I also maintain that neither at the mouth of the Elbe, nor anywhere else out of the Norselands, do we see the remains of a dense, warlike, and maritime population—a population which has left traces in the number of its graves far greater than has Rome itself.
How could the host miscalled Saxon by the later Romans, which overran Europe, till the downfall of the empire, for four centuries, avoid leaving such traces? Their population must have been very dense in order to allow them to send forth such vast fleets to fight and conquer the Romans. How is it that the Saxons, whom we know as Saxons, were not a sea-faring people in the time of Charlemagne, as we know they were not? Simply because they never had been. How is it that in Charlemagne’s time, on the other hand, the Sueones who must have been the Saxons of the later Romans were dreaded by him as powerful at sea, just as they are described by Tacitus?
Have not the races which have disappeared in America or elsewhere left traces, and must we make an exception of the so-called Saxons of the Romans? This would be against the evidence of everything before us.
It is by comparing the graves and antiquities of the Norselands with those of England that we have the proof that the early settlers of Britain were Norsemen. The scene in this volume, of Ivar going to visit his kinsmen on the banks of the River Cam, in England, has been described, because there is a cemetery there whose antiquities show its Norse origin, and the Roman coins buried with them, of Trajanus, 98-117 A.D.; of Hadrianus, 117-138; Faustina, wife of Antoninus Pius, 138-161; Marcus Aurelius, 161-180; of Maximianus, 286-305, show how early Norse settlements began.
What are the objects found in that cemetery, and described in the beautiful work of the Honorable R. C. Neville, “Saxon Obsequies, Illustrated by Ornaments and Weapons Discovered in a Cemetery near Little Wilbraham, Cambridgeshire,” printed in 1852? Swords, axes, umbos, cinerary urns with burned bones, wooden buckets with bronze hoops, bronze tweezers, spear and arrow heads of iron, ear picks, iron knives, iron shears, brooches, beads of glass, and other material fired by cremation.
I will quote the words of Mr. Neville himself: “That so large a number of urns containing human remains should have been discovered in conjunction with skeletons, affords a remarkably satisfactory confirmation of the coexistence of these two modes of burial. My experience enables me to state with confidence that the urns now discovered differ entirely from any [Roman] I had before encountered, and resemble closely those usually met with in Anglo-Saxon burying-grounds, etc.”