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EMIGRATION FROM SWEDEN IN
ANCIENT TIMES
BY
OTTO v. FRIESEN
UPPSALA
The gothic historian jordanes in a frequently quot*
ed passage in his Getica (Gothic history) calls Scandia, i. e. the Scan*
dinavian peninsula, a »workshop where tribes are forged» and a »womb
of the peoples». Jordanes wrote in 551 A. D. in Italy. He himself was of Gothic
birth and can thus be supposed to be quite familiar with the legends and songs
of their past fortunes that the Goths, like other Germanic tribes of the period of
migrations, preserved with extraordinary fidelity from generation to generation.
His above*quoted statement starts out from the assumption that the great
region in the northern sea that was taken to be an island called Scadinavia or
Scandia by the geographers and historians of antiquity was the primeval home
of a number of the Germanic tribes that appeared in Middle and South Europe
during the period of migrations and whose onset at length overthrew the Roman
Empire, the great civilization of antiquity. He relates himself that his own people,
the Goths, under the leadership of King Berig once left this island and crossed
the sea in three ships. The first time they are mentioned in classical literature
they are settled on the south coast of the Baltic in the neighbourhood of the
estuary of the Vistula. Another of the leading Germanic tribes on the Continent,
the Gepids, has also, according to Jordanes, come over the sea from Scandia to
the islands in the delta of the Vistula, which were called Gepidoios after them —
the Gepidislands. Jordanes’ general view of Scandia as the original home of a
number of tribes of that time also agrees with the traditions quoted by other
writers of the period of migrations.
Paulus Diaconus, who during the time of Charles the great wrote the history
of the Langobards, tells us that this people came from the island of Scadinavia,
which they left because the country was unable to maintain the whole of their
populous tribe. The same legend is quoted a couple of centuries earlier in the
introduction to the statute*book of King Rothar, the Langobardian king, and is
thus obviously based on an ancient tradition in the tribe.
According to the tribal legend the Heruli too are one of the peoples who
emigrated from Scandinavia. Jordanes relates that they were expelled from their
native land by the Dani, who had issued from the tribe of the Svear. As early
as the 3rd century they appear by the side of the Goths in the south*east of
Europe, where they ravage the coasts of the Black sea and the Archipelago. But
on the other hånd they also appear in the Viking expeditions along the shores
of Western Europe in France and Spain. The appearance of the tribe in these
widely separated regions along the two main commercial routes to the north from
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