THE SCANDINAVIAN PEOPLES
Sec. 1
When the early history of Scandinavia is studied as a process of social
evolution rather than as a chronicle of feuds and of the exploits of
heroes of various grades,[638] it is found to constitute a miniature
norm of a simple and instructive sort. Taken as it emerges from the
stage of myth, about the time of Charlemagne, it presents a vivid phase
of barbarism, acted on by powerful conditions of change. The three
sections of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden stand in a certain natural
gradation as regards their possibilities of political development. All
alike were capable only of a secondary or tertiary civilisation, being
at once geographically disrupted and incapable, on primitive methods, of
feeding an abundant population. In their early piratical stage, the
Scandinavians are not greatly different from the pre-Homeric Greeks as
these were conceived by Thucydides; but whereas the Greeks came in
contact with the relatively high civilisations which had preceded them,
the Scandinavians of the Dark Ages had no contacts save with the
primitive life of the pre-Christian Slavs, the premature and arrested
cross-civilisations of Carlovingian France and Anglo-Saxon England, and,
in a fuller and more fruitful degree, with the similarly arrested
semi-Christian civilisation of Celtic Ireland, which latter counted for
so much in their literature.
But in barbarian conditions certain main laws of social evolution
operate no less clearly than in later stages; and we see sections of the
Norsemen passing from tribal anarchy to primitive monarchy, and thence
to military "empire," afterwards returning to their stable economic
basis, as every military empire sooner or later must. Of the
Scandinavian sections, Denmark and the southern parts of Sweden (round
the Maelar) are the least disrupted and most fertile; and these were
respectively the most readily reducible to a single rule. In all, given
to begin with the primordial bias to royalism in any of its forms,[639]
the establishment of a supreme and hereditary military rule was only a
question of time; every successive attempt, however undone by the forces
of barbaric independence, being a lead and stimulus to others. It is
important to note how the process was promoted by, and in its turn
promoted, the establishment of Christianity. The incomplex phenomena in
Scandinavia throw a new light on the more complex evolution of other
parts of Christendom. Primitive polytheism is obviously unpropitious to
monarchic rule; and in every ancient religion it can be seen to have
undergone adaptations where such rule arose. In the widely varying
systems of Homeric Greece, Babylonia, Egypt, and Rome, the same tendency
is visibly at work in different degrees, the ascendent principle of
earthly government being more or less directly duplicated in theological
theory. Under the Roman Empire, all cults were in a measure bent to the
imperial service, and it was only the primary exclusiveness of
Christianity that put it in conflict with the State. Once the emperor
accepted it, recognising its political use, and conceded its exclusive
claims, it became a trebly effective political instrument,[640]
centralising as it did the whole machinery of religion throughout the
Empire, and co-ordinating all to the political system. To use a modern
illustration, it "syndicated" the multifold irregular activities of
worship, and was thus the ideal system for a centralised and imperial
State.[641] This was as readily seen by Theodoric and Charlemagne as by
the rulers at Constantinople; and to such a perception, broadly
speaking, is to be attributed the forcing of Christianity on the
northern races by their kings.
Compare the explicit admissions of Mosheim, _Eccles. Hist._ 8
cent., pt. ii, ch. ii, Sec. 5 and note, following on the testimony of
William of Malmesbury as to Charlemagne. Other ecclesiastical
historians coincide. "Numbers of the earliest and most active
converts, both in Germany and England, were connected with the
royal households; and in this way it would naturally occur that
measures which related to the organising of the Church would
emanate directly from the King.... It is indeed remarkable that so
long as kings were esteemed the real patrons of the Church, she
felt no wish to define exactly her relations to the civil power;
the two authorities ... _laboured to enforce obedience to each
other_" (Hardwick, _Church History: Middle Age_, 1853, pp. 56-57).
The same historian (p. 127) describes the Wends of the eleventh
century as seeing in the missionary a means for their subjection to
Germany, and as "constantly attempting to regain their independence
and extinguish the few glimmerings of truth that had been forced
into their minds."
Northern paganism, more than the semi-cosmopolitan polytheism of the
south in the period of Augustus, was a local and domestic faith, lending
itself to separateness and independence, as did the civic and family
religions of early Greece and Rome. While there were communal assemblies
with specially solemn sacrifices, the popular beliefs were such that
every district could have its holy places, and every family or group its
special rites;[642] and in primitive Scandinavia a priesthood could
still less develop than even in primitive Germany, whose lack of any
system corresponding to the Druidism of Gaul is still empirically
ascribed to some anti-sacerdotal element in the "national character,"
whereas it is plainly a result of the nomadic life-conditions of the
scattered people. In germ the Teutonic priesthood was extremely
powerful, being the judiciary power from which there was no appeal.[643]
But an organised priestly system can arise only on the basis of some
measure of political levelling or centralisation, involving some
peaceful inter-communication. Romanised Christianity, coming ready-made
from its centre, permitted of no worship save that of the consecrated
church, and no ministry save that of the ordained priest.[644] Only the
most obstinately conservative kings or chieftains, therefore, could fail
to see their immediate advantage in adopting it.[645]
Naturally the early Christian records gloss the facts. Thus it is
told in the life of Anskar (Ancharius) that "the Swedes" sent
messengers to the Emperor Ludovic the Pious (_circa_ 825) telling
that "many" of them "longed to embrace the Christian faith"--a
story for which the only possible basis would be the longings and
perhaps the propaganda of Christian captives of some western
European nationality. (Cp. Hardwick, _Church History: Middle Age_,
1853, p. 110, _notes_, and p. 111.) Still it is admitted that the
king was avowedly willing to listen; and the tale of the first
acceptance of Christianity in Sweden, even if true in detail, would
plainly point to a carefully rehearsed plan under the king's
supervision. The admission that afterwards there was a return to
heathenism for nearly a century consists entirely with the view
that the first tentative was one of kingly policy. See Geijer, c.
iii, pp. 34, 35. It was the people who drove out the missionaries;
and Hardwick's statement that after seven years Anskar "was able to
regain his hold on the affections of the Swedes" is confuted by his
own narrative. All that Anskar obtained was a toleration of his
mission; and this was given after a trial by lots, on heathen
principles (Hardwick, pp. 112, 113; cp. p. 115). The account in
Crichton and Wheaton's _Scandinavia_, 1837, i, 122, brings the
king's initiative into prominence. (Cp. Otte, _Scandinavian
History_, 1874, p. 34.) They also note that Charlemagne, in
treating with the Danes, "did not attempt to impose his religion"
upon them; but they do not glimpse the true explanation, which is
that he could gain nothing by helping to organise a hostile
kingdom. In point of fact he refused to let Lindger pursue his
purpose of converting the Northmen. (Hardwick, p. 108, _note 2_,
citing _Vit. S. Lindger_.) He had not developed the devotion or the
subservience to the Church which in later ages led emperors to
force the acceptance of Christianity on a defeated State that
remained otherwise independent.
