Note. After surveying the races of men who constituted the ancient population of the west of Europe, we ought now to pursue our inquiry towards the north. The German nations appear to come next in order after the Celts and the races of Iberians and Italians, who are beyond them towards the south and the west. But the Germans are not the aborigines of the most northern parts in Europe: they found those countries previously occupied by Allophyllian tribes. Before proceeding to the Germans, we must investigate the history and relations of these tribes.

CHAPTER V.

ABORIGINES OF NORTHERN EUROPE.-RACE OF IOTUNS, TSCHUDES, AND OUGRES.

SECTION I.-Historical Survey.

An extensive region in the northern part of the old continent, including all the countries beyond the Baltic, and a tract of uncertain limits stretching thence towards the east as far as the Uralian mountains and beyond that chain of hills and the river Obi reaching almost to the remote Yeniseï, has been the immemorial abode of numerous tribes of people who may be considered as belonging to one great family of nations. Many parts of that region are still inhabited by races descended from the same stock, while in others the native tribes have been exterminated, or driven further northwards, or into forests and mountainous tracts: almost everywhere they have been vanquished and oppressed by more powerful nations who have encroached upon them from the south, of German, or Slavonian, or of Tartar origin. In one only instance has it fallen to the lot of a people descended from this race to found an independent state, or to take any part in the affairs of the civilised world.* I allude to the kingdom of the Magyars or Hungarians. The several tribes belonging to this family of nations have no collective name or general epithet, either adopted by themselves or universally bestowed upon them by foreigners, that might serve to distinguish them from people who are strangers to their stock and lineage. Each nation has its particular appellative. In some instances the names given to

• See Schloezer's Allgem. Nord. Geschichte. Müller's Ugrische Volkstamm. Rühs, Finnland und seine Bewohner.

individual tribes appear to have been derived from the nature of the countries which they inhabit. It has been supposed by Ihre and others that the Finns were so termed by their German and Swedish neighbours from the fenns and marshy districts with which their land abounds.* The name of the Quæns is said to have had a similar origin. The meaning of Lappes, in Russian Lopari, is yet unknown: no probable explanation of it has been found. The name of Tschudes or Tschudaki, meaning foreigners or barbarians, was originally given in the Russian annals to the native people on the shores of the Livonian gulf, who were a tribe of the same race.§ This epithet has lately been used by writers on ethnography in a more extensive sense, and has been made to comprehend all the numerous tribes in the Russian empire who speak languages akin to the dialect of the original or Livonian Tschudes. In like manner the name of Finns has been generalised by some late German writers, who include under that designation, besides the proper Finns, the Laplanders, and the different tribes in the north of Europe and of Asia, whom the Russians. assimilate with the Tschudes. A recent author of great learning, who has treated expressly on the history of this family of

• Fen (Islandice). Palus, terra paludosa.—(Anglo-Sax.)—Idem, Ihre, Glossar.— Fen (Hollandice Fenn). Palus. Skinner. See Lehrberg, über die Wohnsitze der Jemen, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte Neu-Finnlands, in Untersuchungen zur Erläuterung der alten Geschichte Russlands. 4to. St. Petersburg, 1826.

+ Quæns is the appellation still given in the northern parts of Norway to the Finnlanders. (Von Buch, Lehrberg, lib. citat.) The Finnlanders in the eastern parts of Bothnia call themselves, as Lehrberg declares, Kainu-laiset, meaning People of the low or marshy land. (See also Geijer, Schwedens Urgeschichte Deutsch-Übersetzt, s. 354.)

Lappe is derived by Lehrberg from a Finnish word meaning "the extreme," "the last or furthest." Ihre derives it from Lop or Lap, an old Swedish word meaning wizard or enchanter. But as a similar name is given to this people by their Russian neighbours, it is most probably an ancient epithet derived from a national name of the original Lappes. (See Geijer's note in p. 349.)

§ Dobrowsky, an excellent authority in any question connected with Slavonian antiquity, informs us that there are three terms in the Slavonic languages nearly corresponding with the Greek Bapßapoí, Czud or Tschud, Vlach, and Niem. The latter is appropriated to people of German race, the second to Gauls or Celts: the first is used as the designation of the aboriginal tribes in the Russian empire akin to the Lappes and Finns. (Dobrowsky, Geschichte der Böhmischen Sprache, Prag.

nations, gives to all of them the collective name of Ugrians, from the Ugri or Ougres, who are tribes inhabiting the Uralian mountains. There is an obvious inconvenience in such double acceptations of the same terms, since the reader may not in all cases easily distinguish whether they are used in a particular or in a more general sense.

