Return to the Baltic

by Hilaire Belloc

  RETURN TO THE BALTIC

  By

  HILAIRE BELLOC

  Contents

  JELLING

  THE BOATS

  THE ICE

  ELSINORE

  THE SOUND

  RIBE

  AARHUS

  ROSKILDE

  COPENHAGEN

  STOCKHOLM

  THE VASA

  SWEDEN AND ENGLAND

  UPSALA

  THE STATUES

  ARCHITECTURE

  FOREST

  JONKOPPING

  WATER POWER

  THE GREAT LAKES

  NO CASTLES

  THE CANAL

  VADSTENA

  POLAND

  DANTZIG

  CRACOW

  THORN

  WARSAW

  PRUSSIA

  GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS

  ICONOCLASTS

  GOTHENBURG

  Return to the Baltic

  When I was a lad—I had not yet left school—I was taken to see at the Savoy Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, then young like myself and even younger than I.

  I heard the operetta from a certain place in the front row of the dress circle a little to the left of the middle. The impression it made on me was very vivid; I retained a permanent and lively memory of the occasion, nor was that impression blurred by repetition, for I never saw the thing again on the stage during the rest of a long life.

  Not long ago I saw a notice that The Mikado was to be played at the Savoy and a fancy took me to book exactly the same place, as far as possible, in the new theatre, and see what difference a space of fifty years would make in The Mikado’s effect on my mind.

  I am not sure that such an experiment was moral. We are not intended to measure our mortality, and to plan a contrast of this kind deliberately is a mechanised and artificial way of treating life; for life should rather be taken as it comes, and lived in continuity, remaining all the while identical with itself. But the curiosity of testing Time was too strong for me, so I acted as I have said. I booked my place many days ahead so as to make sure of it, and on the appointed evening I sat there, gauging the years—nearly fifty years—between youth and age, observing what the interval had done to me.

  The notes or jottings I am beginning here about Scandinavia come of a similar experiment. Forty-three years ago, in the year 1895, I set out with a companion for Scandinavia—Sweden and back by Denmark—not Norway—a brief but intense experience vividly remembered. ‘Why ’ (said I to myself) ‘should I not test that gap, leap the forty-three years between youth and age, and bring the one against the other in comparison?’

  I had not seen Denmark or Sweden again in all that long interval, a working lifetime. They would have changed, but I much more; and it would be fascinating to explore the change. . . . What happened was by no means a peregrination; it was rather a glimpse: Copenhagen again, Stockholm again, Elsinore again, Gothenburg again, the vast lakes and the innumerable pines, the unending forest of the Gothlands and the Danish Islands and their farms after forty-three years. And in that sharp glimpse much more than the things immediate to the eye (and more even than the people) concerned me, for they provoked in me, as travel always does, other thoughts, and other memories, and other speculations in a train of reflection and feeling, so that the whole little business when written down became a hotch-potch which the reader, if he will bear with it, must take or leave according to his mood.

  Jelling

  §

  He that would concern himself with the Danes must begin with Jelling, in Jutland, whence their story springs.

  With every people of Europe outside the old limits of the Roman Empire there is a moment of origin to be discerned, a moment in which it passed out of the formless mist of barbaric paganism into the fixed culture of Christendom: a moment in which there came to it for the first time in sufficient strength the formative institutions of our civilisation, writing and record, the monastic centres, permanent building, and also, and above all, the kernel of the whole affair, the Mass.

  When they are thus transformed they become communities strengthened by organisation: they are already polities: they are prepared to become, later, one of those provinces of our race which are called the European Nations.

  That moment came late for Denmark. Charlemagne had been dead more than a hundred years; his bishoprics and his garrisons, framing and holding the outer Germanies, confirming the work of the high and later missionaries, expanding Rome and her civilisation, had been established for two lifetimes not only north of the Danube but beyond the Rhine and up to the northern sea—when there died Gorm the Old, that chief pirate raider who first felt the new tide from the south and therefore first ruled over one state; the state that was to be Denmark: and it was from Jelling that he ruled, hating and hoping to stem the coming of Rome and the Christ, issuing his dooms from some wooden or wattled Hall in little Jelling, with his queen Thyra at his side. Under him Denmark begins.

