So much for fable—at least in regard to the greater portion of this rapid condensation of the archbishop’s history. If we had not already had enough of this ingenious trifling, the Atlantica of Olaus Rudbeck would supply us with enough to fill many such volumes as the present. This writer far outdoes the prelate, whom he exceeds alike in imagination and knowledge of tradition. To him the reader who may be fond of the marvellous, who may delight in traditionary lore, and who may wish to see on how slight a foundation the most gigantic theories can be erected, may have recourse.[2]
In claims to a remote origin Norway is by no means behind the former kingdom. According to Torfœus, one of the most learned, and, considering that he lived in recent times, least critical of mankind, the population of the whole country has been derived from four distinct sources. 1. Of these the giants were the most ancient. These, this historiographer contends to have been really what they are called, viz., much superior in bulk to the rest of mankind; and not that evil spirits, by magical rites, were permitted to effect such appearances. Though he rejects, as pure romance, the stories of many giants alleged to have been seen in comparatively modern times, he is sure that such a race did once inhabit the north; and he is inclined to derive them from Shem, the son of Noah. That they once lived, that their bones are still to be found in several regions of the world, that they may now live in Patagonia or some other country, cannot, he thinks, be disputed. We read of giants in Scripture; who, therefore, can doubt of their existence? As we have already intimated, he represents, as old women’s fables, all the stories, however rife in his time, of giants being produced by the prince of evil spirits; nor will he allow that they are the offspring of men and huge beasts. If they did not spring from either of these causes, they must, necessarily, have derived their origin from one of Noah’s sons. Nor can we be surprised at their appearance in the north of Europe, seeing that we have so many proofs of their existence in Canaan, Egypt, Greece, Spain, Britain, and, indeed, all the world over. Their arrival in the north, however, was no voluntary act; being expelled from Canaan in the time of Joshua, they were glad to seek other settlements; and while some spread themselves throughout northern Africa, northern and central Europe, and, perhaps, found their way to America, others directed their steps towards Sweden and Norway: yet, before the arrival of these exiles, others of the same race might, for ages, have been in that peninsula. 2. After the giants, and, indeed, immediately after them, came the Goths; but the period cannot be fixed. Joannes Magnus and Rudbeck contend that it was immediately after the flood; but Torfœus dares not ascend to so high an antiquity, and he is satisfied with deriving the Goths from the Trojans, and with referring their arrival in the north to the age in which Troy was taken. 3. After the Goths came the Asae, or Scythians, whom he holds to be the third distinct race of men that helped to people the north. These were the followers of Odin, whose empire, at once spiritual and temporal, attested his policy and their prowess. 4. Yet it may be doubted whether these were the sole, or even the original, colonisers of Norway. The people of this as of every other country must have their indigenous families, or families, at least, who were here long before any strangers arrived. Thus, a certain man, Forniot by name, had three sons: Hler, ruler of the winds; Logi, lord of fire; Karl, sovereign of the sea. Snaer was the grandsire of this last-named monarch, and a celebrated prince he was. He had one son, Thor, and three daughters, Faunna, Drifa, and Miollis. Thor was more powerful than the father, since he reigned over the whole of the northern part of the Scandinavian peninsula, including Finland; and divine honours were paid to him by at least one great tribe of his subjects. Thor had three children, Nor and Gor, who were males, and Goe, a daughter. This princess being stolen away, her two brothers went in pursuit of her. Nor went westward, subduing and killing many native kings, among whom were Hemming and Hunding: in short, he conquered the whole of Norway, to which he gave his name. The ravisher of Goe was Rolf, or Rollo, the son of a great prince, who submitted to Thor, and whose sister, Hodda, had the honour to become that monarch’s bride. While he was performing these feats, his brother Gor was subduing all the islands of the Baltic and of the Icy Ocean, which constituted his dominion. The sons of Nor divided the vast region among themselves; hence the many separate principalities which were so long the bane of Norway.[3]
No reader will be at a loss to perceive that this fourth race of men is a mythologic creation. These rulers of the elements, fire, water, wind—Snaer, or snow; Jokul, or frost; Faunn, or frozen snow; Snifa, or sleet—with many others, sufficiently attest this curious fact. Whether the Norwegians invented these elemental gods first, and called their mortal heroes after them; or whether they elevated those heroes after death to the dignity of local gods, we shall not attempt to discuss. The probability is, that in this country, the march of the human mind was the same as in other countries, viz., that men celebrated for their great qualities were believed to have originally sprung from a divine source, and after this life to return to that source; to be invested in another state with a superiority akin to that which they enjoyed in this. As to a northern inhabitant, the sea and the winds were the most important elements, so the deities that they obeyed were the most powerful, the most dreaded, the most worshipped. Every page of the earliest Norwegian history (or fable, if the reader pleases) bears evidence to this inference, that long prior to the arrival of the Goths in that region there was a religion quite distinct from that which followed it; one of truly primitive character, which admitted of no refinement, which dealt with sensible objects, which appealed to the fears and hopes of mankind. The honour in which Thor, the father of Nor, and the common ancestor of all the Norwegian princes, was held, sufficiently accounts for his superiority over Odin himself, in the religious creed of that people. The Danes and Swedes held the former, the Norwegians the latter, to be the supreme god—supreme, at least, as far as the government of this world is concerned. Hence there must, at some period subsequent to Odin’s arrival, have been an amalgamation of the two religions. If the successors of Odin in Denmark and Sweden forced the Norwegians to acknowledge him as a divinity, and to place his statue with that of Thor, it is manifest that they only paid him a secondary veneration; Thor sitting in state, surrounded by all the attributes of majesty, while the warrior god—the foreign Asiatic god—was made to stand beside him. On this subject, however, more in the proper place.[4]
Denmark is, in no respect, behind either Sweden or Norway in its claims to antiquity. In the valuable collection of Langebek, we find a list of monarchs in Icelandic[5] as old, at least, as the tenth century, sufficiently ample for the vanity of any nation. It begins with Noah; passes down through the intervening generations to Odin, “that king of the Turks whom the Romans forced towards the north;” and ends with Hardecanute. Another branch of the same list deduces the regal genealogy from Odin to Harald Harfagre, the well-known monarch of Norway.[6] In both cases, the names must be considered as strictly belonging to the Asiatic potentates, who were never alleged to have set foot in the north of Europe. During their reigns, fabulous or true, Scandinavia was not without its petty kings, or, if the reader pleases, hereditary chieftains, whose authority was similar to the patriarchal. Their names are given by Saxo Grammaticus and other native writers, who, following their own traditionary songs, knew little of the Asiatic predecessors of Odin, and were therefore unable to enumerate them. Thus, too, with the Swedes, who, as we have seen, had their internal, no less than their external, kings—their domestic, no less than their foreign, potentates. Hence, in all these states, two distinct races of rulers—the native and the foreign—the former indigenous, the latter wholly strangers, to the regions of northern Europe.[7]