I shall avoid the obscurities that might arise from the use of ambiguous terms, by comprehending the nations of this family under the epithets of Iotuns, Tschudes, and Ougres, neither of which is applicable to any particular nation. The meaning and limitations of each of these names will be explained as I proceed.

By the first term, which is that of Iotuns or Iotnen, it appears that the Northmen of Scandinavia were accustomed to designate the more ancient inhabitants of that country who were alien to the lineage of Odin, and to all the tribes of the Germanic race. It was used by our ancestors nearly in the same sense in which the Greeks and Romans used the term of barbarian. The epithet of Jotun or Iotnen is of frequent occurrence in the sagas. In these compositions it has, according to Geijer, both a mythological and an historical acceptation. In the former sense, beings so termed are the destructive powers of Nature personified and represented under the forms of giants or dwarfs and enchanters. Iotuns among the old poets of the north, as were the Titans of the Greeks, were the enemies of gods and men, creatures of the imagination, symbolical of physical and moral evils. Races of men who were the hereditary and perpetual foes of the Teutonic tribes, were also called Iotuns; and this term assumes its historical sense when it is used to designate the barbarous aborigines of northern Europe, whose conquest or extirpation by a race of happier destinies is celebrated in the early poems of the Scalds. Traces of these older inhabitants of Scandinavia are found in the stories of their warfare handed down from the early historical age. Adam of Bremen, who during the eleventh century, in

* Der Ugrische Volkstamm, von F. H. Müller.

It is not improbable that Iotun originally was analogous to the Greek word Trav, but it bears ethnographically the sense attributed.

the character of missionary as well as in military service, lived twelve years with the Danish king Swen Ulfson, has preserved a relation of this kind. "Narravit mihi," he says, "rex Danorum sæpe recolendus, gentem quandam ex montanis in plana descendere solitam, et incertum esse unde veniat ". "subito accedunt omnem depopulantur regionem." Enemies of civilisation, these barbarous natives of mountains and forests, who were clothed with the skins of wild beasts, and uttered sounds more like the cries of wild animals than the speech of men-"qui ferarum pellibus utuntur pro vestibus, et loquentes ad invicem frendere magis quam verba proferre dicuntur," dwelt in caves and the clefts of rocks, and issued thence as nightly marauders to perpetrate deeds of blood.* By the Icelanders they were termed Iotnen and Thursen, giants and enchanters. That these designations do not belong to the mere creatures of fancy, such as superstition in later times associates with them, appears from the fact that the historical sagas deduce the genealogy of many families from an Iotnian ancestry. The early poems, according to Geijer, describe real wars in the accounts of contests against barbarians of the rocks and mountains. In the song of Thiodolf to the honour of Thor, that god is termed "the destroyer of mountain-wolves, the overturner of the altars of the Fornjotish idols, the conqueror of Iotuns and Finns. Here an historical name comes forward in connection with the old term of Iotun to explain its meaning in still earlier use. So Snorro Sturleson in the Heimskringla uses Finns and Iotuns as synonymous.§ The people thus termed are plainly the Skrith-finni, who were described by Procopius as inhabiting Thule in the sixth century, and by Paul Warnefrid's Son in the eighth, under nearly the same and of whom Adam of Bremen reports that they exceeded wild beasts in the swiftness of their flight. They dwelt, ac

name,

Adam of Bremen. Geijer, op. cit. p. 341.

+ Geijer, ubi supra.

Geijer, s. 343.

§ In Harald Harfager's Saga in the Heimskringla the Iotun Svase calls himself a Finn. Finn is plainly used as synonymous with Iotni or Jotuns, rendered Iätten in the Swedish version in Peringskiöld's edition of the Heimskringla, and in the Latin version Gigantes.

|| Adam of Bremen terms them Skritefingi. Saxo calls them Scricfinni. He describes them, "Quæ gens inusitatis assueta vehiculis montium inaccessa venationis