman as ruler. (2)
The identification of the Suiones with the Swedes (Svear) is a matter of certainty, but there has been considerable doubt as to the identity of the Sitones. Some writers have believed them to be the Finns and not a people of Scandinavia, yet it is just as likely that they were a Germanic folk of Swedish culture inhabiting Vesterbotten and the northern shores of the Gulf of Bothnia. (3) That they are said to 'continue' the Swedish people and were like to them in most respects seems to confirm this; moreover an archaeological discovery at Storkaage near Skellefteaa has provided proof of a flourishing trade between this Vesterbotten district and Estland in the latter part of the Roman Iron Age, (4) so that there is good reason why the Sitones, if they dwelt on the Norrland coasts, should be mentioned in conjunction with the Swedes. For Tacitus in all probability derived his information concerning the people of Scandinavia from Roman amber-merchants and others who traded with the north, and he presumably names these two peoples of Scandinavia and no others because his informants obtained their own
1. This is doubtless a garbled version of a custom at things or fairs such as might easily attract the notice of foreign traders and yet have little real significance.
2. quod femina dominatur. This could mean that their then ruler was a woman or that their sovereigns were always women (my interpretation and the usual one) or that the Sitones were an Amazon tribe where 'the woman rules'. Professor Maurice Hutton (Tacitus, Dialogus, etc., Loeb Library, p. 353) argues that the epigram immediately following these words, i.e. in tantum non modo a libertate sed etiam a servitute degenerant, enforces this last interpretation.
3. The district that in medieval times was called Kvänland. Adam of Bremen (eleventh century) is thought to refer to this selfsame territory when he speaks of the 'land of women', terra feminarum (IV, 17, 224; IV, 19, 228; cf. III, 15, 134). It is then arguable that the Latin expression may be a punning translation, or even a misunderstanding, of the tribal name Kvän which was confused with ON. kvįn, woman. The words terra feminarum, if not due to an accident of this kind, confirm the statement of Tacitus about the Sitones quod femina dominatur, and strengthen, as Professor Hutton sees, the interpretation of this phrase as 'where the woman rules', thus implying that the Sitones were an Amazonian society.
4. See Erland Hjärne, Fornvännen, 1917, pp. 147, 203 (for Kvänland, p. 216; and for the Sitones, p. 223).
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knowledge of these folk from the mainland tribes of the East Baltic, who were well acquainted with the Swedes and Sitones, their nearest neighbours in the peninsula, but who had little or nothing to do with the inhabitants of southern and western Sweden. (1)
The history of the north opens, then, with the civitas of the Swedes already formed, a state that must accordingly take honourable rank as the second earliest monarchy in the Germanic world (2) and one that, since it can be counted as a forerunner of the modern realm, gives Sweden to-day title to claim herself the oldest state in Europe. This ancient kingdom of Svitjod, as it was later styled, must have embraced all the folk of Uppland and the Mälar and Hjelmar country, and perhaps many of the people of Norrland south of the territory of the Sitones.
The next witness after Tacitus is Ptolemy the Geographer (C. A.D. 150). East of the Cimbric peninsula, he says, (3) are four islands called Skandiai. Three of these (perhaps the west Danish islands) are small, but the fourth, which is the easternmost and lies opposite to the mouth of the Weichsel, is a big island; this is the one that is properly called Scandia. In the western part of it dwell the Chaideinoi, in the east the Fauonai and Firaisoi, in the north the Finnoi, (4) in the south the Goutai and the Daukiones, and in the centre the Leuonoi.
These queer-sounding and unexpected tribal names have been the subject of much speculation. The only reasonably certain identification is that of the Finnoi with the Lapps, for in this instance there is a wealth of corroborative evidence from other sources; but as to the rest of the tribes mentioned, it has been found exceedingly difficult to connect them with any peoples named elsewhere in history, or even, as a last resort, with place-names. It is, however, common ground that the Goutai must be either the Goths of Götaland or the inhabitants of the island of Gotland, and the mention of the Chaideinoi in this passage has been allowed to attract considerable sentimental interest as being, it is thought, the first appearance of a Norwegian people in history, namely the Heiner, or folk of the Hedemark in central
1. Cf. J. V. Svensson, Namn och Bygd, 1917, p. 154.
2. A Frisian civitas comes first, see G. Schütte, Our Forefathers, Cambridge, 1929, p. 51. Note that Curt Weibull, Hist. Tidskriftf. Skåneland, VII (1920), pp. 304-5, denies the existence of this early Swedish kingdom.
3. Geog. II, ii.
4. Actually this name is recorded in only one MS. See the editions of the Geography by Mailer (Paris, 1883) and Otto Cuntz (Berlin, 1923).
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