When in a later age Christianity was definitely established in
Sweden under Olaf the Lap (or Tribute) King (_circa_ 1000), whose
father Erik is said to have been murdered in a tumult for his
destruction of a pagan temple, the process was again strictly
monarchic, the Diet resisting; but Olaf's substantial success was
such as to permit of his annexing Gothland, temporarily conquering
Norway, and styling himself king of all Sweden; and his son, Anund
Jakob, continuing the profitable policy, earned the title of Most
Christian Majesty (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 111; Geijer, p. 39).
Even after this the attempt of a bishop (1067) to destroy the old
temple at Upsala, resisted by the Christian King Stenkil, but
supported by his rasher son Inge, caused the expulsion of the
latter by the pagan party under Svend. Only after Inge's
restoration by Danish help (1075) was the heathen worship
suppressed (Hardwick, p. 116).
As regards Denmark, the historians incidentally make it clear that
Harald Klak, usurping king of Jutland (_circa_ 820), wanted to
Christianise his turbulent subjects in order to subordinate them,
having learned the wisdom of the policy from Louis the Pious; and
it is no less clear that the same motive swayed Erik I, who, after
having in his days of piratical adventure, as usurper of the Jute
crown, destroyed the Christian settlement of Charlemagne at
Hamburg, entirely changed his attitude and favoured Christianity
when, on the death of King Horda-Knut, he became king of all
Denmark (Crichton and Wheaton, pp. 120-23).
So plain was the political tendency of the new creed that after the
Christianisation of Denmark by Erik I the nobility forced Erik II to
restore the pagan system; but the triumph of the Church, like that of
monarchy, was only a question of time. Even kings who, being caught late
in life, did not renounce their paganism, are found ready to favour the
missionaries; and in Denmark such tolerance on the part of Gorm the Old
(d. 941), successor of Erik II, is followed by the official Christianity
of his son Harald Bluetooth. Danish "empire" duly follows; and in the
next century we find Knut the Great (1014-1035) utterly reversing[646]
the pagan policy of his father, Svend[647] (who had been enabled to
dethrone _his_ Christian father, Harald, by the pagan malcontents), and
dying in the odour of sanctity, "lord" of six kingdoms--Denmark, Sweden,
Norway, England, Scotland, and Wales.
The principle is established from another side in the case of Norway.
There the first notable monarchic unification had been wrought by the
pagan Harold Fairhair (875), without the aid of Christianity; and the
pagan resistance was so irreducible that revolters sailed off in all
directions, finding footing in Scotland and Ireland, and in particular
in Northern France and Iceland.[648] In the next generation the monarchy
relapsed to the old position; and Harold's Christian son Hakon (educated
in England) had to cede to the determined demands of the pagan majority,
who forced him to join in the old heathen rites, and murdered the
leading Christians;[649] a course followed by the further weakening of
the power of the crown. The Danish Harald Bluetooth, son of Gorm, who
then conquered Norway, sought to re-establish the Church by the sword;
but Hakon Jarl, who followed, gave up Christianity in order to reign
and again put it down by violence.[650] The next king to restore it,
Olaf Tryggvason, who had met with Christianity in his wanderings in
Greece, Russia, England, and Germany,[651] established that creed by
brute force when he attained the throne (977), and again the spirit of
local independence, abnormally conserved in Norway by the special
separateness set up by the geographical conditions, fiercely resisted
the new system as it had done the rule of Harold Fairhair, many defeated
pagans withdrawing to remote glens and fastnesses, where to this day
their mythology thrives.[652] On Olaf's final defeat and death (1000),
his immediate successors, jarls supported by Denmark and Sweden, were
content to leave paganism alone, as representing a too dangerous spirit
of independence; and when St. Olaf, in turn, again undertook to crush
it, he found he had but beaten down and alienated the forces that would
have enabled him to resist Knut.[653] Danish "imperialism" had been
evolved while the Norwegian kings were striving towards it; and St. Olaf
was exiled, defeated, and slain (1030). His subsequent popularity is a
mere posthumous Church-made cult of the Christian period.
The spread of Christianity among the Franks; in England; in Saxony
by Charlemagne; in North Germany later; and among the Wends, Poles,
Hungarians, and Bohemians, constantly exhibits the same phenomena.
Always it is the duke or king who is "converted"; whereupon the
people are either baptised in mass or dragooned for generations. A
powerful king like Clovis could secure obedience; others, as in
Scandinavia, Bohemia, and Wendland, lost life and kingdom in the
attempt to crush at once paganism and local independence. Prussia
was almost depopulated by sixty years of war before the Order of
Teutonic Knights, who undertook to convert it on being awarded the
territory, could extinguish by savagery its staunch paganism. The
Christianisation of almost the whole of Northern Europe was thus a
purely political process, accomplished in great part by the sword.
See Hardwick, _passim_, and cp. the author's _Short History of
Christianity_, pp. 211-16.
Sec. 2
The ultimate arrest of all aggression by the Scandinavian peoples is to
be explained as a simple redressing of the balance between them and the
States they had formerly plundered. To begin with, all the Scandinavian
groups alike practised piracy[654] as against the more civilised States
of Northern Europe; and piracy showed them the way to conquest and
colonisation. At home their means of subsistence were pasturage,
fishing, the chase, and an agriculture which cannot have been easily
extensible beyond the most fertile soils; hence a constant pressure of
population, promoting piracy and aggressive emigration. How the pressure
was purposively met is not clear; but as the Scandinavian father, like
the Greek and Roman, was free either to expose or bring up a new-born
child,[655] there is a presumption that at some periods exposure was not
uncommon.[656] There is even testimony, going back to the eighth century
and recurring frequently as late as the twelfth, to the effect that a
certain number of men were periodically sent away by lot when the mouths
had visibly multiplied beyond the meat.
See, for instance, the _Roman de Rou_ (1160), ed. Andresen,
1877-79, i, 18, 19, verses 208-25 of prologue. Pluquet, in a note
on the passage in his edition (1827, i, 10), remarking that the
usage is often mentioned, not only by Norman but by English and
French annalists of the Middle Ages, adds that the oldest mention
of all, in the _Tractatus_ of Abbot Odo (d. 942), must be rejected,
the document being apocryphal. That, however, is not the oldest
mention by a long way. Paulus Diaconus (740-99) gives the statement
in a very circumstantial form (cited by Rydberg, _Teutonic
Mythology_, Eng. tr. p. 68) in his history of the Longobardians,
his own stock, who he says came from Scandinavia. He testifies that
he had actually talked with persons who had been in
Scandinavia--his descriptions pointing to Scania. M. Pluquet notes
(so also Crichton and Wheaton, i, 166-67) that no northern saga
mentions the usage in question. But it was likely to be
commemorated only by the stocks forced in that fashion to emigrate.
The saga-making Icelanders were not among these. The old statement,
finally, is in some measure corroborated by the testimony of
Geijer, p. 84, as to the long subsistence of the Swedish practice
of sending forth sons to seek their fortune by sea.
