The knowledge of shipbuilding coming in from the South crept up the Frisian coast and there was plenty of piracy from the third century onwards, and there seem to have been regular small settlements or colonies of the pirates—in Northumbria and the Lowlands of Scotland, for instance—the chieftains at the established garrisons took over the local government. And though we do not know what happened in all that dark time we do know that on the fringe of Christendom our culture and its religion were obscured and perhaps destroyed. It was necessary to re-introduce the Mass and the Faith into Britain.
All that story of the early raids is a commonplace and has been enormously exaggerated, until people who did not appreciate the small numbers involved got to believe that England was in some way repeopled from across the North Sea, an absurdity so absurd that it makes one blush for human judgment.
Then again we all know how the language changed over a great part of England, probably through the Church Schools and their gradual effect after the Church had plumped for the little Eastern Kinglets of our Island against the Western.
All that, I say, is common property. But why the new outburst hundreds of years later? Why Lindisfarne? Why, after the better part of a lifetime, the appearance of the pirate Danish ships everywhere in the ninth and the tenth centuries?
That is a question no one has answered and probably no one can. All we know is that it happened, and that then, after about 200 years, the storm died down and the raiders were absorbed; but not before they had stamped names of their own upon Islands and Capes very far away from the Danish bays whence they had sailed. By a nice irony that place in which there were perhaps fewest of them in proportion to the total population has best retained their name, for we still talk of the second Lyonese as ‘Normandy.’
One interesting thing happened through these raids—a thing not unlike the currency adventures of our own day. It was the piling up of great masses of gold and silver in Scandinavia which gave it a sort of ephemeral power for a time; and another thing that happened was the discovery by Scandinavia of wine. The pirates brought it home in lashings and I suppose it did more to make them rational human beings than anything else in their loot. Also there is very good wine in Denmark to this day, and in Sweden; but more difficult to get at in Sweden.
§
Lord! How the wind howled round these tombs of Thyra and Gorm the Old! How the storm clouds raced above them!
It was a southerly gale as you may imagine, and I wish it either always blew from that quarter or was always calm, or half and half, but never from the north-east or east, for all evil things come to Old England with easterly winds, coughs and colds and other ailments, influenza and a thing called ‘Frozen Gizzard’ (a very inhibiting disease which atrophies all the pseudo-creative power in mankind and paralyses the Genius or Protecting Spirit whereby books are written, Stones carved and songs sung), thence also pushed by the east wind, came to England, the House of Nassau, of which the less said the better, and (I suppose) the Guelphs—who at least had lineage, though no more title to the throne of England than a barber’s block; but worst of all it brought the Danish pirates who, few though they were, all but murdered her; rifling her shrines and burning her churches and massacring her priests and torturing and robbing and playing the Apocalypse at large. The great Alfred mastered them—but barely. They came again to destroy and rage till they were thoroughly and finally knocked on the head by Duke William when, being crowned, he was already King William; a square-shouldered, short, bullet-headed man from Falaise (nourished on wine, not ale), where you may see his statue on a prancing horse.
If the winds had always been from the southwest whenever they blew in these parts the pirates could never have got here, for they could not beat up against the weather, and in calms they had not the determination to row for days on end as did the southern men. I thank God that sometimes their horrible north-easter betrayed them, as in Swanage Bay when he piled up a whole fleet of their ships on to the Dorset shingle and drowned the crews thereof. That was a great day for England! It was in Swanage Bay their shallow long boats were wrecked and I hope the jolly men of the Chesil Bay who wear earrings in their ears ran up in time, and also from Lulworth, to get their pickings from the wreckage.
But from the north-east and down its wind a good thing has lately come to us; and that is Norwegian anchovies dressed in bay leaves. Of these no man can have enough.
§
One thing always strikes me most when I come on the barbaric origins of Europe, and that is the rapidity with which the Catholic civilisation established itself when once it had got a Start. Here you have for raw material a parcel of savages who can make and do nothing. They cannot build or write or sculpt or paint or calculate. We only know them through the off-scourings of their broken men. Then comes the Church to take them in hand and Lo! within a century arise courts of justice, letters and the rest, all on the pattern of the South and the West—that is, of Christendom. They take up administration by local divisions after the Roman Hundred (which they got from Gaul, where you first find it under the Merovingians). They develop true and large kingship in place of little tribal chiefs—they learn all the organisation of our Occident.
For it was this new pressure of the Catholic civilisation from the South which further consolidated the coming Denmark. It was again the eternal story of conflict and peril breeding kingship. There had been any number of little chiefs with their tribal gatherings, as there always are in the early part of the human Story. They were called ‘the small kings’ in the later stories which were written down when the Danes had learnt reading and writing, and all the rest of civilisation from the Church. I suppose that each of them, as in Ireland, as in England, vaguely administered about 400 square miles of land, say twenty miles by twenty. That was about the area from which one centre could watch and police a whole countryside. Ten to twelve miles would be a long day’s ride there and back from the chief place to the boundaries; and so their little districts up and down Europe rose on that scale some 400 square miles to each kinglet. But there was probably nothing fixed, there was certainly no great difference between one chieftain’s following and another’s. Gorm got them all into some sort of vague allegiance to himself, but whether through the appeal of character or of lineage or of position, or as commonly happens through all three combined, we do not know. Position played some part in this rise of kingship with Jelling for a centre.
