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Chap. XV.
THE DANISH LANGUAGE.
229
moment allow that the maritime glory of our country,
the dominion of the waves, could ever descend to us
from German forefathers—a race incapable of crossing
a duck-puddle without being sea-sick; or our love of
colonisation from a race who never possessed a single
colony of their own? The Vikings of old—blackguards
though they might be—were fine, bold, dashing
fellows. They cared little to settle, but were ever ready
to seek new adventures—to launch forth on the
unknown seas in quest of prey and conquest; they robbed
—they pillaged, murdered, burnt, laid waste—they
struck terror far and wide.
“ A furore Normanorum libera nos O Domine! ” was
added by the helpless Saxon to the Litany of the ninth
century; still, as they have long since passed away, let
us forgive them their failings, and only admire what
was glorious and heroic in their deeds, the romance and
poetry of their existence. Your stay-at-home people,
full of “ sweet home ” (mutton 1(M a pound) and other
like domestic comforts, may descend from Anglo-Saxons,
if you will; but our sailors, our explorers, our
missionaries, our adventurers of all sorts, have, depend upon it,
running in their veins a dash of the Sea-king of
Scandinavia. Why, the duchy of Normandy itself, conquered
by the Scandinavian Vikings, under Rollo, derives its
name from the Northmen (Normans); and William
the Conqueror, his descendant, is represented on the
Bayeux tapestry as advancing to the battle of
Hastings (a town named after the Northman pirate, Hasting),
his banner borne by a mailed knight—a banner,
semicircular in form, from which hangs a fringe of nine
points, in the centre a bird like the raven of Odin, of a
blue-black on a yellow ground. After the conquest of
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