But without any such organised exodus there were adventurers
enough.[657] Hence colonisations and conquests in Scotland, the
Hebrides, Ireland, Iceland, Russia, England, and remote plundering
expeditions by land and river, some getting as far south as Italy; one
conquering expedition passing from Gaul through Arab Spain (827) and
along the Mediterranean coasts, north and south; another passing through
Russia to Constantinople. Thus the Norwegian and Danish stocks must have
rooted in nearly every part of the British Islands; and the settlement
in Gaul of a colony of revolters from Norway, in the reign of Harold
Fairhair, built up one of the great provinces of France. Only in Iceland
did the colonists preserve their language; hence, in terms of the
hallucination of race, the assumption that the others "failed," when in
reality they helped to constitute new races; no more "failing" in these
cases than did the British stock in its North American colonies. It may
be said, indeed, that the Teutonic stocks which overran Italy, Spain,
and North Africa did in large part physically disappear thence, their
physiological type having failed to survive as against the southern
types. Even on that view, however, the impermanent type must in some
degree have affected that which survived. In any case, the amalgamated
Norse stock in Normandy, grown French-speaking, in turn overran England
and part of Italy and Sicily, and, in the Crusades, formed new kingdoms
in the East; while in the case of England, turning English-speaking,
they again modified the stock of the nation. As against the notion that
in this case there was "failure" either for French or for Normans, we
might almost adopt the _mot_ of M. Clemenceau and call England "a French
colony gone wrong."[658] In terms of realities there has been no racial
decease; it is but names and languages that have changed with the
generations.
But there was an arrest of military exodus from Scandinavia; and
thenceforward the Norse-speaking stocks figure as more or less small and
retiring communities. They gave up piracy and conquest only because they
had to, Danish imperialism causing the arrest on a wide scale, as every
monarchic unification had done on a small.[659] When Knut reigned over
six kingdoms, piracy was necessarily checked as among these; and when
Knut's empire broke up after his death through the repulsive powers of
its component parts and the relative lack of resources in Denmark, the
various States of north-western Europe, in the terms of the case, were
more able than before to resist Norse attacks in general. In England,
William the Conqueror was fain to keep them off by bribery and intrigue;
but the States with the greater natural resources grew in strength,
while those of Scandinavia could not. When the pirates began to get the
worst of it, and when the Scandinavian kings had cause to dread
reprisals from those of the west, piracy began to dwindle. The last
regular practitioners were the pagan Wends, and the republican pagans of
the city of Jomsborg, who plundered the Scandinavians as they had of
yore plundered others; and after the Christianised Danish people had for
a time defended themselves by voluntary associations, both sets of
pirates were overthrown by an energetic Danish king. The suppression was
under Christian auspices; but it is a conventional fallacy to attribute
it to the influence of Christianity. It was simply an act of necessary
progressive polity, like the suppression of the Cilician pirates by
Pompeius.
Messrs. Crichton and Wheaton make the regulation statement that
when Christianity was introduced into Scandinavia, "it corrected
the abuses of an ill-regulated freedom; it banished vindictive
quarrels and bloody dissensions; it put a restraint upon robberies
and piracies; it humanised the public laws and softened the
ferocity of public manners; it emancipated the peasantry from a
miserable servitude, restored to them their natural rights, and
created a relish for the blessings of peace and the comforts of
life" (_Scandinavia_, i, 196). For the general and decisive
disproof of these assertions it is necessary only to follow Messrs.
Crichton and Wheaton's own narrative, pp. 201, 213, 216, 219, 230,
240, 244, 247, 275, 278, 280, 308, 312, 322, etc., and note their
contrary generalisation at pp. 324, 325. It was his "Most Christian
Majesty" Anund Jakob who got the nickname of Coal-burner for his
law that the houses and effects of malefactors should be burned to
the value of the harm they had done. The Swedes, polygamous before
Christianity, continued to be so for generations as Christians
(Crichton and Wheaton, i, 197, 198, citing Adam of Bremen. Cp.
Grimm, _Geschichte der deutschen Sprache_, i, 18, 188.) Civil wars
and ferocious feuds greatly multiplied in the early Christian
period, apart altogether from pagan insurrections. Geijer, while
erroneously attributing to Christianity the lessening of war
between Scandinavia and the rest of the world, admits that the
passions of strife, "hitherto turned in an external direction, now
spent themselves in a domestic field of action, generating civil
discord and war. Christianity, besides, dissolved the effective
bond of the old social institutions" (p. 40). In that case it
clearly cannot have been religious feeling that checked external
war. As to piracy, that was later practised by Elizabethan
Protestants and by the Huguenots of La Rochelle, when the
opportunities were tempting. As to popular misery, it is told in
the life of Anskar that the poor in ancient Sweden wore so few that
the first Christians could find a use for their alms only in
foreign countries (Geijer, p. 33). That difficulty has not
prevailed since. Messrs. Crichton and Wheaton later admit that the
Danish peasantry, free as pagans, "gradually sunk under the
increasing power and influence of the feudal chiefs and the Romish
hierarchy" (p. 227), and that the Crusades did not forward the
emancipation of the serfs in Denmark as elsewhere, the peasantry on
the contrary sinking into "a state of hopeless bondage" (pp. 251,
252).
Sec. 3
From the period of arrest of aggression, the economic and political
history of the Scandinavian States is that of slightly expansible
communities with comparatively small resources; and their high status
to-day is the illustration of what civilisation may come to under such
conditions. In the feudal period they made small material or
intellectual progress. It is not probable that the Norse population was
ever greater than in the eighteenth century, though Malthus had a
surmise that it might anciently have been so:[660] the old belief that
Scandinavia was the great _officina gentium_, the nursery of the races
which overran the Roman Empire, is a delusion; but it is certain that
the increase since the twelfth century has been even slower than the
European average. In the absence of emigration, this meant for past
centuries constant restraint of marriage through lack of houses and
livelihoods--the preventive check in its most stringent form. Emigration
there must have been; but the check must also have been strong. Thus,
while the lot of the common people, in so far as it remained free, was
likely to be comparatively comfortable, the land-owning classes, in the
absence of industry and commerce, tended to become nearly all-powerful;
and the Church, which inherits and does not squander, would engross most
of the power if not specially checked. The conditions were thus as
unfavourable to intellectual as to material progress.
Denmark was the first of the Scandinavian States to develop a
considerable commerce, beginning as did Holland on the footing of the
fishery;[661] and on that basis there was a certain renewal of Danish
empire. But this again could not hold out against the neighbouring
forces; and in the thirteenth century, the herring fishery in the
Baltic failing, it had to yield its hold on the mainland cities of
Hamburg and Luebeck, which began a new career of commercial power as the
nucleus of the great trading federation of the Hansa cities, while
Denmark itself was riven by the struggles of six claimants of the
throne. The result was a "feudal and sacerdotal oligarchy,"[662] leading
to an era of "the complete triumph of the Romish clergy over the
temporal power in Denmark," in which the peasantry were reduced to
absolute predial slavery.[663] Similar evolution took place in
Norway,[664] though with less depression of the peasantry,[665] by
reason of the small scope there for capitalistic agriculture; and there
too the now nascent commerce was appropriated by the Hansa.[666] In
Sweden, where industry remained so primitive that down till the
sixteenth century there was hardly any attempt to work up the native
iron,[667] Germans greatly predominated in the cities and controlled
trade,[668] even before the accession of Albert of Mecklenburg (1363),
who further depressed the native nobility in the German interest.[669]
On the other hand, the clergy were less plenipotent than in the sister
kingdoms, the people having retained more of their old power.
