the Baltic coast, thence they passed down through Central Europe and
westward into France and thence into Spain, where they settled and
remained until they were driven into Africa. They may have left behind
some of their blood to mingle with the later-coming Germanic tribes in
Spain. It is possible also, though not probable, that to them are due
some of the blond characters still found in the Atlas Mountains. As a
race, however, their disappearance is complete.
The Visigoths maintained their control in Spain until 711 A.D. when
the Mohammedan Arabs crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and completely
defeated the Visigothic armies. Why the power of this people collapsed
so suddenly and completely is one of the mysteries of history, but
after the great seven days' battle on the Guadalquivir in which their
king, Roderick, was slain, the whole peninsula was easily conquered by
the Arabs. At this time, it is true, the blood of the Visigoths had
been greatly mixed with that of the subject races, resulting perhaps in
a weakening of their fighting power.
One of the reasons for the easy conquest of the Visigoths by the
Moors lay in the hatred for them as Arians by the old Orthodox
Catholic population who regarded their conquerors as heretics, and the
assistance rendered by the Jews whom the Visigoths had treated harshly
and who are reputed to have induced the Moors to make their invasion.
A remnant of the Visigoths fled northerly into southern Gaul, which
was called Gothia Septimania. There the name Visigoths was corrupted
into Vigot or Bigot, which was a term of reproach used by the orthodox
natives.
It is important to note that the relations between the populations
of the Roman Empire and the invading Teutonic Nordics were greatly
affected by the fact that the latter were the followers of the
schismatic monk Arius who, about 350 A.D., converted the Goths to
a Unitarian form of Christianity. The denial of the Trinity by the
Barbarians roused a fierce hatred among their subject peoples.
Ostrogoths and Visigoths, Vandals and Alans, Burgundians and Lombards,
all were Arians. The Franks alone among the Barbarians were converted
directly to Orthodox Christianity. This greatly facilitated their
conquest of Gaul. In consequence, France for more than a thousand
years was regarded as the eldest son of the church.
Down to our time, the aristocracy of Spain, and more especially that of
Portugal, shows a marked inheritance of blondness coming down largely
from Visigothic and Suevic ancestry. The province of Galicia still
retains very appreciable marks of Gothic blood, especially in a high
percentage of light-colored eyes.
The Visigoths left behind them in Spain a legacy of names which now are
regarded as most typically Spanish, as for instance Rodrigo, Alfonso,
Alvarez, Guzman, and Velasquez. In the same manner we find a Nordic
legacy of names reaching from Italy into France even where little
Nordic blood is left. In other words, while blood dies out, names
persist.
At the time of Spanish greatness the predominant blood in the peninsula
was still Gothic,[3] and the adventurers who went overseas and were
lost to the race were of this blood. In Portugal, the one great
poet, Camoens,[4] and in Spain Cervantes, who was his contemporary,
were descendants of the old Gothic nobility and had marked Nordic
characteristics, as had the Cid Campeador. The case was the same
in Italy[5] at this period. The great men were from the northern
part of the peninsula. Dante, Michaelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and
virtually all of the leading men of the Renaissance were blond Nordics.
Columbus himself, supposed to have come from Genoa, is described as
having blue eyes and fair hair. In southern France, in the so-called
Gothic Septimania and in the country around Toulouse, the home of the
Troubadours, Gothic names abound.[6] A similar condition prevails
throughout France. French names are Gothic, Frankish, or Burgundian
today, though disguised by their spelling, as, for example, Joffre
from Gotfrid. In the opinion of Count deLapouge, France as late as the
settlement of America was more Nordic than is the Germany of today.
The main body of the Visigoths who survived the conquest by the Arabs
took refuge in the northwestern part of Spain where they maintained
some small kingdoms which ultimately coalesced and became the nucleus
of a Christian Spain, which in the course of a seven-hundred-year
crusade gradually reconquered the peninsula and finally expelled the
Moors in 1492.
