Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 3.djvu/380

 368 CHRONICLE OF THE NOTES. Jutland. The antiquary might thereby throw some light upon the disputed question, whether the Picts were a Celtic or Gothic people; and whether the Picts were not a race who had expelled a still older race, the Laponic, and had themselves been extirpated by a Caucasian or Gothic race, the followers of Odin. This last succession of inhabitants in Scandinavia is evidently an historical event, although wanting an historical date, and to us only mythological. Manners, customs, laws, and religious and social institutions, existing in Iceland, yet evidently derived from and more adapted to a people in the plains of Asia, and by tradition and religious belief received through their Scandinavian ancestors from Asia, must surely be of Asiatic origin, although the date of the migration from the original seat of those manners, cus- toms, and institutions cannot be assigned. How could the symbolical use of horse-flesh at religious festivals be an obser- vance in Iceland or Norway, where the horse is, from the climate, not in such numbers as to have ever been slaughtered for food, if not a religious ordinance in commemoration of an original country in which the horse was generally used for food ? How could the great and connected mass of tradition and mythology, all referring to an Asiatic origin and home, have arisen in Norway, Sweden, and Iceland, if not founded upon some real event and connection? The event itself is probably not so far distant from historical times as antiquaries imagine. The account which Snorro gives in the fifth chap- ter of the Ynglinga Saga, and also in the Edda attributed to him, of Odin having been driven northwards by the increas- ing power of the Romans in the countries in which he origin- ally lived, may not be so wide of the true date, nor so much too near times of well-ascertained historical truth, as many antiquaries suppose. Torfaeus, reckoning upon extravagant assumptions of longevity in the genealogies given in the Saga, supposes in his history of Norway that Odin came to Scandi- navia in the time of Darius Hydaspes, about 520 years before the Clu-istian aera. But in his " Series Kegum et Dynas- tarum Daniae," lib. iii. cap. 2., he reckons back from Harald Haarfager, who was born 853, to Odin, twenty-six gene- rations, son succeeding father, and allows thirty-five years to each generation, which brings Odin to about fifty-seven years before the Christian aera. He is obliged, therefore, to sup-