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we find it in old writings and in modern authors.
Any account of the period must be tentative and
provisional, depending on annals and sagas which
cannot be trusted implicitly, and on inferences which
a wider knowledge may upset. But there is one class
of misstatements which ought to be cleared away at
the beginning the wide-spread belief in the prehistoric
Viking. There is no reason to assert that
Scandinavian sea-robbers, as distinct from the Angles
and Saxons of the fifth and sixth centuries, appeared
on the coasts of Britain before the end of the eighth
century.
In a well-known book, justly popular on account of
its wealth of illustration, the late Paul du Chaillu used
the argument from this doubtful entry of "Northmen
from Hærethaland" to enforce his idea that the "so-called
Saxons," as he was careful to call them, were
precisely the same people as the Scandinavian Vikings,
whose sagas, he remarked, never called the English
"Saxons," as the Celtic nations did. He contended
that from Roman days to the twelfth century there was
a continuous stream of invasion setting in from the
Baltic shores to Britain; littus Saxonicum was a
Viking settlement; the English came from Engelholm
on the Cattegat, and from places named Engeln in
Sweden; Tacitus mentioned the boats of the Suiones,
and surely their "mighty fleets" must have been
employed between the days of Agricola and those of
Charlemagne in more than local traffic; the whole
millennium was a Viking Age.
Burton also (Hist. Scotland, i. 302) wrote that
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