  Now what is Denmark?

  Denmark is an archipelago, a mass of islands set on a submerged shelf in a very shallow sea and stretching eastward from a horn or projection of the mainland which sticks out northward from the flat plain of the Germanies and is called ‘Jutland.’ It is as a group of islands that you must understand Denmark, yet do these islands make one thing, which thing was first made one from Jelling. Therefore did I long to find Jelling, of which I had heard so often and stand where had stood at the beginning Gorm the Old.

  There are two larger islands east of the abrupt projection also another lesser one to the north over a narrow drift of water; another lesser one to the south over another strait, half a dozen lesser still and innumerable islets all using as their communication each with the rest this shallow sea, its long bays and many havens sheltered by turns of the Strand. They lived and moved by boats and sails. The inlets and short rivers were their roads. Their little groups of rough low dwellings stood for the most part on the shores and all looked eastward to where, beyond a long creek or narrows, another mainland stretches northward for ever, Scania and the Gothic lands and the lakes and pine forests of the northern Suevi, whence it has to-day the common name of Sweden.

  So neighbouring, so almost touching the special Danish thing, yet is the Swedish land a separate land with a separate Story; though ruled at times and for long times from the Danish throne, it is another place. The tongues are similar yet distinft. Denmark is itself and now has been so for a thousand years.

  §

  I came to Jelling by a stormy day, grey clouds driving low down near earth with gusts of rain, and I saw beneath them the two large mounds which mark the burial places of Gorm the Old and his queen Thyra, Father and Mother of the Danes.

  You know how our fathers everywhere loved to mark the glory of fallen or dead heroes with great heaps of earth.

  So it was with Hector:—

  Even we lesser ones put up small mounds called graves that the living, stumbling over them, may respeft our memories. A poet has well put it in an Epitaph that should be famous:—

  ‘Traveller, pass on, nor waste your worthless time

  In lying eulogy and far worse rhyme.

  For, what I am, this mound of earth assures,

  And what I was is no affair of yours.’

  But the enormous mounds of Jelling are very much my affair for their magnitude worthily fixes the standing Names, the vast but dim shades, of Gorm the Old and Thyra. So by the main western road in Wiltshire on the way to Devizes men long ago tried to cheat mortality by the raising of burial mounds. Some old battlefield there is strewn with these heaps for miles and above them presides the greatest of all, Silbury Hill, monument to what great name of what high leader? He would be remembered for ev
er, and his warriors heaped up that mountain so that his name should endure unceasingly and challenge death.

  For that is the purport of such things. It is the immortal soul of man challenging mortality. Yet is that name quite forgotten and even the meaning of those wars. The work remains.

  But Gorm and Thyra at least are remembered. Their mighty twin memorials seem the greater for lifting up on either side of the little church which was set between them and the earliest walls of which belong to the first Christian temple of the Danes: Gorm, as is fitting, on the right, Thyra on the left, and for 500 years the Mass which he defied and which she secretly favoured was sung between them: but to-day no more.

  §

  Gorm and Thyra had a son—Harald—one of the numberless Haralds. For your barbarian is not a multiple fellow and having got one thing into his head there is little room for another. But this Harald remains in the memory even of our schooldays because he was nicknamed Bluetooth. He first admitted—late and for policy—the agents of civilisation, the priests of Christ and their divine liturgy.

  But the thing went sluggishly. There is a discipline about civilisation which irks your barbarian as lessons irk a raw lad or company manners a yokel. Dickens has hit it in one good phrase about the boy who said of learning the alphabet, ‘Going through so much to acquire so little!’ Hence the kick against enlightenment. Everywhere—even in Ireland at first (though Ireland was manifestly predestined)—the coming of right living, of the Mass and all that goes with the Mass, of permanent building and a literature, was for a moment resisted: but after all, Tara came centuries before Jelling.