The Arabs who conquered Spain, and the Islamized Persians and Moors,
had a wonderful period of intellectual expansion during the seventh and
following centuries. This amazing outburst of genius, which preserved
for us much of the science and learning of the Greeks, came to an end
when the Mediterranean Mohammedans began mixing their blood with that
of their Negro slaves. Mohammedanism has always appealed to the lower
races, especially the Negro, because when they became followers of
the Prophet they were admitted to social and racial equality with the
superior race. This and the lure of the Negro women ruined the Arab
race. Today, all through Africa and Egypt and in parts of Arabia, the
so-called Arabs are often Negroid in appearance. In this case polygamy
was a racial curse because the richer and abler men had the most slave
women and left a larger progeny of half-breed children than did their
poorer countrymen.
The exact reverse happened in the case of the Turks, who were
originally Alpines from Central Asia strongly mixed with Mongol. They
conquered Asia Minor and the nations of Southeast Europe up to and
including Hungary. Everywhere they seized the most beautiful women and,
being polygamists, the ablest Turks had the most children by the finest
women of the subject countries. Thus the Turks bred up as the Arabs
bred down. To this day the Turks are the superior race in Asia Minor
and have eliminated, at least from the ruling classes, practically all
the physical traces of their Asiatic origin.
The women of the Caucasus, especially the Circassians and Georgians,
who retain some remnants of the Nordic Alans, have always been noted
for their physical beauty. They were in great demand in Turkish Harems.
Incidentally the Kurds are, or rather were, Nordic and it is
interesting to note that Saladin, of Crusading fame, was a Kurd.
Concerning other Teutonic Nordics, we need mention only those whose
blood enters largely into modern nations. Of these, one of the most
interesting peoples were the Burgundians, who settled on the western
bank of the upper Rhine in what is now Alsace, and in Burgundian
France and French-speaking Switzerland. They were a very promising
and flourishing nation until their overthrow in the middle of the
fifth century by Attila and his Huns, a tragedy which supplies the
subject matter of the Niebelungenlied. Appollonius Sidonius refers to
the Burgundians as being seven feet high; while this is an obvious
exaggeration, it is interesting to note that in the old Burgundian
provinces we find the tallest stature in France today.
When the Lombards first appear in history about 165 A.D. they were
in northern Germany. They entered Italy in 568 A.D. and conquered
the Peninsula even more thoroughly than had their predecessors, the
Ostrogoths. They not only occupied Italy north of the Apennines for
three hundred years, but also established several large duchies in the
south. The valley of the Po, where they settled, had been for centuries
Cisalpine Gaul, and this Lombard territory is today the backbone of
modern Italy. The percentage of light-colored eyes around Milan is
high, and blondness through this district is as common a characteristic
of the peasantry as it is of the aristocracy throughout the rest of
Italy.
The Lombards were Arians and were in constant conflict with the Popes
and their Orthodox followers and were consequently generally maligned.
Just as a similar situation facilitated the conquest of Spain by the
Moors, so the destruction of the Lombard Kingdom by the Franks was made
the easier by this antagonism.
In passing, we need only remark that there were small bands of other
Nordics, who entered Italy as Saxons, Alemanni, and Suevi, and who
entered France as Alans and Saxons. These small bands differed in few
respects from the larger Nordic peoples and were quickly absorbed in
them. All these barbarian tribes were closely related racially.
Before we leave the Alemanni who occupied southwest Germany with Alsace
and German-speaking Switzerland, we may note that their name, Alemanni,
did not mean 'All Men' in the sense of a mixed company, but rather _The
Men_ "par excellence,"--the German "_All_" being the analogous of the
Greek "_Pan_."
We come next to the Franks, who appear in history about the time of
the Battle of Chalons in 451 A.D. in which they took an unimportant
part, but in the following centuries they rapidly gained the ascendency
throughout Gaul and western Germany. The conquests by the Franks were
the most important and enduring of those of the Teutonic Nordics in
Continental Europe. We know very little about the Franks from the
Romans, although they may have been the Varini, who were located in
northwestern Germany in classic times. As a result of the Crusades,
Roman Orthodox, as contrasted with Greek Christians, are known as
"Ferangi" to this day in the Levant. Being Orthodox Christians and not
Arians, the Franks had the support of the Roman Church in all their
conquests.
