Chambers's Repository of Instructive and Amusing Tracts (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Chambers's Repository of Instructive and Amusing Tracts

At what (period the gothic-germanic race, which now inhabits Norway an Sweden, first entered those countries, still remains an unanswered question, as far as indubitable historic evidence is concerned; but whatever may have been the time at which the immigration took place, the archaeological monuments of the countries, and the traditions of the people, leave no doubt as to their having, on their arrival, found the country inhabited by another race, with whom they had to sustain a, long and severe stru le for supremacy. These older occupants of the hypea nort were in all, probability the Finns, a race still 8 read over part of north-eastem Europe and northern Asia, and w me name occurs for the first time in the lilmwlb oit'htachitus, who describes them as a and eu race, °ving y e c ase alone, mmmg' about withm settled mes, clad in the skins of wild mimale, having no shelter but the trees of the forest, and making the bare earth their bed. But Tacitus ke of the Finns of more countries; whether those of ndinavia were in an y, barbarous state at the time of the arrival of the Gothic tri It is not possible to determine; but if the conflicts between the gods or Asar, and the J otuns, Svartalfer, and other beings mentioned in Scandinavian myths and traditions, do indeed represent the struggles of the Goths with the earlier inhabitants of t e country, it may be inferred from these, that there were varieties among the Finnish tribes; for while some of the op onents of the Asar are represented as powerful giants, others are escribed as contemptible dwarfs, dangerous only through their wiles and cunning.

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