THE 
American-Scandinavian 
Review 
Volume X 
February, 1922 
Number 2 
Oscar Montelius 
By Ernst Klein 
Oscar Montelius is dead. Who was he? He was a man who 
saw the past, thousands and thousands of years, not darkly as in a 
dream, not in the lightning flashes of a primitive poetic genius, but 
steadily and soberly in the enduring light of reality, detail after 
detail, as the architect sees the house he is planning to build, or the 
farmer sees the fields he is laying under the plough. 
In exactly the same manner Oscar Montelius saw the prehistoric 
eras, not instantaneously in a synthetic glance, but step by step, as 
his bold, untiring pilgrimage through the depths of the dark ages, 
lasting more than half a century, opened new paths and led him to new 
places. And wherever he went forward there was light, so that now 
any one can see the way. Therefore the name of Oscar Montelius has 
become one that is mentioned with gratitude in all languages as that 
of the man who first successfully cast the searchlight of modern 
scholarship over that prehistoric European field which no literature 
and hardly any tradition illumined. In those formerly unexplored 
regions he discovered and brought to light stage after stage of de¬ 
velopment, from the Stone Age through the eras of copper and bronze 
down to the epoch of iron and steel in which it may be said that we 
are still living. 
It was not Montelius who invented the division into ages accord¬ 
ing to the civilization of the race as indicated by the material from 
which its most important weapons and working implements were 
made. But in the early seventies when, as a young student, he threw 
himself into the investigation of the Swedish antiquities contained in 
the State archaeological collection, this division into three ages was 
still a conjecture and subject to dispute. It was true that plenty of 
flint axes, numerous beautiful swords and breast ornaments of bronze, 
and many articles made of iron were found in Swedish earth; but how 
