84 
THE AMERICAN-SC AN DIN A VI AN REVIEW 
could any one be sure that the rusty iron sword did not antedate the 
one of shining bronze? Or how could one know that both were not 
in use simultaneously by two different peoples in different stages of 
civilization, while perhaps a third race might be wandering aiound in 
the forests with stone axes and flint-pointed spears? 
Oscar Montelius was a typical Swedish scholar, one who like Carl 
von Linne—to mention only one name that is generally known—pre¬ 
ferred to see for himself, to look long and fixedly as the hsheiman 
looks into the water or the hunter into the depths of the forest, and 
who then, after he had seen all there was to be seen, would draw his 
own clear and sane conclusions m which every paiticulai was based 
on fact. It is this that differentiates the Swedish scholar when at his 
best from others who like to throw bridges over unknown abysses: the 
Swedish bridges do not break, because they are not built of the stuff 
that dreams are made of. 
Oscar Montelius knew everything there was to be known about 
bronze swords. He made a note of where they had been found, in 
what kind of territory, at what elevation above the sea, and in what 
part of the country. He compared all Swedish bronze swords with 
other implements of bronze, paying regard to form, character of 
material, and style of ornamentation, and this information he reduced 
to tables covering all the antiquities discovered. Many of the similar¬ 
ities and dissimilarities he noted were accidental, but others were of 
the greatest significance. They enabled him to trace the evolution of 
a certain form from another form, which must therefore be older, and 
he proved his point by unmistakable circumstances in connection with 
the discovery. His method was that known as the typological method. 
It brought the first definite result, when, after many years of labor, 
excavations, museum research, and traveling, he was able to say with 
certainty what was older and what was younger within the Bronze 
Age and to say also that all the antiquities counted within this period 
(and its sub-periods which he discovered) were younger than the stone 
axes and older than the iron swords. But how old was the Bronze 
Age in the North? Was it 5,000 or 25,000 or only 1,000 years old? 
And in what relation did these discoveries stand to the vikings of 
whom we read in the stories of the early Middle Ages, in Frankish, 
Saxon, or Irish chronicles, or to the Northmen mentioned by the 
geographers of ancient times, by Ptolemy, Pliny, or Tacitus? 
It may have been a chance coincidence that when Montelius was 
systematizing the antiquities of the North, the pre-Hellenic period 
in Greece was being unveiled through discoveries in Mycenae, Troy, 
and other places ; but it was no chance that Montelius utilized these 
discoveries and similar ones in Egypt, Italy, and the islands of the 
Mediterranean for comparison with our own Bronze Age and that he 
found in the records of those countries—where annals and historical 
