22 EMIGRATION FROM SWEDEN 



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 historic 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 

 fact it was a settled agricultural people with good possibilities of increasing their 

 prodution to the same extent as the population increased. 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 disinclination to split up and leave their original ancestral farm and 

 settle 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 much in their old farms. But these inconveniences were 

 gradually removed without any emigrations. 



It was, as we have already seen, the terrible effects 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 historic 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 

 semi*starvation 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. 