Cp. Schweitzer, _Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur_, i, 129.
The Swedish peasantry, like the Norwegian, were less easy to
enslave than the Danish by reason of the natural conditions; those
of the remote mountain and mining districts in particular retaining
their independence (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 375, 376; Geijer, pp.
50, 81, 89, 97, 103), so that they ultimately enabled Gustavus Vasa
to throw off the Danish yoke. Yet they had at first refused to
recognise him, being satisfied with their own liberties; and
afterwards they gave him much serious trouble (Otte, _Scandinavian
History_, 1874, pp. 228, 235; Geijer, pp. 109, 112, 115, 116, 118,
120-24). Slavery, too, was definitely abolished in Sweden as early
as 1335 (Geijer, pp. 57, 86; Crichton and Wheaton, i, 316, 333). As
regards the regal power, the once dominant theory that the Swedish
kings in the thirteenth century obtained a grant of all the mines,
and of the province of the four great lakes (Crichton and Wheaton,
i, 332), appears to be an entire delusion (Geijer, pp. 51, 52).
Such claims were first enforced by Gustavus Vasa (_id._ p. 129). As
regards the clergy, they appear from the first, _qua_ churchmen, to
have been kept in check by the nobles, who kept the great Church
offices largely in the hands of their own order (Geijer, p. 109),
though Magnus Ladulas strove to strengthen the Church in his own
interest (_id._ pp. 52-53). Thus the nobles became specially
powerful (_id._ pp. 50, 56, 108); and when in the fifteenth century
Sweden was subject to Denmark, they specially resented the
sacerdotal tyranny (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 356).
In Sweden, as in the other Scandinavian States, however, physical strife
and mental stagnation were the ruling conditions. Down till the
sixteenth century her history is pronounced "a wretched detail of civil
wars, insurrections, and revolutions, arising principally from the
jealousies subsisting between the kings and the people, the one striving
to augment their power, the other to maintain their independence."[670]
The same may be said of the sister kingdoms, all alike being torn and
drained by innumerable strifes of faction and wars with each other. The
occasional forcible and dynastic unions of crowns came to nothing; and
the Union of Calmar (1397), an attempt to confederate the three kingdoms
under one crown, repeatedly collapsed. The marvel is that in such an age
even the attempt was made. The remarkable woman who planned and first
effected it, Queen Margaret of Norway, appealed in the first instance
with heavy bribes for the co-operation of the clergy,[671] who,
especially in Sweden, where they preferred the Danish rule to the
domination of the nobles,[672] were always in favour of it for
ecclesiastical reasons.
Had such a union permanently succeeded, it would have eliminated a
serious source of positive political evil; but to carry forward
Scandinavian civilisation under the drawbacks of the medieval difficulty
of inter-communication (involving lack of necessary culture-contacts),
the natural poverty of the soil, and the restrictive pressure of the
Catholic Church, would have been a task beyond the power of a monarchy
comprising three mutually jealous sections. As it was, the old strifes
recurred almost as frequently as before, and moral union was never
developed. If historical evidence is to count for anything, the
experience of the Scandinavian stocks should suffice to discredit once
for all the persistent pretence that the "Teutonic races" have a faculty
for union denied to the Celtic, inasmuch as they, apparently the most
purely Teutonic of all, were even more irreconcilable, less fusible,
than the Anglo-Saxons before the Norman Conquest and the Germans down
till our own day, and much more mutually jealous than the quasi-Teutonic
provinces of the Netherlands, which, after the severance of Belgium,
have latterly lost their extreme repulsions, while those of Scandinavia
are not yet dead.[673] The explanation, of course, is not racial in any
case; but it is for those who affirm that capacity for union is a
Teutonic gift to find a racial excuse.
With the Reformation, though that was nowhere more clearly than in
Scandinavia a revolution of plunder, there began a new progress, in
respect not of any friendliness of the Lutheran system to thought and
culture, but of the sheer break-up of the intellectual ice of the old
regimen. In Denmark the process is curiously instructive. Christian II,
personally a capable and reformative but cruel tyrant, aimed throughout
his life at reducing the power alike of the clergy and the nobles, and
to that end sought on the one hand to abolish serfdom and educate the
poor and the burghers,[674] and on the other to introduce Lutheranism
(1520). From the latter attempt he was induced to desist, doubtless
surmising that the remedy might for him be a new disease: but on his
enforcing the reform of slavery he was rebelled against and forced to
fly by the nobility, who thereupon oppressed the people more than
ever.[675] His uncle and successor, Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein,
accepted the mandate of the nobles to the extent of causing to be
publicly burned in his presence all the laws of the last reign in favour
of the peasants, closing the poor schools throughout the kingdom,
burning the new books,[676] and pledging himself to expel Lutheranism.
He seems, however, to have been secretly a Protestant, and to have
evaded his pledge; and the rapid spread of the new heresy, especially in
the cities, brought about a new birth of popular literature in the
vernacular, despite the suppression of the schools.[677] In a few years'
time, Frederick, recognising the obvious interest of the crown, and
finding the greater nobles in alliance with the clergy, made common
cause with the smaller nobility, and so was able (1527) to force on the
prelates, who could hope for no better terms from the exiled king, the
toleration of Protestantism, the permission of marriage to the clergy,
and a surrender of a moiety of the tithes.[678] A few years later (1530)
the monasteries were either stormed by the populace or abandoned by the
monks, their houses and lands being divided among the municipalities,
the king and his courtiers, and the secular clergy.[679] After a stormy
interregnum, in which the Catholic party made a strenuous reaction, the
next king, Christian III, taking the nobles and commons-deputies into
partnership, made with their help an end of the Catholic system; the
remaining lands, castles, and manors of the prelates going to the crown,
and the tithes being parcelled among the landowners, the king, and the
clergy. Naturally a large part of the lands, as before, was divided
among the nobles,[680] who were in this way converted to Protestantism.
Thus whereas heathen kings had originally embraced Christianity to
enable them to consolidate their power, Christian kings embraced
Protestantism to enable them to recover wealth and power from the
Catholic Church. Creed all along followed interest;[681] and the people
had small concern in the change.[682]
Norway, being under the same crown, followed the course of Denmark. In
Sweden the powerful Gustavus Vasa saw himself forced at the outset of
his reign to take power and wealth from the Church if he would have any
of his own; and after the dramatic scene in the Diet of Westeras (1527),
in which he broke out with a passionate vow to renounce the crown if he
were not better supported,[683] he carried his point. The nobles, being
"squared"[684] by permission to resume such of their ancestral lands as
had been given to churches and convents since 1454, and by promise of
further grants, forced the bishops to consent to surrender to the king
their castles and strongholds, and to let him fix their revenues; all
which was duly done. The monasteries were soon despoiled of nearly all
their lands, many of which were seized by or granted in fief to the
barons;[685] and the king became head of the Church in as full a degree
as Henry VIII in England;[686] sagaciously, and in part unscrupulously,
creating for the first time in Scandinavia a strong yet not wholly
despotic monarchy, with such revenues from many sources[687] as made
possible the military power and activity of Gustavus Adolphus, and
later the effort of Charles XII to create an "empire"--an effort which,
necessarily failing, reduced Sweden permanently to her true economic
basis.
