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Rh interest, and at a time when national lines were not yet drawn, it is futile to fit the inadequate evidence into one or another theory. The important fact is that Norway, Denmark, and even more distant Sweden, all contributed to the colonists who settled in Normandy under Rollo and his successors, and the achievements of the Normans thus become the common heritage of the Scandinavian race.

The colonization of Normandy was, of course, only a small part of the work of this heroic age of Scandinavian expansion. The great emigration from the North in the ninth and tenth centuries has been explained in part by the growth of centralized government and the consequent departure of the independent, the turbulent, and the untamed for new fields of adventure; but its chief cause was doubtless that which lies back of colonizing movements in all ages, the growth of population and the need of more room. Five centuries earlier this land-hunger had pushed the Germanic tribes across the Rhine and Danube and produced the great wandering of the peoples which destroyed the Roman empire; and the Viking raids were simply a later aspect of this same Völkerwanderung, retarded by the outlying position of the Scandinavian lands and by the greater difficulty of migration by sea. For, unlike the Goths who swept across the map of Europe in vast curves of marching men, or the Franks who moved forward by slow stages of gradual settlement in their