Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 3.djvu/391

 KINGS OF NORWAY. 379 heathen, not Danish men, who maraud in Northumberland notes. or cast of the Thames ; while those who apparently coasted along the continent before crossing over, and ravaged in the south and west of England, in Kent, Dorsetshire, and even in Cornwall, are generally called Danes. If this reading be admissible, it would remove the difficulty with regard to the time when Ivar Vidfadme or his descendant Rao'nar Lodbrok marauded in England. They were Danes, or people from the same coast from which the Anglo-Saxons themselves originally came as marauders and colonists into England ; and the limitation in the passage of the Saxon Chronicle under the year 787 would apply, as the sense of the passage seems to require, only to the Northmen from Hordaland or Heredaland, who first came in that year to the shores of England ; not to the Danes from J utland, Slesvick, and Hol- stein, who, it is reasonable to suppose, must from the days of Hengist have been in the habit of visiting England from the same coast from which he and so many expeditions after his sailed, either to trade with their kinsmen or plunder them. We see no reasonable ground for believing that after so many naval expeditions to England from that coast, during the centuries subsequent to the year 450, the art of navigating from the same coast to England was so entirely lost that in the year 787 the Danes, — that is, the inhabitants of the coasts from which the Anglo-Saxons originally embarked, — were an unknown people to their own posterity in England. But the Northmen from Heredaland might very well be strangers ; and the year 787 might very well be the first of the appear- ance of those northern marauders, who inmiediately after- wards laid waste the country by their expeditions. III. The 32d chapter of the Knytlinga Saga, — that is, of the saga of the family of Knut or Canute the Great, — is a very curious and important historical document. It is a kind of statistical account of the military force and organization of Denmark in the time of Saint Canute. He was the son and successor of King Swend, a sister's son of Canute the Great.