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Updated: June 15, 2025
In the words of Mr. Worsaae, a Danish writer of this century: "From time immemorial Ireland was celebrated in the Scandinavian north, for its charming situation, its mild climate, and its fertility and beauty. The Kongspell mirror of Kings which was compiled in Norway about the year 1200, says that Ireland is almost the best of the lands we are acquainted with although no vines grow there.
By collecting and studying a vast variety of such implements, and other articles of human workmanship preserved in peat and in sand-dunes on the coast, as also in certain shell-mounds of the aborigines presently to be described, the Danish and Swedish antiquaries and naturalists, MM. Nilsson, Steenstrup, Forchhammer, Thomsen, Worsaae, and others, have succeeded in establishing a chronological succession of periods, which they have called the ages of stone, of bronze, and of iron, named from the materials which have each in their turn served for the fabrication of implements.
The Danes themselves came to see that they had acted rashly in striving to deprive the Irish of a religion which was so dear to their hearts; they resolved on a change of policy, as they were still bent on taking possession of the island, which Mr. Worsaae has told us they considered the best country in existence.
Their only money, according to Caesar, consisted of pieces of brass or iron, reduced to a certain standard weight. It is particularly important to observe, says M. Worsaae, that all the antiquities which have hitherto been found in the large burying places of the Iron period, in Switzerland, Bavaria, Baden, France, England, and the North, exhibit traces more or less of Roman influence.
But the mother said, "Put it away, my child; we must begone out of this land, for these people will dwell in it." M. Worsaae of Copenhagen, who has been followed by other antiquaries, has even gone so far as to divide the natural history of civilization into three epochs, according to the character of the tools used in each.
Mr Worsaae only speaks the truth when he remarks how the name of the Danes has been impressed on the English mind. 'Legends about the Danes are, he says, 'very much disseminated among the people, even in the south of England. There is scarce a parish that has not in some way or another preserved the remembrance of them.
Worsaae quotes similar facts at Borreby, Chantres refers to the same thing in the caves of the Caucasus, Captain Burton at Beitsahur, near Jerusalem, Wiener in the SAMBAQUIS of Brazil, even in deposits which he considers of recent origin. Brazil is not the only part of the American continent in which we find traces of the use of this revolting food.
Pausanias saw, still standing erect, the thirty square stones of Pharse, each bearing the name of a divinity. With M. Worsaae and the Copenhagen archaeologists, I am inclined to think that these monuments belong to a more ancient humanity. Never, in fact, has any branch of the Indo-European race built in this fashion.
We now use iron roofs, iron bedsteads, iron ropes, and iron pavement; and even the famous "wooden walls of England" are rapidly becoming reconstructed of iron. In short, we are in the midst of what Mr. Worsaae has characterized as the Age of Iron.
Worsaae, whose object in writing his account of the Danes and Norwegians in England, Scotland, and Ireland, was to glorify his own country, Denmark.
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