The Flemings of Belgium are remnants of the original Franks who
retained their own language. Most of these invaders, like the Franks,
Visigoths, Lombards, and Normans, adopted the Latin language of their
subject peoples when they settled within the confines of the Roman
Empire.
Except in eastern England and northern France the numbers of the
conquering Nordics were not sufficient entirely to evict and replace
the conquered populations, but they everywhere formed the upper classes
and land-owning aristocracy and to this day these same classes in all
European nations continue to show, in more or less purity, the physical
characters of the Nordic race.
During the Middle Ages, the dominating and war-like Nordics paused long
enough from fighting each other to carry on the Crusades and to beat
back the onrush of the Saracens at Tours in 732 A.D. They saved Europe
from the Mongols in 1241 A.D. at the Battle of Liegnitz (now Wahlstatt)
in Silesia where the Duke of Liegnitz and the Nordic nobility,
outnumbered five to one, lay dead upon the field of battle; but checked
the advance of the Asiatic hordes and saved the budding civilization of
Europe from the fate of Asia.
This race supplied the navigators of the expansion period, when the
world was for the first time opened up in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, and since then they have formed the fighting men, soldiers,
sailors, explorers, hunters, adventurers, and frontiersmen of Europe
and her colonies.
After mastering the north of France, the Franks subjugated the remnants
of the Burgundians and destroyed the Visigothic kingdom which still
flourished in the south of Gaul. They also conquered the country on
the east bank of the Rhine known as Franconia, and under Charlemagne
seized northern Italy. In 800 _A.D._ Charlemagne revived the Western
Roman Empire, which under various guises lasted down to 1807.
Charlemagne's greatest and most difficult conquest, however, was that
of the Saxons, who were pure Nordics. They occupied the districts of
northwest Germany, centering in Hanover, and even today this part of
Germany is still the most Nordic portion of that country.
When Charlemagne reached the Elbe in his conquests he found beyond it
the heathen Alpine Wends and from his day down to the World War, the
history of Central Europe has been the pushing back of the frontier of
Alpine Asia from the Elbe eastward toward the Urals.
These eastern lands were conquered and little by little Christianized
and civilized from the west. This process went on as far as the
Vistula, where it met the culture, and Greek Orthodox religion, of the
Byzantine Empire, which had followed up the rivers of Russia from the
Black Sea and had given to Moscovia and to the Ukraine their religion,
alphabet, and art.
The Northmen were the last of the Nordic barbarians to appear on the
scene. In the ninth and tenth centuries they raided the coasts of
Europe from England to Greece. They established themselves as permanent
settlers on all the Scottish islands and on many parts of the Scottish
coast. In Caithness, the northernmost corner of Scotland, Norse was
spoken as late as the seventeenth century. They formed settlements and
left place names all around the coasts of Wales and England. In the
tenth century as Danes they subjugated northeastern England and imposed
their rule east of the line of Watling Street, which runs from London
to Chester. These Danes had barely been overcome by the Saxons when
a new group of Nordics arrived as Normans from France and conquered
England in 1066.
Ireland was attacked by the Norse who came in from the north and by the
Danes who entered from the south. The island was overrun by these two
peoples who have left many traces in the place names and in the blood
of Ireland.
On the Continent the coasts of France and Germany were harried by the
Northmen and the country since called Normandy was conquered by them in
911 A.D. The Danish conquest of England, referred to above, must have
been largely Norse while, in France, Rollo's followers were probably to
an overwhelming extent Danes.
The Norman element in England and to some extent in America down to
this very day has supplied a very large proportion of the conquerors,
seamen, explorers, and frontiersmen. This same ruling and restless
strain showed itself in the individual adventurers who went to South
Italy and Sicily, which they thoroughly conquered in the twelfth
century. They even attacked the Byzantine Empire. To this day blue
eyes in Sicily are called "Norman eyes" and are to some extent
characteristic of the upper classes there.
It was in this period that the Norse rovers under Leif Ericson
discovered the northeast mainland of America about 1000 A.D., nearly
five hundred years before Columbus, who probably knew of their voyages,
crossed the Atlantic.