I think there was reason for this. The leader in battle, especially when he is leader of a defensive, Stands rather towards the frontiers than in the middle of his business. He has to watch the danger point. Now the danger point, once the pressure from the civilised South had begun, once the priests and their Mass and their letters and their buildings, and all that old Gorm and his followers dreaded were on the advance, was the neck of the Danish isthmus. From Jelling one can get to that neck without crossing open water, and one can reach it in a long day’s ride. Perhaps that explains the position of Jelling; or perhaps it can be explained in a better way Still, a way that explains so many ancient things if we only have the key to the riddle—sanctity.
Anyhow, from Jelling Denmark begins, and therefore to Jelling at once should all men go who want to look down the story of Denmark in perspective. It is not close to any gate by which the traveller from the outside world reaches the Danes. It is within easy distance of the sea-coast of Denmark, but none of the later powers developed Jelling—it may never have been more than a royal village. To-day it is a village still—and a very pleasant one. Thither did we go from our landing place, and we got there in this afternoon of angry weather, lashing with rain.
In such weather did we come on the great tombs. Their silence and their immensity were enhanced by the noise of the wind.
The Boats
§
For such pirates to come raiding Christendom there were needed not only north-east winds but boats. Now in the Danish islands and their seas and the Swedish coasts beyond there were already 2,0
00 years ago a multitude of sailing ships. Mediterranean travellers and merchants had noted this and told the Mediterranean writers of the South from whom we learn of it. There was all these years ago, a swarm of small sailing ships in the end of the Baltic long before they went off raiding. What bred that swarm of boats?
In the guesswork—and fascinating work it is—at the Beginnings of Things there has been made a guess that the use of boats, especially of boats with sails, arose at first in places where there were many islands close together and plenty of shelter in the narrow waterways between. It is likely enough, for one never knows how ‘Things’ arose in the beginning. Perhaps the best way of understanding the affair is to watch children and to note what they invent, and how, and why.
Anyhow, many islands and narrow seas and shelter did between them hatch there, and there again the egg of seafaring.
So it was, for instance, with the Morbihan, landlocked and with islands. The men of Vannes produced a whole fleet, apparently more seaworthy than any other Gallic boats, and the archipelago of Greece and the deep bays of the mainland to either side gave us early a seafaring people, and the Phoenicians came from islands it is said, though why they wandered over to the Syrian coast I have never understood.
These islands of the Danish archipelago and the sheltered waters all along the Swedish coast and the deep inland-running bays of Norway tended, then, to produce ships that sailed and men that could sail them. Horace, who was right about so many things, was right about the strength of will there must have been in the first man who left shore to try the sea. But what Horace left out, because he never knew it, was the fun which accompanies that terror.
Boys who have had the good luck, as I had, to be allowed to sail alone on the sea long before they were men, know what an unparalleled adventure it is. The first time I ever went out alone, creeping along the coast, I had as much discovery and inward glory as the first fellow who grounded his keel on the beach of the Hesperides.
I suppose the first adventurers did just that. Sailed timidly along a little way, keeping close to land, then daring to go out a little more, and a little more, and always ready to run back the moment it began to blow.
Time came when they first ventured out of sight of land, and then they knew the wonder of the landfall.
I shall never forget the first landfall I ever made: it was Golden Cap in Dorset. I wrote a sonnet to it; for I was already eighteen. The day was full of thick mist so I lost the land early, a thing I had never meant to do. I turned back from what felt like mid-Channel, but was, I suppose, only quite a few miles out (she was an open boat with a catsail, and there I was alone with her in the midst of the sea). When I could no longer discover England I had, even at that mature age, a mixture of glory and fear. I turned back towards the land, till there came a moment when a sharp light through the clouds showed me the proud head of Golden Cap, well so named.
§
All Denmark being built up of islands and full of straits with sheltered water, was a paradise for such beginners, and I think a man to-day understands Denmark best if he travels about it altogether by water. The habits of the Danes make this easy for him; they have vessels of all sorts and sizes, official and unofficial, going from every point of their immensely long coastline to every other point and over to the mainland as well. Let a man take Jelling by walking up from the sea; let him go down the long fjord which cuts off the northern tip of Jutland from the rest; let him sail from Aarhuis past Samso, to the island of the capital; let him explore the Great and the Little Belt, and push the nose of a boat into the narrow, shallow creeks where no one else seems to have gone. Let him, if the weather will allow him, creep down the outer coast, looking in between the islands, until he reaches the Eider. I have not done it, but I think a man who did so would, at the end of his adventures, really know Denmark and be able to write on her Story. More than any other country I think Denmark has come out of the sea, a nurturing, homelike sea, shallow and well protected, but the sea all the same; and salt enough (at least, on the northern side) to pass muster with Thetis and her Naiads, though, as we know they are particular about salt and especially so is their queen, who sits throned in the depth of the salt beside her aged father.
