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His views (Vikingerne, i. p. 134) may be summarised
thus:–
Long before Ireland was attacked, viz. a.d. 700 or
earlier, men from south-western Norway – Hordaland,
Ryfylke, Jæderen, and neighbouring settlements, – may
have sailed over the North Sea and landed in
Orkney and Shetland. Several Shetland place-names
are formed in a way which had gone out of fashion
when Iceland was colonised, as Dr. Jakob Jakobsen
notes (in Aarböger for nordisk Oldkyndighed, 1902).
Further, the Viking Age settlers had owned their land
so long that they could call it their odal or udal, and
the tradition was that jarl Torf-Einar took the odal
lands away from the boendr, who got them back from
Sigurd Hlödver’s son; whereas in Iceland, colonised
late in the ninth century, no such word as odal is
used: the Icelanders who left their native country
under compulsion had their odals in Norway, not
in Iceland. With the Norse may have come
Gotlanders; stones inscribed with the earlier runes (of
the kind used before the Viking Age) and found in
Norway bear witness to a connexion with east Sweden
and Gotland, and in Gotland there is a series of
pillar-stones dating from 700 or earlier, with spirals
and other ornaments of a Celtic type, which suggests
intercourse between Celtic countries and the Baltic,
possibly by way of Orkney and Norway.
With regard to these three lines of argument it
might be answered that a connexion between Britain
and the Baltic in early ages need not be doubted, but
that it was more likely to have been by way of Frisia;
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