as they come to us in legend and folk-song, much of which we must
conclude is imaginary, beautiful as it is. But Mother Earth has
revealed to us, at the spade of the archaeologist, trustworthy
and irrefutable accounts of the age and the various degrees of
civilization of the race which inhabited the Scandinavian Peninsula in
prehistoric times. Splendid specimens now extant in numerous museums
prove that Scandinavia, like most other countries, has had a Stone
Age, a Bronze Age, and an Iron Age, and that each of these periods
reached a much higher development than in other countries.

The Scandinavian countries are for the first time mentioned by the
historians of antiquity in an account of a journey which Pyteas from
Massilia (the present Marseille) made throughout Northern Europe,
about 300 B.C. He visited Britain, and there heard of a great country,
Thule, situated six days' journey to the north, and verging on the
Arctic Sea. The inhabitants in Thule were an agricultural people who
gathered their harvest into big houses for threshing, on account of
the very few sunny days and the plentiful rain in their regions. From
corn and honey they prepared a beverage (probably mead).

Pliny the Elder, who himself visited the shores of the Baltic in the
first century after Christ, is the first to mention plainly the name
of Scandinavia. He says that he has received advices of immense
islands "recently discovered from Germany." The most famous of these
islands was Scandinavia, of as yet unexplored size; the known parts
were inhabited by a people called _hilleviones_, who gave it the name
of another world. He mentions Scandia, Nerigon, the largest of them
all, and Thule. Scandia and Scandinavia are only different forms of
the same name, denoting the southernmost part of the peninsula, and
still preserved in the name of the province of Scania in Sweden.