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castle that was still there in the 13th century. Thence they moved farther up
the river Dyna and down through Russia to the Grecian empire, where at length
they obtained permanent dwelling — places from the Grecian emperor.
In this case we are probably concerned with a historie event, perhaps several,
that have been preserved in the memory of the people in the form of a legend.
Here too what is reasonable is that the real cause of the extraordinary measure
of banishing a large portion of the people is a famine caused by failure of the crops.
We thus find that tradition both among those nations who have emigrated
themselves and at home in Scandinavia can tell us of emigrations from the Scan«
dinavian regions caused by the country being over«populated. The surplus of
population here concerned was in all probability not of the sort that I called
chronic above, i. e. where the population is constantly greater than can be suppor«
ted by the average food production of the country.
In assuming this it has been supposed that the population consisted of
hunters and fishermen or led a completely or half nomadic life. As a matter of
faet it was a settled agricultural people with good possibilities of inereasing their
prodution to the same extent as the population inereased. There was a great
deal of cultivable land not yet being used; there were also implements and
methods whereby they could turn this land to account. During certain periods
the country so far settled may to some extent have been over«populated on account
of the clan’s disinelination to split up and leave their original ancestral farm and
settie down far away from it to break new ground and form new farms. Thus
in more recent times Gustav Vasa complains in an edict of 1555 that the pea«
sants crowd together too mueh in their old farms. But these inconveniences were
gradually removed without any emigrations.
It was, as we have already seen, the terrible effeets of several successive failures
of the crops that made the people leave. The starving people sought for food where
this could be got. The population of one district certainly applied to another
that was temporarily better off. Even at the beginning of historie times the
Norwegian kings had to adopt energetic measures against those who — as it was
said — ravaged their own country. It is a reasonable supposition that the district
castles, so numerous in our country, which partly derive their origin from the
period of the migrations, were to a certain extent erected to protect the supplies
of grain and cattle from a desperate and starving populace in adjacent hundreds
and counties.
In most cases, however, the failure of the crops extended over great regions of
the country, and there was no other way out of the difficulty than to expel part
of the people so that the fragments obtained from the bad crop and the reduced
stock of cattle might be sufficient for those who were left to exist in a state of
sembstarvation until the next harvest.
Those who were exiled had ships allotted to them in which with their families
and household goods they could cross the sea to places where they knew or
supposed that the harvest had been better and there was food for them. From a Swe«
dish point of view the first districts that had more favourable agricultural condi«
tions and more certain harvests were Scania and the countries on the south and south*
eastern side of the Baltic. It was there most frequently that the course was steered.
L.
J
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