Scandinavian-Britain

THE EARLIEST RAIDS .57centuries: now at last theyconquer. It was not that theyGaul and Britain, but that theyfound new worlds tohad never heard ofhad not been inducedor emboldened to venture so far in small parties forthe sake of robbery under arms.What, then, was the reason, or occasion, of thissudden outburst ?Steenstrup thought that overpopulation,through polygamy, had made emigration necessary: but the earlier raids were not emigration ;andK. Maurer argued that Harald Fairhair's attempts tocheck emigration showed that Norway was not toocrowded. J. R. Green, in his Conquest of England,suggested that as the unification of the small Scandinaviankingdoms had already begun, the more independentspirits preferred adventure and exile to alienrule ; adding that it is needless to look further fora reason than the hope of plunder. But attempts atunification had begun long before this period in Denmarkand Sweden, and in Norway Harald Fairhair'sdomination came after the Viking Age had alreadyset in. The hope of plunder was no doubt the motive,but why should this date stand as the moment whensuch hopes were formed ? Others have supposed thatheathendom was making reprisals for Charlemagne'swar on the Saxons ;but this idea involves a solidarityamong the Scandinavians, and a sentiment of religion,wholly foreign to all we know of them. The Vikingraids may have been prompted partly by hate of theChristian invader, but they were not analogous tothe Crusades; they simply meant that the peopleof the Baltic awoke to the possibilityof successful