Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/140

126 from the statement in the Egils Saga that in the reign of Æthelstan almost every family of note in Northern England was Danish on the father’s or mother’s side.

In the account of the early history of the Danes which Saxo gives us, we read of the part which other nations of the Baltic coasts took in the war between them and the Swedes. There were Kurlanders, Esthonians. Livonians, and Slavs, from the eastern or southern coasts of the Baltic Sea engaged in that war, and it is by such alliances rendered probable that in expeditions against England the Danes or Northmen also had Eastmen of these maritime nations acting with them. If alliances could exist in the later Anglo-Saxon period, there is no reason why they might not have existed during the time when the Danes were fighting for new homes and largely settling in England, or that some of these Baltic allied people may not have settled in England with them under the Danish name. Under that name Fins also may have come among other so-called Danes, and there is evidence that a few of them did come. Finland, the most northern of the Baltic countries, inhabited by people allied to, or perhaps even descended in part from, the old Gothic and Scandinavian stock, has been through the range of history, and still is, more advanced in the arts of civilization than its Slavic neighbours, and its geographical position in ancient time brought it into commercial intercourse with Scandinavia and Denmark.

There are reasons for believing that the Finnic race occupied part of the Northern peninsula at an early period in the history of Scandinavia. At a remote time, which tradition places at the beginning of the Iron Age in that country, but which may have been much earlier, the country was overrun by people of a different race from its aboriginal inhabitants—i.e., by tribes of similar racial characters to those of the early Gothic or Teutonic