Passing of the Great Race — The Nordic Race

With the fall of Constantinople the Empire of Rome passes finally from the scene of history and the development of civilization is transferred from Mediterranean lands and from the Mediterranean race to the North Sea and to the Nordic race.

VI THE NORDIC RACE

We have shown that the Mediterranean race entered Europe from the south and forms part of a great group of peoples extending into southern Asia, that the Alpine race came from the east through Asia Minor and the valley of the Danube and that its present European distribution is merely the westernmost point of an ethnic pyramid, the base of which rests solidly on the round skulled peoples of the great plateaux of central Asia.

Both of these races are, therefore, western extensions of Asiatic subspecies and neither of them can be considered as exclusively European.

With the remaining race, the Nordic, however, the case is different.

This is a purely European type, in the sense that it has developed its physical characters and its civilization within the confines of that continent.

It is, therefore, the _Homo europæus_, the white man par excellence.

It is everywhere characterized by certain unique specializations, namely, wavy brown or blond hair and blue, gray or light brown eyes, fair skin, high, narrow and straight nose, which are associated with great stature and a long skull, as well as with abundant head and body hair.

A composite picture of this Nordic race and remarkable examples of its best contemporary types can be found in the English illustrated weeklies, which are publishing during this great war the lists and portraits of their officers who have fallen in battle.

No nation, not even England although richly endowed with a Nordic gentry, can stand the loss of so much good blood.

Here is the evidence, if such be needed, of the actual Passing of the Great Race.

Abundance of hair is an ancient and generalized character which the Nordics share with the Alpines of both Europe and Asia, but the light colored eyes and light colored hair are characters of relatively recent specialization and consequently highly unstable.

The pure Nordic race is at present clustered around the shores of the Baltic and North Seas from which it has spread west and south and east fading off gradually into the two preceding races.

The centre of its greatest purity is now in Sweden and there is no doubt that at first the Scandinavian Peninsula and later, also, the immediately adjoining shores of the Baltic were the centres of radiation of the Teutonic or Scandinavian branch of this race.

The population of Scandinavia has been composed of this Nordic subspecies from the commencement of Neolithic times and Sweden to-day represents one of the few countries which has never been overwhelmed by foreign conquest and in which there has been but a single racial type from the beginning.

This nation is unique in its unity of race, language, religion and social ideals.

Southern Scandinavia only became fit for human habitation on the retreat of the glaciers about twelve thousand years ago and apparently was immediately occupied by the Nordic race.

This is one of the few geological dates which is absolute and not relative.

It rests on a most interesting series of computations made by Baron DeGeer, based on an actual count of the laminated deposits of clay laid down annually by the retreating glaciers, each layer representing the summer deposit of the subglacial stream.

The Nordics first appear at the close of the Paleolithic along the coasts of the Baltic.

The earliest industry discovered in this region, named the Maglemose and found in Denmark and elsewhere around the Baltic, is probably the culture of the Proto-Teutonic branch of the Nordic race.

No human remains in connection therewith have been found.

The vigor and power of the Nordic race as a whole is such that it could not have been evolved in so restricted an area as southern Sweden although its Teutonic or Scandinavian section did develop there in comparative isolation.

The Nordics must have had a larger field for their specialization and a longer period for their evolution than is afforded by the limited time which has elapsed since Sweden became habitable.

For the development of so marked a type there is required a continental area isolated and protected for long ages from the intrusion of other races.

The climatic conditions must have been such as to impose a rigid elimination of defectives through the agency of hard winters and the necessity of industry and foresight in providing the year’s food, clothing and shelter during the short summer.

Such demands on energy if long continued would produce a strong, virile and self-contained race which would inevitably overwhelm in battle nations whose weaker elements had not been purged by the conditions of an equally severe environment.

An area conforming to these requirements is offered by the forests and plains of eastern Germany, Poland and Russia.

It was here that the Proto-Nordic type evolved and here their remnants are found.

They were protected from Asia on the east by the then almost continuous water connections across eastern Russia between the White Sea and the old Caspian-Aral Sea.