But when one thinks of those early boats and how the thing began, there creeps up another problem which will certainly never be solved and to which I have not seen even a plausible guess. It is this: Why did human things begin so late? Once again, we know nothing of the beginnings. That is why the opening words of the Bible are so good: they postulate, they affirm, they do not explain. In principio.
‘In the beginning,’ take it or leave it. That is the way to introduce a book!
Well, between the beginnings of man and the beginning of his works and pomps, what happened? We do not know. What we do know is that the things we care about came late. Building and writing, sculpture and the rest, are not to be traced beyond the last few centuries. How many centuries no man can tell, but not very many, and a century is not very much longer than a human life.
If we cannot tell why the other things began so late, least of all can we tell why those boats of the Northern sailors began so late. They must have learnt the art I suppose from the South, as they learnt all arts from the South, but they do not appear in any record except by vague name till 2,000 or 3,000 years, and perhaps more, after the great Empires of the South and East. They talked 2,000 years ago of the multitude of craft on the Scandinavian coast. Why did these craft never go far afield till about 2,000 years ago?
The first that sailed any distance, the first that we are told of, at least, were a few pirates who crossed the North Sea; that 1,100 years ago they sacked Lindisfarne. They came perhaps from Jutland, certainly from the flats of the Elbe mouth and the Weser mouth, ‘The Angulus,’ that is, the Bight when we get our name; but nothing came from Scandinavia proper till much later. Why so late?
As for the very beginning of boats in these parts it cannot have been of course till the ice melted, and when that was we do not know (again), but it was probably much later than men used to think. As bold a sentence as was ever written, and an illuminating one, was written in the English language about a lifetime ago, for the English were pioneers in geology. This sentence said that ‘Southern Scandinavia was under ice when Babylon and Egypt were in their heyday.’ It may be so.
The Ice
§
When did the ice melt? It is one of the most fascinating questions in the world! Being what is called ‘a scientific question,’ there is no answer to it, and that is part of the fascination. Also, because it is a question of this sort, people will always be exceedingly positive in their answers, that is, the scientists will always be exceedingly positive: at any one time! and yet they have to change their answers over and over again.
For a long time, during the nineteenth century, the answer given was that the ice age in each hemisphere, the northern and the southern, alternated in a very obvious manner. As long as the summer in the northern hemisphere corresponded with the parts of the earth’s orbit when it was nearest the sun, the northern hemisphere was naturally warmer than the southern—then, when the summer in the southern hemisphere gradually corresponded more and more to that part of the earth’s orbit, the southern hemisphere got warmer and the northern colder.
If things had always been as they are to-day we could tell how long these periods would be. The ice in the northern hemisphere would melt more and more during the first part of a period of about 10,000 years and the ice would recede more and more till past the middle of that period as the warmth accumulated. Then during the last few thousand years of the 10,000, the accumulated warmth gradually declined, the melting gradually stopped in the north, and in the next 10,000 years it was the turn of the southern hemisphere to go through the same process and for the northern hemisphere to get glaciated again. It was all very neat and convincing until it was knocked on the head by proof that there had been glaciation in both hemispheres at the same time. We wer
e back where we were before and free to make new guesses and affirm new answers, with the old cocksuredness.
I have read somewhere that a sort of clock or measurement was established some time ago by measuring traces of the recession of the ice, or what were taken to be such, on one or more of the Swedish lakes. According to this new answer Scandinavia was all under ice 6,000 years ago or so, and the man who had most to say in favour of the theory would have it that northern Europe was uninhabitable till quite late. The ice was still there, he said, when Egypt and Assyria were in their heyday—it certainly does look as though the big change was fairly recent, and if it was it would account for a good deal. It would account for the north coming so late into history, for the newness of many waterfalls, which have apparently not had time to cut their way back and flatten out the river slope. Niagara is a very good example. If the erosion has been going on at its present pace for many centuries, then we can affirm that it was only a few thousand years since the ice began to melt in northern America. To-morrow there will be some new answer, and after that another answer again. Meanwhile, we can be sure of one thing, that the ice moulded all the landscape of the North and especially scooped out the lakes of Scandinavia and Finland, and, I suppose, the bays, the shallow bays and the shallow straits which separate the islands which make up Denmark. It must have been a fine sight when the ice began to melt seriously, and probably that came with a bang, for it is pretty clear that Nature works by cataclysms and fits and starts. The old passion for very slow processes, working imperceptibly, was like most convictions (and perhaps all convictions) theological. It was part of contemporary theology that there was no God and people had a sort of a kind of a feeling that if things went very slowly it made the act of creation less necessary than if they went with a bang. This doctrine, like all doctrines, filtered down slowly from the more privileged and leisured to the more unfortunate and humorous masses; so that nowadays when it has become a mark of unintelligence among the vanguard to talk about natural selection that old nonsense has become a prime doctrine with the millions of the centre and rear. An imaginary brute called the cave man is the familiar certitude of the cinema public and the public press, they have not heard of Cro Magnon and perhaps they never will—and so much for that! Any way, the Baltic is actually there before us and we can make quite certain of it, and for my part though I love problems, especially the insoluble ‘scientific problems,’ I love landscape still more.
Return to the Baltic Page 2