At the time of this Norwegian and Danish expansion, there was a
similar outpouring of Swedes who, as Varangians, crossed the Baltic
into Russia, which they conquered and ruled for many centuries. The
name Varangian is strongly suggestive of Varini or Franks and the name
"Russian" means "rowers." The Varangians came across the seas precisely
as their ancestors, the Goths, had done a thousand years earlier. After
the expansion of this so-called Viking period, Scandinavian activities
came to an end.
* * * * *
Man undoubtedly crossed back and forth on dry land from Europe to
England in Neolithic and earlier times. In fact, some of the earliest
records of man have been found in England and the recent discoveries
in Norfolk of chipped implements and hearths show that man made
tools and used fire in England before the appearance of the first
glaciers--something over a million years ago.
These early species and genera of men largely died out or were
exterminated and were succeeded at the beginning of Neolithic times by
invasions of the small, dark, long-skulled Mediterranean race which
for many thousands of years formed the basis of the population of
England, Scotland, and Ireland.
About the beginning of the Bronze Age, some 1800 B.C., a tall,
round-skulled type from the Continent called the Beaker Makers appeared
on the scene in England. They resembled somewhat the present Dinaric
race, a tall, round-skulled branch of the Alpines now found from the
Tyrol southward to Albania on the east side of the Adriatic. It is
clear that the Beaker Makers entered from the east across the narrow
seas and their remains indicate a tall, masterful type which seems to
have disappeared to a large extent, although some of the round-skulled,
heavily built Englishmen, found numerously among the commercial
classes, may be their representatives today.
The racial composition of the British Isles when the Nordic first
appeared on the scene may be safely said to have been composed of
small, brunet Mediterraneans interspersed with a small number of
round-skulled types and including, very probably, remnants of still
earlier races.
The Celtic-speaking Nordics appear to have crossed the Rhine into
France and the countries to the southwest about 800 B.C. At about
the same time they forced their way into the British Isles which
they thoroughly conquered. These Nordics were called Goidels or "Q"
Celts and their language is represented today by the remnants of Erse
in Ireland, Gaelic in Scotland, and Manx on the Isle of Man. These
"Q" Celts, as contrasted with the later coming "P" Celts, are now
represented by the Macs (meaning son) just as the later Cymric or
Brythonic Celts are called "P" Celts because in their language Ap means
son.
The aborigines were called Picts in Scotland. These Mediterranean Picts
spoke a language related to Hamitic or Egyptian, and many place names
of this origin are still to be found.
It is not definitely known whether the Gaelic speech of Scotland is a
remnant of early Goidel invasion or whether it was reintroduced from
Ireland in the early centuries of our era. The latter appears probable,
because the second conquest by the Celts was nearly complete throughout
Britain, although it did not reach Ireland. This second subjugation of
Britain was by the "P" Celts or Brythons, speaking a Cymric form of
Celtic. It occurred in the fourth century B.C. and was so thorough that
it is not probable that remnants of the earlier Goidelic speech could
have survived in Scotland.
These Brythons were represented on the continent by the Belgæ, who, in
Cæsar's time, occupied Gaul between the Rhine and the Seine. A remnant
of their speech survives in Brittany as Armorican.
The "P" Celts gave their speech to all England and remnants of it are
found in the recently extinct Cornish in Cornwall and in the Cymric of
Wales. Both the "Q" Celts and the "P" Celts were, on their arrival in
Britain, pure Nordics, but in many cases they soon merged with the
aboriginal population. They were everywhere the ruling military class,
in Britain as well as in Gaul.
Having imposed their language on the conquered people, they died out
almost completely, leaving, as in Wales, their speech on the lips
of the little Mediterranean native. Whatever truth there is in the
legends of King Arthur and his resistance to the Saxons they clearly
indicate a blond, Celtic aristocracy ruling over an underclass of small
Mediterraneans. The same condition is indicated in Irish legends where
the Celts appear as a distinct, fair-haired military class.