Apart from those remarkable episodes, the development of the
Scandinavian States since the sixteenth century has been, on their
relatively small scale, that of the normal monarchic community with a
variously vigorous democratic element; shaken frequently by civil
strife; wasting much strength in insensate wars; losing much through bad
kings and gaining somewhat from the good; passing painfully from bigotry
to tolerance; getting rid of their old aristocracies and developing new;
exhibiting in the mass the northern vice of alcoholism, yet maintaining
racial vigour; disproportionately taxing their producers as compared
with their non-producers; aiming, nevertheless, at industry and
commerce, and suffering from the divisive social influences they entail;
meddling in international strifes, till latterly the surrounding powers
preponderated too heavily; disunited and normally jealous of each other,
even when dynastically united, through stress of crude patriotic
prejudice and lack of political science; frequently retrograding, yet in
the end steadily progressing in such science as well as in general
culture and well-being. Losses of territory--as Finland and
Schleswig-Holstein--at the hands of stronger rivals, and the violent
experiences and transitions of the Napoleonic period, have left them on
a relatively stable and safe basis, albeit still mutually jealous and
unable to pass beyond the normal monarchic stage. To-day their culture
is that of all the higher civilisations, as are their social problems.
Sec. 4
In the history of Scandinavian culture, however, lie some special
illustrations of sociological law. The remarkable fact that the first
great development of old Norse literature occurred in the poor and
remote colonial settlement of Iceland is significant of much. To the
retrospective yearning of an exiled people, the desire to preserve every
memory of the old life in the fatherland, is to be attributed the
grounding of the saga-cult in Iceland; and the natural conditions,
enforcing long spells of winter leisure, greatly furthered the movement.
But the finest growth of the new literature, it turns out, is due to
culture-contacts--an unexpected confirmation, in a most unlikely
quarter, of a general principle arrived at on other data. The vigilant
study of our own day has detected, standing out from the early
Icelandic literature, "a group of poems which possess the very qualities
of high imagination, deep pathos, fresh love of nature, passionate
dramatic power, and noble simplicity of language, which [other] Icelandic
poetry lacks. The solution is that these poems do not belong to Iceland at
all. They are the poetry of the 'Western Islands'"[688]--that is, the
poetry of the meeting and mixing of the "Celtic" and Scandinavian stocks
in Ireland and the Hebrides--the former already much mixed, and
proportionally rich in intellectual variations. It was in this area that
"a magnificent school of poetry arose, to which we owe works that for
power and beauty can be paralleled in no Teutonic language till centuries
after their date.... This school, which is totally distinct from the
Icelandic, ran its own course apart and perished before the thirteenth
century."[689]
Compare Messrs. Vigfusson and Powell's _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_,
1883, vol. i, Introd. pp. lxii, lxiii; and, as regards the old
Irish civilisation, the author's _Saxon and Celt_, pp. 127, 128,
131-33.
The theory of Celtic influence, though established in its
essentials, is not perfectly consistent as set forth in the
_Britannica_ article. Thus, while the Celticised literature is
remarked for "noble simplicity of language," the true Icelandic,
primarily like the Old English, is said to develop a "complexity of
structure and ornament, an elaborate mythological and enigmatical
phraseology, and a regularity of rhyme, assonance, luxuriance,
quantity, and syllabification which it caught up from the Latin and
_Celtic_ poets." Further, while the Celticised school is described
as "totally distinct from the Icelandic," Celtic influence is also
specified as affecting Norse literature in general. The first
generations of Icelandic poets were men of good birth, "nearly
always, too, of Celtic blood on one side at least"; and they went
to Norway or Denmark, where they lived as kings' or chiefs'
henchmen. The immigration of Norse settlers from Ireland, too,
affected the Iceland stock very early. "It is to the west that the
best sagas belong: it is to the west that nearly every classic
writer whose name we know belongs; and it is precisely in the west
that the admixture of Irish blood is greatest" (_ib._). The facts
seem decisive, and the statements above cited appear the more
clearly to need modification. It is to be noted that Schweitzer's
_Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur_ gives no hint of the
Celtic influence.
But the Icelandic civilisation as a whole could not indefinitely
progress on its own basis any more than the Irish. Beyond a certain
point both needed new light and leading; for the primeval spirit of
strife never spontaneously weakened; the original Icelandic stock being,
to begin with, a selection of revolters from over-rule. So continual
domestic feuds checked mental evolution in Iceland as in old
Scandinavia; and the reduction of the island to Norwegian rule in the
thirteenth century could not do more for it than monarchy was doing for
Norway. Mere Christianity without progressive conditions of culture
availed less for imaginative art than free paganism had done; and when
higher culture-contacts became possible, the extreme poverty of Iceland
tended more than ever to send the enterprising people where the culture
and comfort were. It is in fact not a possible seat for a relatively
flourishing civilisation in the period of peaceful development. The
Reformation seems there to have availed for very little indeed. It was
vehemently resisted,[690] but carried by the preponderant acquisitive
forces: "nearly all who took part in it were men of low type, moved by
personal motives rather than religious zeal."[691] "The glebes and
hospital lands were a fresh power in the hands of the crown, and the
subservient Lutheran clergy became the most powerful class in the
island; while the bad system of underleasing at rack-rent and short
lease with unsecured tenant-right extended in this way over at least a
quarter of the better land, stopping any possible progress." For the
rest, "the Reformation had produced a real poet [Hallgrim Petersen], but
the material rise of Iceland"--that is, the recent improvements in the
condition of the people--"has not yet done so,"[692] though poetry is
still cultivated in Iceland very much as music is elsewhere.
Thus this one little community may be said to have reached the limits of
its evolution, as compared with others, simply because of the strait
natural conditions in which its lot was cast. But to think of it as a
tragically moribund organism is merely to proceed upon the old
hallucinations of race-consciousness. Men reared in Iceland have done
their part in making European civilisation, entering the more southerly
Scandinavian stocks as these entered the stocks of western Europe; and
the present population, who are a remnant, have no more cause to hang
their heads than any family that happens to have few members or to have
missed wealth. Failure is relative only to pretension or purpose.