During the last glacial advance (known as the Würm) which, like the preceding glaciations, is believed to have been a period of land depression, the White Sea extended far to the south of its present limits, while the enlarged Caspian Sea, then and long afterward connected with the Sea of Aral, extended northward to the great bend of the Volga.

The intermediate area was studded with large lakes and morasses.

Thus an almost complete water barrier of shallow sea located just west of the low Ural Mountains, separated Europe from Asia during the Würm glaciation and the following period of glacial retreat.

The broken connection was restored just before the dawn of history by a slight elevation of the land and the shrinking of the Caspian-Aral Sea through the increasing desiccation which has left its present surface below sea level.

An important element in the maintenance of the isolation of this Nordic cradle on the south is the fact that from earliest times down to this day the pressure of population has been unchangeably from the bleak and sterile north, southward and eastward, into the sunny but enervating lands of France, Italy, Greece, Persia and India.

In these forests and steppes of the north, the Nordic race gradually evolved in isolation and at an early date spread north over the Scandinavian Peninsula together with much of the land now submerged under the Baltic and North Seas.

Nordic strains form everywhere a substratum of population throughout Russia and underlie the round skulled Slavs who first appear a little over a thousand years ago as coming not from the direction of Asia but from south Poland.

Burial mounds called kurgans are widely scattered throughout Russia from the Carpathians to the Urals and contain numerous remains of a dolichocephalic race,—in fact, more than three-fourths of the skulls are of this type.

Round skulls first become numerous in ancient Russian graveyards about 900 A. D.

and soon increase to such an extent that in the Slavic period from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries one-half of the skulls were brachycephalic, while in modern cemeteries the proportion of round skulls is still greater.

The ancient Nordic element, however, still forms a very considerable portion of the population of northern Russia and contributes the blondness and the red-headedness so characteristic of the Russian of to-day.

As we leave the Baltic coasts the Nordic characters fade out both toward the south and east.

The blond element in the nobility of Russia is of later Scandinavian and Teutonic origin.

When the seas which separated Russia from Asia dried, when the isolation and exacting climate of the north had done their work and produced the vigorous Nordic type, and when in the fulness of time bronze for their weapons reached them these men burst upon the southern races, conquering east, south and west.

They brought with them from the north the hardihood and vigor acquired under the rigorous selection of a long winter season and vanquished in battle the inhabitants of older and feebler civilizations, but only to succumb in their turn to the softening influences of a life of ease and plenty in their new homes.

The earliest recorded appearance of Aryan-speaking Nordics is our first dim vision of the Sacæ introducing Sanskrit into India, the Cimmerians pouring through the passes of the Caucasus from the grasslands of South Russia to invade the Empire of the Medes and the Achæans and Phrygians conquering Greece and the Ægean coast of Asia Minor.

About 1100 B. C.

Nordics enter Italy as Umbrians and Oscans and soon after other Nordics cross the Rhine into Gaul.

The latter were the western vanguard of the Celtic-speaking tribes which had long occupied those districts in Germany which lay south and west of the Teutonic Nordics.

These Teutons at this early date were confined probably to Scandinavia and the immediate shores of the Baltic and were just beginning to press southward.

This first Celtic wave of Nordics seems to have swept westward along the sandy plains of northern Europe, and entered France through the Low Countries.

From this point as Goidels they spread north into Britain, reaching there about 800 B. C.

As Gauls they conquered all France and pushed on southward and westward into Spain and over the Maritime Alps into northern Italy, where they encountered the kindred Nordic Umbrians, who at an earlier date had crossed the Alps from the northeast.

Other Celtic-speaking Nordics apparently migrated up the Rhine and down the Danube and by the time the Romans came on the scene the Alpines of central Europe had been thoroughly Celticized.

These tribes pushed eastward into southern Russia and reached the Crimea as early as the fourth century B. C.

Mixed with the natives, they were called by the Greeks the Celto-Scyths.