The next Nordic invasion of Britain was by the Saxons from the country
around the present duchy of Holstein and by the Angles and Jutes from
farther north on the mainland of Denmark or Jutland. These tribes which
entered England in the fifth century were probably more purely Nordic
than the continental Teutons and this also was true of the Norse and
Varangians of a later date. Their conquest was almost completed during
the century after their arrival but there was sufficient resistance
in the western part of England to postpone its final subjugation for
several centuries. However, gradually the population of practically all
England and the lowlands of Scotland became purely Nordic. This racial
stock was reinforced by the invasion of Danes, who occupied most of
northeast England.
The Norsemen settled around the coasts of Ireland, Scotland, England,
and, especially, Wales, and added a very considerable contribution to
the pure Nordic element of the population.
The next and last invasion of Britain by the Nordics was the Norman
conquest in 1066. The Norman leaders and soldiers were pure Nordics
from the most Nordic part of France. In fact, the Normans were heathen
Danes speaking a Teutonic tongue when they arrived in Normandy in 911
A.D. so that on coming to England they had been in France only a little
over one hundred and fifty years. In those years they had accepted
Christianity, had learned French, and had become the exponents of the
highest culture in Europe. Into England they brought with them many
followers of Alpine origin, and the clergy whom they imported was also
composed very largely of Latinized Alpines.
At this point we may remark that Wales, especially along the coasts,
has a very large Nordic population. It is absurd to distinguish between
England, Scotland, North Ireland, and Wales as is done in the census
of the United States. We might just as well distinguish between North
England and South England on the ground that the first is Anglian and
Danish and the other Saxon and Jutish. The lowlands of Scotland are
pure English territory and have been such for a thousand years. The
Ulster Scots who came to America were only two or three generations
removed from the Scottish and English borderers and had not mixed with
the native Irish. It is also to be remarked that the Norman conquest
of England was that of one Nordic people by another, and that Great
Britain and Ireland constitute a group, the membership of which is
overwhelmingly Nordic in its racial inheritance.
At the time of the discovery of America, all Europe was far more Nordic
than it is today. Germany at that time had not witnessed the expansion
of the Alpines of the south and east which is characteristic of the
present era. In England, before the industrial revolution created a
demand for little brunet Mediterraneans to drive spindles, the Nordic
had the field to himself. As farmer, soldier, sailor, explorer, and
pioneer he was pre-eminent. The brunet Mediterranean element, formerly
called Iberians, had been forced back into the extreme west of England
and into Wales, and was not an important economic or political factor.
Nor was there any considerable immigration of that racial stock into
the American colonies. These were settled primarily by the descendants
of the Normans, Saxons, Anglians, and Danes coming from the distinctly
Nordic districts of the mother land.
Norfolk and Suffolk were settled by the Angles and afterwards formed a
part of the Danish kingdom. As said above the lowlands of Scotland and
the English borders were Anglian and Dane, while the coasts and islands
of Scotland were everywhere Norse. The Highlands were Celtic with an
admixture of Norse, Anglian, and Norman. There were also remnants of
the old Mediterranean populations, probably Picts. Curiously enough
these Mediterraneans contributed their dark eyes and hair color,
but not their short stature. The population of West Scotland has the
greatest height of all the peoples of Europe.
Ireland, like England, was settled as we have seen originally by
the Neolithic Mediterraneans. They in turn were conquered by the
Goidelic or "Q" Celts, blond Nordics who imposed their language on the
aborigines. In the ninth century, Ireland was overrun by the Norse and
Danes, whose descendants today constitute a very considerable portion
of the population. The very name Ireland is Danish. Most of the big
blond Irish of today, although they like to claim "Celtic" descent,
are, in fact, of Norse, Danish, Saxon, Norman, or Scotch derivation.
The Nordic elements in Ireland were reinforced again and again by
the English and Normans, who, from the days of their original entry
into the island down to our day have formed the great majority of the
nobility and upper classes of the country. The Celtic Goidel in Ireland
today is a negligible quantity which cannot be racially identified.
The brunet elements in western Ireland, though to some extent Celtic
in speech, are descended from the old Neolithic or Mediterranean
population of the British Isles, mixed with a primitive, aboriginal
race of great antiquity, the Firbolgs.