The modern revival of Scandinavian culture, as must needs be, is the
outcome of all the European influences. At the close of the sixteenth
century, in more or less friendly intercourse with the other Protestant
countries of north Europe, Denmark began effectively to develop a
literature such as theirs, imaginative and scientific, in the vernacular
as well as in Latin; and so the development went on while Sweden was
gaining military glory with little enlightenment. Then a rash attack
upon Sweden ended in a loss of some of the richest Danish provinces
(1658); whereafter a sudden parliamentary revolution, wrought by a
league of king and people against the aristocracy, created not a
constitutional but an absolute and hereditary monarchy (1660),
enthroning divine right at the same instant in Denmark and Norway as in
England. Thereafter, deprived of their old posts and subjected to
ruinous taxes, the nobility fell rapidly into poverty;[693] and the
merchant class, equally overtaxed, withdrew their capital; the peasantry
all the while remaining in a state of serfdom.[694] Then came a new
series of wars with Sweden, recurring through generations, arresting, it
is said, literature, law, philosophy, and medicine,[695] but not the
natural sciences, then so much in evidence elsewhere: Tycho Brahe being
followed in astronomy by Horrebow, while chemistry, mathematics, and
even anatomy made progress. But to this period belongs the brilliant
dramatist and historian Holberg, the first great man of letters in
modern Scandinavia (d. 1754); and in the latter half of the eighteenth
century the two years of ascendency of the freethinking physician
Struensee as queen's favourite (1770-72) served partially to emancipate
the peasants, establish religious toleration, abolish torture, and
reform the administration. Nor did his speedy overthrow and execution
wholly undo his main work,[696] which outdid that of many generations of
the old regime. Still, the history of his rise and fall, his vehement
speed of reconstruction and the ruinous resistance it set up, is one of
the most dramatic of the many warnings of history against thinking
suddenly to elevate a nation by reforms imposed wholly from
without.[697]
Thenceforward, with such fluctuations as mark all culture-history, the
Scandinavian world has progressed mentally nearly step for step with
the rest of Europe, producing scholars, historians, men of science,
artists, and imaginative writers in more than due proportion. Many names
which stand for solid achievement in the little-read Scandinavian
tongues are unknown save to specialists elsewhere; but those of Holberg,
Linnaeus, Malte-Brun, Rask, Niebuhr, Madvig, Oehlenschlaeger,
Thorwaldsen, and Swedenborg tell of a comprehensive influence on the
thought and culture of Europe during a hundred years in which Europe was
being reborn; and in our own day some of the greatest imaginative
literature of the modern world comes from Norway, long the most backward
of the group. Ibsen, one of a notable company of masters, stood at the
head of the drama of the nineteenth century; and the society which
sustained him, however he may have satirised it, is certificated abreast
of its age.
Sec. 5
In one aspect the Scandinavian polities have a special lesson for the
larger nations. They have perforce been specially exercised latterly, as
of old, by the problem of population; and in Norway there was formerly
made one of the notable, if not one of the best, approaches to a
practical solution of it. Malthus long ago[698] noted the Norwegian
marriage-rate as the lowest in Europe save that of Switzerland; and he
expressed the belief that in his day Norway was "almost the only country
in Europe where a traveller will hear any apprehension expressed of a
redundant population, and where the danger to the happiness of the lower
classes of people is in some degree seen and understood."[699] This
state of things having long subsisted, there is a presumption that it
persists uninterruptedly from pagan times, when, as we have seen, there
existed a deliberate population-policy; for Christian habits of mind can
nowhere be seen to have set up such a tendency, and it would be hard to
show in the history of Norway any great political change which might
effect a rapid revolution in the domestic habits of the peasantry, such
as occurred in France after the Revolution. Broadly speaking, the mass
of the Norwegian people had till the last century continued to live
under those external or domiciliary restraints on multiplication which
were normal in rural Europe in the Middle Ages, and which elsewhere have
been removed by industrialism; yet without suffering latterly from a
continuance of the severer medieval destructive checks. They must,
therefore, have put a high degree of restraint on marriage, and probably
observed parental prudence in addition.
When it is found that in Sweden, where the conditions and usages were
once similar, there was latterly at once less prudential restraint on
marriage and population, and a lower standard of material well-being,
the two cases are seen to furnish a kind of _experimentum crucis_. The
comparatively late maintenance of a powerful military system in Sweden
having there prolonged the methods of aristocratic and bureaucratic
control while they were being modified in Denmark-Norway, Swedish
population in the eighteenth century was subject to artificial stimulus.
From about the year 1748, the Government set itself, on the ordinary
empirical principle of militarism, to encourage population.[700] Among
its measures were the variously wise ones of establishing medical
colleges and lying-in and foundling hospitals, the absolute freeing of
the internal trade in grain, and the withdrawal in 1748 of an old law
limiting the number of persons allowed to each farm. The purpose of that
law had been to stimulate population by spreading tillage; but the spare
soil being too unattractive, the young people emigrated. On the law
being abolished, population did increase considerably, rising between
1751 and 1800 from 1,785,727 to 2,347,308,[701] though some severe
famines had occurred within the period. But in the year 1799, when
Malthus visited the country, the increased population suffered from
famine very severely indeed, living mainly and miserably on bark
bread.[702] It was one of Malthus's great object-lessons in his science.
On one side a poor country was artificially over-populated; on the
other, the people of Norway, an even poorer country, directly and
indirectly[703] restrained their rate of increase, while the Government
during a long period wrought to the same end by the adjustment of its
military system and by making a certificate of earning power or income
necessary for all marriages.[704] The result was that, save in the
fishing districts, where speculative conditions encouraged early
marriages and large families, the Norwegian population were better off
than the Swedish.[705]
Already in Malthus' youth the Norwegian-Danish policy had been altered,
all legal and military restrictions on marriage having been withdrawn;
and he notes that fears were expressed as to the probable results. It is
one of his shortcomings to have entirely abstained from subsequent
investigation of the subject; and in his late addendum as to the state
of Sweden in 1826 he further fails to note that as a result of a
creation there after 1803 of 6,000 new farms from land formerly waste,
the country ceased to need to import corn and was able to export a
surplus.[706] It still held good, however, that the Norwegian
population, being from persistence of prudential habit[707] much the
slower in its rate of increase, had the higher standard of comfort,
despite much spread of education in Sweden.
Within the past half-century the general development of commerce and of
industry has tended broadly to equalise the condition of the
Scandinavian peoples. As late as 1835 a scarcity would suffice to drive
the Norwegian peasantry to the old subsistence of bark bread, a ruinous
resort, seeing that it destroyed multitudes of trees of which the value,
could the timber have found a market, would have far exceeded that of a
quantity of flour yielding much more and better food. At that period the
British market was closed by duties imposed in the interest of the
Canadian timber trade.[708] Since the establishment of British free
trade, Norwegian timber has become a new source of wealth; and through
this and other and earlier commercial developments prudential family
habits were affected. Thus, whereas the population of Sweden had all but
doubled between 1800 and 1880, the population of Norway had grown even
faster.[709] And whereas in 1834 the proportion of illegitimate to
legitimate births in Stockholm was 1 to 2.26[710] (one of the results of
foundling hospitals, apparently), in 1890 the total Swedish rate was
slightly below 1 to 10, while in Norway it was 1 to 14. The modern
facilities for emigration have further affected conjugal habits.
Latterly, however, there are evidences of a new growth of intelligent
control.
In recent years the statistics of emigration and population tell a
fairly plain story. In Norway and Sweden alike the excess of births over
deaths reached nearly its highest in 1887, the figures being 63,942 for
Sweden and 29,233 for Norway. In 1887, however, emigration was about its
maximum in both countries, 50,786 leaving Sweden and 20,706 leaving
Norway. Thereafter the birth-rate rapidly fell, and the emigration,
though fluctuating, has never again risen in Sweden to the volume of
1887-88, though it has in Norway. But when, after falling to 43,728 in
1892, the excess of Swedish births over deaths rises to 60,231 in 1895,
while the emigration falls from 45,000 in 1892 to 13,000 in 1894, it is
clear that the lesson of regulation is still very imperfectly learned.
