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To a man uninfluenced by a preconceived or pet system, it is evident at first sight that no mythology of the East or of the South has ever given rise to that of Scandinavia. There is not the slightest resemblance between it and any other.
Neither Caesar nor Tacitus gives us any idea of the habits or usages of the people who lived north of the Belgae. They had no notion of Scandinavia nor of Sclavonia.
While himself asserting that the Potsdam-sandstone of North America, the Lingula-flags of England, and the alum-slates of Scandinavia are of the same period while fully aware that among the Silurian formations of Wales, there are oolitic strata like those of secondary age; yet his reasoning is more or less coloured by the assumption, that formations of like qualities probably belong to the same era.
But for nearly half-a-century to come no great pirate fleet made its way to the west, or landed on the shores of Britain. The energies of the northmen were in fact absorbed through these years in the political changes of Scandinavia itself. The old isolation of fiord from fiord and dale from dale was breaking down.
It has always been, in the countries of Scandinavia, the best known and the most popular of all Ibsen's writings. This success, however, was largely one of sentiment, not of pecuniary fortune. The total income from four editions of a poem like Brand, in the conditions of Northern literary life forty years ago, would not much exceed £100.
Every island, says Sir Edmund Head, and truly for the name of almost every island on the coast of England, Scotland, and Eastern Ireland, ends in either ey or ay or oe, a Norse appellative, as is the word "island" itself is a mark of its having been, at some time or other, visited by the Vikings of Scandinavia.
The bronze age civilization in Europe spread westward from the eastern Mediterranean either by the southern route of Italy, Spain, France, and thence to Ireland, or, as seems more probable, up the river Danube, then down the Elbe, and so to Scandinavia, whence traders by the north of Scotland introduced the motives and patterns of the Aegean into Ireland.
The kidnapping of the artist, the death of the Comte de Chagny under such exceptional conditions, the disappearance of his brother, the drugging of the gas-man at the Opera and of his two assistants: what tragedies, what passions, what crimes had surrounded the idyll of Raoul and the sweet and charming Christine! ... What had become of that wonderful, mysterious artist of whom the world was never, never to hear again? ... She was represented as the victim of a rivalry between the two brothers; and nobody suspected what had really happened, nobody understood that, as Raoul and Christine had both disappeared, both had withdrawn far from the world to enjoy a happiness which they would not have cared to make public after the inexplicable death of Count Philippe ... They took the train one day from "the northern railway station of the world." ... Possibly, I too shall take the train at that station, one day, and go and seek around thy lakes, O Norway, O silent Scandinavia, for the perhaps still living traces of Raoul and Christine and also of Mamma Valerius, who disappeared at the same time! ... Possibly, some day, I shall hear the lonely echoes of the North repeat the singing of her who knew the Angel of Music! ...
It is true that the Norman Conquest found a certain kind of feudality in existence in England a feudality which was developed from the customs of the Teutonic tribes with no admixture of Roman law; and also that even before the Conquest this country was slowly beginning to be mixed up with the affairs of the Continent of Europe, and that not only with the kindred nations of Scandinavia, but with the Romanized countries also.
Towns and villages were erected in Scandinavia, where huts only were before seen: the skins of the bear and wolf were exchanged for woollens, linens, and silks: learning was introduced; and printing was scarcely invented before it was practised in Denmark, Sweden, &c.
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