  This Harald, then, did receive the missionaries sent him and reason filtered in through the neck of the Danish Chersonese.

  It filtered slowly and with setbacks. Harald’s own son, Svend, who harried England, was fiercely in opposition to the Church and civilisation, and if Harald himself did not withstand the new things in his age, yet he was moved as much by policy as by anything else: for he was a sly savage and needed support against those whom he opposed. It was not till Svend’s son, Canute, the midget Canute, was acclaimed by the Danish soldiery which still camped in England that things really began to move.

  For there was greatness in Canute even though he did bear the brutish name of Knud until it was softened and tamed into pronounceable form: but, then, his mother was a Slav and men inherit from their mothers. Canute in the days when the light was spreading, in the early eleventh, the dawn of the Middle Ages, venerated Rome. Such a mood gave him power, and he was recognised all over the North—attempting a shadowy general realm, to include England with the Baltic. The crazy fabric crumbled just after his death for his successors were worthless and early died.

  The framework of Denmark was formed. There were Bishops at last, in Ribe and in Sleswig, nearest to the Empire; though the Islanders, the Danes, mistrusted the Empire which stood for constructive order and might cut short their piracies and dry up the stream of loot—the gold and silver which the raiders brought back from happier places.

  From the beginning the crews of Danish Islanders, the Pirates, had hoped to stave off Europe: at least as early as Gorm and Thyra, perhaps earlier, they had attempted to defend themselves permanently against the South, its laws and justice.

  There is a narrows in the neck of the Danish Chersonese, the gate of approach from the south. There two waterways from the east and the west of the peninsula nearly meet, and in the gap of dry land between, which was a gate of invasion for the Imperial armies, they had set up the ‘Dane work,’ a fortified line. In due time the Emperors destroyed it, but they never really mastered the Islanders nor their Jutland mainland beyond the dyke, though they had behind them all the tradition of Charlemagne and his Gallic and Roman forces. These had baptised the Saxons by force—using for this the Elbe water. Hamburg had arisen. The northern Germans were already half civilised—but the Danes were not overrun nor pacified nor fully of the Faith for a hundred years and more; the twin mounds of Jelling stood guardian of the Pagan past.

  §

  That mighty dyke, the Danework, of Thyra’s making was wrecked long ago, but the marks and relics of it remain and though now in Prussian hands it stands a symbol of Danish independence.

  The most obvious apparent frontier for the Danes to hold against pressure from the south would have been the line of the Eider River carried on to-day by the eastern waterway to Kiel. It is the line of what is to-day the Kiel Canal. But though that line is the most obvious demarcation, it is not the easiest to hold. The easiest to hold was and is the trace in the narrow gap of dry land just north of the canal, and that was seen right back in the Dark Ages when the new civilised Catholic body of northern Germans had first been formed, pressing upon the pagan Danes.

  There then, across the gap, the Danes put up their earthwork with its Strong-points at regular intervals (called ‘towers,’ being, I suppose, at first wooden blockhouses); and what they did was called by the Germans ‘the Danework’ and its remains are called so still.

  The trace, I have said, skilfully took advantage of the narrowest bit of dry land between the Baltic and the North Sea, which is between the waters of the Eckenfjord and the marshes of the Treene River. The water of the Eckenfjord coming right into the land from the Baltic, is continued in the mere called Westerbrunge for some miles further inland. From the head of that little mere, if you go up a local stream westward by a little south, you come in one day’s easy marching, not much more than ten miles, to the swamps of the Treene. So restricted a narrow could be held; and the work was of such skill that you may see its broken relics to-day, just as you may see the huge relics of the Wansdyke in Wiltshire.