Norway shows the same fluctuations, the excess of births rising from
23,600 in 1892 to nearly 32,000 in 1896, and again from 27,685 in 1908
to 29,804 in 1909, doubtless because of ups and downs in the harvests,
as shown in the increase of marriages from 12,742 in 1892 to 13,962 in
1896.
In Denmark the progression has been similar. There the excess of births
over deaths was so far at its maximum in 1886, the figures being 29,986
in a population of a little over 2,000,000; whereafter they slowly
decreased, till in 1893 the excess was only 26,235. All the while
emigration was active, gradually rising from 4,346 in 1885 to 10,382 in
1891; then again falling to 2,876 in 1896, when the surplus of births
over deaths was 34,181--a development sure to force more emigration. In
1911 the population was 2,775,076--a rapid rise; and in 1910 the surplus
of births over deaths was 40,110. The Scandinavians are thus still in
the unstable progressive stage of popular well-being, though probably
suffering less from it than either Germany or England.
Here, then, is a group of kindred peoples apparently at least as capable
of reaching a solution of the social problem as any other, and visibly
prospering materially and morally in proportion as they bring reason to
bear on the vital lines of conduct, though still in the stage of curing
over-population by emigration. Given continued peaceful political
evolution in the direction first of democratic federation, and further
of socialisation of wealth, they may reach and keep the front rank in
civilisation, while the more unmanageably large communities face risks
of dire vicissitude.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 638: As in Carlyle's _Early Kings of Norway_, the _caput
mortuum_ of his historical method. Much more instructive works on
Scandinavian history are available to the English reader. The two
volumes on _Scandinavia_ by Crichton and Wheaton (1837) are not yet
superseded, though savouring strongly of the conservatism of their
period. Dunham, who rapidly produced, for Gardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia
series, histories of _Spain and Portugal_ (5 vols.), _Europe during the
Middle Ages_ (4 vols.), and the _Germanic Empire_ (3 vols.), compiled
also one of _Denmark, Sweden, and Norway_ (3 vols. 1839-40), of inferior
quality. But Geijer's _History of Sweden_, one of the standard modern
national histories of Europe, is translated into English as far as the
period of Gustavus Vasa (3 vols. of orig. in one of trans. 1845); and
the competent _History of Denmark_ by C.-F. Allen is available in a
French translation (Copenhagen, 2 tom. 1878). Otte's _Scandinavian
History_, 1874, is an unpretending and unliterary but well-informed
work, which may be used to check Crichton and Wheaton. The more recent
work of Mr. R. Nisbet Bain, _Scandinavia: a Political History of
Denmark, Norway, and Sweden from 1513 to 1900_ (Camb. Univ. Press,
1905), is useful for the period covered, but has little sociological
value. For the history of ancient Scandinavian literature, the
introduction to Vigfusson and Powell's _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_ (1883),
and Prof. Powell's article on Icelandic Literature in the 10th ed. of
the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, are preferable to Schweitzer's
_Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur_ (1886, 2 Bde.), which,
however, is useful for the modern period.]
[Footnote 639: See Geijer's _History of the Swedes_, Eng. tr. of pt. i,
1-vol. ed. p. 30, as to the special persistence in Scandinavia of the
early religious conception of kingship. Cp. Crichton and Wheaton's
_Scandinavia_, 1837, i, 157.]
[Footnote 640: Such New Testament passages as _Rom._ xiii, 1-7, and
_Titus_ iii, 1, seem to have been penned or interpolated expressly to
propitiate the Roman government.]
[Footnote 641: It was by entirely overlooking this historic fact that M.
Fustel de Coulanges, in the last chapter of his _Cite antique_, was able
to propound a theory of historic Christianity as something
extra-political. He there renounced the inductive method for a pure
ecclesiastical apriorism, and the result is a very comprehensive
sociological misconception.]
[Footnote 642: Geijer, pp. 31, 33; Crichton and Wheaton, i, 102, 104,
183, 184.]
[Footnote 643: Tacitus, _Germania_, cc. 7, 11.]
[Footnote 644: Cp. Zschokke, _Des Schweizerlands Geschichte_, c. 7, as
to the psychological effect of an organised worship in a great building
on heathens without any such centre. And see the frank admission of J.R.
Green, _Short History_, p. 54, that among the Anglo-Saxons "religion had
told against political independence."]
[Footnote 645: Cp. C.F. Allen, _History of Denmark_, French tr.,
Copenhagen, 1878, i, 55, 56.]
[Footnote 646: Crichton and Wheaton, _Scandinavia_, i, 129-32; Hardwick,
_Church History: Middle Age_, 1853, p. 115. Knut was a great supporter
of missionaries. Hardwick attributes to Gorm a "bitter hatred" of the
Church, and also "violence," but gives no details.]
[Footnote 647: Even Svend is said to have laboured for Christianity in
his latter years--another suggestion that it was found to answer
monarchic purposes. See Hardwick, p. 115, _note 9_.]
[Footnote 648: Cp. Dasent, Introd. to _The Burnt Njal_, p. ix.]
[Footnote 649: Hardwick, as cited, p. 117.]
[Footnote 650: Hardwick, as cited.]
[Footnote 651: A warlike priest of Bremen is said to have converted him
in Germany; and he was baptised in the Scilly Islands, which he had
visited on a piratical expedition. Finally he was confirmed in England,
which he promised to treat in future as a friendly State. (_Id._ _ib._)]
[Footnote 652: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 151.]
[Footnote 653: Cp. Hardwick. p. 118, _note 3_.]
[Footnote 654: Though this was often of the most brutal description,
there were some comparatively "mild-mannered" pirates, who rarely "cut a
throat or scuttled ship." See C.-F. Allen, _Histoire de Danemark_, i,
21.]
[Footnote 655: Geijer, _History of Sweden_, Eng. tr. p. 31.]
[Footnote 656: It is actually on record that the practice long subsisted
in Iceland, despite the efforts of St. Olaf to suppress it. Hardwick,
_Church History: Middle Age_, p. 119, _note_, citing Torfaens, _Hist.
Norveg._ ii, 2, and Neander. Among the Slavonic Pomeranians in the
twelfth century it was still common to destroy female children at birth.
_Id._ p. 224, _note_.]
[Footnote 657: Cp. C.-F. Allen, _Histoire de Danemark_, Fr. tr. 1878, i,
20.]
[Footnote 658: "Qu'est-ce que c'est que l'Angleterre? Une colonie
francais mal tournee."]
[Footnote 659: Thus Rolf the Ganger fared forth to France because Harold
Fairhair would not suffer piracy on any territory acquired by him.]
[Footnote 660: _Essay on the Principle of Population_, 7th ed. p. 139.]