This swarming out of what is now called Germany of the first Nordics was during the closing phases of the Bronze Period and was contemporary with and probably caused by the first great expansion of the Teutons from Scandinavia by way both of Denmark and the Baltic coasts.

These invaders were succeeded by a second wave of Celtic-speaking peoples, the Cymry or Brythons, who drove their Goidelic predecessors still farther westward and exterminated and absorbed them over large areas.

These Cymric invasions occurred about 300–100 B. C.

and were probably the result of the growing development of the Teutons and their final expulsion of the Celtic-speaking tribes from Germany.

These Cymry occupied northern France under the name of Belgæ and invaded England as Brythons in several waves, the last being the true Belgæ.

The conquests of these Cymric tribes in both Gaul and Britain were only checked by the legions of Rome.

These migrations are exceedingly hard to trace because of the confusion caused by the fact that Celtic speech is now found on the lips of populations in nowise related to the Nordics who first introduced it.

But one fact stands out clearly, all the original Celtic-speaking tribes were Nordic.

What were the special physical characters of these tribes in which they differed from their Teutonic successors is now impossible to say, beyond the possible suggestion that in the British Isles the Scottish and Irish populations in which red hair and gray or green eyes are abundant have rather more of this Celtic strain in them than have the flaxen haired Teutons, whose china-blue eyes are clearly not Celtic.

When the peoples called Gauls or Celts by the Romans and Galatians by the Greeks first appear in history they are described in exactly the same terms as were later the Teutons.

They were all gigantic barbarians with fair and very often red hair, then more frequent than to-day, with gray or fiercely blue eyes and were thus clearly members of the Nordic subspecies.

The first Celtic-speaking nations with whom the Romans came in contact were Gaulish and had probably incorporated much Alpine blood by the time they crossed the mountains into the domain of classic history.

The Nordic element had become still weaker by absorption from the conquered populations when at a later date the Romans broke through the ring of Celtic nations and came into contact with the Nordic Cymry and Teutons.

After these early expansions of Gauls and Cymry the Teutons appear upon the scene.

Of the pure Teutons within the ken of history, it is not necessary to mention more than the most important of the long series of conquering tribes.

The greatest of them all were perhaps the Goths, who came originally from the south of Sweden and were long located on the opposite German coast at the mouth of the Vistula.

From here they crossed Poland to the Crimea where they were known in the first century.

Three hundred years later they were driven westward by the Huns and forced into the Dacian plain and over the Danube into the Roman Empire.

There they split up;

the Ostrogoths after a period of subjection to the Huns on the Danube, ravaged the European provinces of the Eastern Empire, conquered Italy and founded there a great but shortlived nation.

The Visigoths occupied much of Gaul and then entered Spain driving the Nordic Vandals before them into Africa.

The Teutons and Cimbri, destroyed by Marius in southern Gaul about 100 B. C.

, the Gepidæ, the Alans, the Suevi, the Vandals, the Alemanni of the upper Rhine, the Marcomanni, the Saxons, the Batavians, the Frisians, the Angles, the Jutes, the Lombards and the Heruli of Italy, the Burgundians of the east of France, the Franks of the lower Rhine, the Danes, and, latest of all, the Norse Vikings emerge from the northern forests and seas one after another and sweep through history.

Less well known but of great importance are the Varangians, who coming from Sweden in the ninth and tenth centuries, conquered the coast of the Gulf of Finland and much of White Russia and left there a dynasty and aristocracy of Nordic blood.

In the tenth and eleventh centuries they were the rulers of Russia.

The traditions of Goths, Vandals, Lombards and Burgundians all point to Sweden as their earliest homeland and probably all the pure Teutonic tribes came originally from Scandinavia and were closely related.

When these Teutonic tribes poured down from the Baltic coasts, their Celtic-speaking Nordic predecessors were already much mixed with the underlying populations, Mediterranean in the west and Alpine in the south.

These “Celts” were not recognized by the Teutons as kin in any sense and were all called, Welsh, or foreigners.

From this word are derived the names “Wales,” “Cornwales” or “Cornwall,” “Valais,” “Walloons,” and “Vlach” or “Wallachian.

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