  But there is this difference between the Dane-work and our dykes in this country, Wansdyke, Offa’s Dyke, and the rest, our dykes were not, and could not have been raised mainly for defence; they must have been intended mainly for demarcation, though capable of use for defence at any one sector with sufficient warning of a raid. You cannot man, under primitive conditions, a line scores of miles long. If our English dykes were not for demarcation they may have had some other lost purpose—perhaps religious—but the Danework was clearly made for defence and nothing else. Note how the town of Slesvig stands just north of that rampart and barrier. That Slesvig should have fallen to the pressure from the south is characteristic of what happened in those lands with the growth of such pressure.

  It is a thing to muse on, the ebb and flow of the pressure upon the Danes from the south, and an ironic aspect of it is the reversal of the rôles in our own time. When the pressure from the South began, and the resistance to it began, when that very ancient Danework was first shovelled up and arose along those few miles, it was a barrier to keep civilisation away from roving, unsettled men who wanted none of it and who used their freedom for piracy. The Danework arose to check the coming of our religion and all that our religion brought with it. It arose against those who claimed in a lesser fashion the traditions of Rome, those who even bore the most exalted title of ‘Imperator ’; those who adopted in a warped way the awful name of Cæsar. But to-day if there were a Danework, if there were a Maginot line for Denmark, it would be just the other way. That happy little State, amenable, full of beauty in stone and bronze and letters and all the tradition of Europe, would depend upon that line to-day to keep out a new barbarism to the south of them worse than the old. For, to the south of Denmark to-day stands Prussia.

  §

  On one of these mounds at Jelling—his mother’s I think, Thyra’s, but it may have been his father’s—Harald had set up a big stone to tell posterity what it was all about and to perpetuate the great names of Gorm the Old and Thyra his Woman. The stone was taken away to Copenhagen I believe and may there be seen by the curious of whom, alas, I am not one.

  There is also another stone in Jelling just outside the church, between the two great mounds, and that one is all covered over with intricate chiselled work standing for a dragon and a serpent, though what it mea
ns I cannot tell. It is full of go. The dragon is evidently master of the affair, as dragons were until they met St. George, who almost finished them: but not altogether, for less than 300 years ago one of them came out of his hole in Sussex near Faygate and was seen by many. I hope he will come again, for the place is getting suburban and a dragon or two would do it good.

  The stone which Harald put up to perpetuate his father’s name (and I wish that someone had done that for the great mound at Silbury) was inscribed with that kind of barbaric writing called runes. These runes are very interesting, because they were a first attempt at writing and keeping record long before the coming of civilisation—perhaps a thousand years before—for learned men (who are rarely to be trusted) will have it that the earliest runes are of the first century. That lettering came, like everything else of advantage to the barbarians, from the South. The runes were rough imitations of the Greek letters, for the Greek merchants or their agents came up, perhaps by the sluggish rivers, from the Black Sea to the Baltic across the great plains. But indeed of all this we know very little, we only know that the runes were there and that, oddly enough, they are peculiar to the Scandinavians. They are found in North England and in the Isle of Man as well as up in the Baltic Lands, wherever the ships sailed from the North in quest of plunder.

  And who shall explain why there came, so late in the story of Europe, that outburst of robbers driving oversea? Some may have landed in America. A group certainly did land and took root in Iceland, and meanwhile, as everybody knows, the Danish pirates nosed into the harbours of England and of France and of Ireland and perhaps beached their boats where there was opportunity and a haven was lacking. It began quite early, as soon as the shore dwellers had learnt some rough arts and the use of certain instruments from the Empire to the South of them and so at last could build proper boats.

  These were not large as we reckon such things to-day. Quite late in the business eighty men was a most exceptional crew, even fifty men was more than the average. That is how we know that the total number of raiders anywhere must have been quite small. But they had a great effect upon a society already disassociated and decayed. Wherever they landed on Christian land one may suppose broken men would join them and they would carry away slaves as well as loot, for of slaves was the bulk of Christendom then still made up. We have only one document with figures to help us guess at the proportion of slaves to freemen in Northern Christendom 1,000 years ago. That document is alluded to as a grant of land to St. Wilfred for his conversion of Sussex between Chichester and the sea, and there the slaves on the land were two-thirds of the people.