[Footnote 661: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 254. Dr. Ph. Schweitzer
(_Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur_, Sec. 19), makes the surprising
statement that the quantity of old coins found in Scandinavia (over
100,000 within the last century) proves that the ancient Scandinavian
commerce was very great (_ein ganz grossartiger_). His own account of
the occasional barter of the Vikings shows that there was nothing
"grossartig" about it, and the coins prove nothing beyond piracy.]
[Footnote 662: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 263, 287.]
[Footnote 663: _Id._ pp. 251, 252, 277, 377.]
[Footnote 664: _Id._ pp. 304, 305, 311.]
[Footnote 665: _Id._ ii, 350. Cp. Laing, _Journal of a Residence in
Norway_ (1834-36), ed. 1851, p. 135. Bain, however, pronounces that in
Norway in the latter part of the fifteenth century "the peasantry were
mostly thralls" (_Scandinavia_, 1905, p. 10).]
[Footnote 666: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 305, 310.]
[Footnote 667: _Id._ p. 332; Geijer, p. 135.]
[Footnote 668: Geijer, pp. 88, 91; Crichton and Wheaton, i, 331.]
[Footnote 669: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 324.]
[Footnote 670: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 331.]
[Footnote 671: _Id._ p. 336.]
[Footnote 672: Geijer, pp. 100, 109; Otte, _Scandinavian History_, 1874,
p. 252.]
[Footnote 673: Cp. Milman, _Latin Christianity_, 4th ed. ii, 225, on
Anglo-Saxon separatism. Since this was written there has taken place the
decisive separation between Norway and Sweden.]
[Footnote 674: Otte, _Scandinavian History_, 1874, pp. 214-18. Himself
an excellent Latinist, he sought to raise the learned professions, and
compelled the burghers to give their children schooling under penalty of
heavy fines. He further caused new and better books to be prepared for
the public schools, and stopped witch-burning. Cp. Allen, _Histoire de
Danemark_, i, 281.]
[Footnote 675: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 377-79, 383; Allen, as cited, i,
286, 310.]
[Footnote 676: Otte, p. 222; Allen, i, 287, 290.]
[Footnote 677: Crichton and Wheaton, i, 384-86; Allen, pp. 287-90.]
[Footnote 678: Allen, i, 299, 300.]
[Footnote 679: Crichton and Wheaton, pp. 386, 387. These writers
suppress the details as to Frederick's anti-popular action; and Otte's
history, giving these, omits all mention of his act of toleration.
Allen's is the best account, i, 293, 299, 301, 305.]
[Footnote 680: Crichton and Wheaton, pp. 394-96; Otte, pp. 222-24.
According to some accounts, the great bulk of the spoils went to the
nobility. Villers, _Essay on the Reformation_, Eng. tr. 1836, p. 105.]
[Footnote 681: It is notable that even in the thirteenth century there
was a Norwegian king (Erik) called the Priest-hater, because of his
efforts to make the clergy pay taxes.]
[Footnote 682: "The bulk of the people, at least in the first instance,
and especially in Sweden and Norway, were by no means disposed to look
to Wittenberg rather than to Rome for spiritual guidance" (Bain,
_Scandinavia_, p. 86; cp. pp. 60, 64).]
[Footnote 683: Geijer, p. 177; Otte, p. 234.]
[Footnote 684: As the king wrote later to an acquisitive noble: "To
strip churches, convents, and prebends of estates, manors, and chattels,
thereto are all full willing and ready; and after such a fashion is
every man a Christian and evangelical"--_i.e._ Lutheran. Geijer, p. 126.
Cp. p. 129 as to the practice of spoliation.]
[Footnote 685: Geijer, pp. 119, 129.]
[Footnote 686: _Id._ p. 125; Otte, p. 236. The prelates were no longer
admitted to any political offices, though the bishops and pastors sat
together in the Diet.]
[Footnote 687: See Geijer, pp. 129-36.]
[Footnote 688: Prof. York Powell, article on Icelandic Literature, in
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_, 10th ed. xii, 621; 11th ed. xiv, 233.]
[Footnote 689: _Id._ (11th ed. xiv, 234).]
[Footnote 690: Bain, _Scandinavia_, pp. 100-1.]
[Footnote 691: Powell, article on Icelandic Literature, _Ency. Brit._
10th ed. xii, 621.]
[Footnote 692: _Id._ p. 623.]
[Footnote 693: Shaftesbury (_Characteristics_, ed. 1900, ii, 262) writes
in 1713 of "that forlorn troop of begging gentry extant in Denmark or
Sweden, since the time that those nations lost their liberties."]
[Footnote 694: Crichton and Wheaton, ii, 104.]
[Footnote 695: _Id._ ii, 321-22.]
[Footnote 696: Laing in 1839 (_Tour in Sweden_, p. 13) thought the Danes
as backward as they had been in 1660, quoting the ambassador Molesworth
as to the effect of Lutheran Protestantism in destroying Danish
liberties (pp. 10, 11). But it is hard to see that there were any
popular liberties to destroy, save in so far as the party which set up
the Reformation undid the popular laws of Christian II. The greatest
social reforms in Denmark are certainly the work of the last
half-century.]
[Footnote 697: It will be remembered that the Marquis of Pombal, in
Portugal, at the same period, was similarly overthrown after a much
longer and non-scandalous reformatory rule, the queen being his enemy.]
[Footnote 698: His particulars were gathered during a tour he made in
1799. Thus the Norse practice he notes had been independent of any
effect produced by his own essay.]
[Footnote 699: _Essay on the Principle of Population_, 7th ed. pp. 126,
133.]
[Footnote 700: This was doubtless owing to the loss of Finland (1742), a
circumstance not considered by Malthus.]
[Footnote 701: Malthus (p. 141) gives higher and clearly erroneous
figures for both periods, and contradicts them later (p. 143) with
figures which he erroneously applies to Sweden _and Finland_. He seems
to have introduced the latter words in the wrong passage.]
[Footnote 702: _Id._ p. 141.]
[Footnote 703: See p. 131 as to the restrictions on subdivision of farms
by way of safeguarding the forests.]
[Footnote 704: _Id._ p. 126. A priest would often refuse to marry a
couple who had no good prospect of a livelihood: so far could rational
custom affect even ecclesiastical practice.]
[Footnote 705: Cp. Crichton and Wheaton, ii, 339-50; Laing, _Journal of
a Residence in Norway_ (1834-36), ed. 1851, pp. 22, 23, 34, 35, 191,
214.]
[Footnote 706: Crichton and Wheaton, ii, 345. Laing (_Tour in Sweden_,
pp. 277-82) thought the Swedish peasants better off than the Scotch,
though morally inferior to the Norwegian.]
[Footnote 707: Laing, _Norway_, p. 213.]
[Footnote 708: Laing, as cited, p. 220; Crichton and Wheaton, ii, 368.]
[Footnote 709: Sweden in 1800 stood at 2,347,303; in 1880, at 4,565,668;
in 1900, at 5,136,441. Estimate for 1910, 5,521,943. Norway in 1815
stood at 886,656; in 1910 at 2,391,782.]
[Footnote 710: Laing, as cited, p. 103, _note_.]