34 Norway and the Norii^egians 



river, the Dwina or the Vistula, it found its way down 

 again to the Baltic. There seem to be some traces of 

 this thin uniting thread of trade between the south and 

 the north ; and some think that the earliest northern 

 alphabet — the well-known riuiic alphabet, which 

 belonged to the Scandinavians and the North Germans 

 — found along this route its way from Greece to the 

 Baltic countries; but of this connection between the 

 north and the south no written record now remains. 

 No Greek traveller has told us how the Baltic countries 

 presented themselves to his eyes.^ The Greeks did, 

 we know, talk of a land of the Hyperboreans— a land 

 to the back of the north wind, but they meant by that 

 no reo-ion so far away as Scandinavia. What they 

 meant by this land at the back of the north wind was 

 simply the territory in which no longer blew a certain 

 wind which daily blows down the ^gean Sea ; so that 

 their land of Hyperboreans would lie but a little to the 

 nortli of the Greek Sea, say in Thrace, or on the other 

 side of Mount Htemus, the Balkans, i.e. in modern 

 Bulgaria— far enough removed from tlie Baltic lands. 



But when we have travelled down the stream of time 

 till the days of the Ptoman Empire, until after the 

 beginning of our era, then we do find the Scandinavian 

 lands beginning, as it were, to dawn on the general 

 knowledge of mankind. A certain knight in the reign 



1 The only Greek traveller who got at all near to these regions and left 

 any record of his travels was Pytheas, a merchant of Marseilles. Some 

 commentators have thought from his descriptions that he passed beyond 

 the Cimbric Chersonese (Jutland) to within the Baltic. But the best 

 authorities are agreed that he never saw any of the Scandinavian 

 countries, save, maybe, Denmark, and of that only the western coast of 

 Jutland. 



