ful and unimportant. For, of the other voyages to the West in the
sixth, the eighth, the tenth centuries, which, on Columbus' success,
turned into prior claims to the finding of the New World, there is not
one that deserves notice.

St. Brandon in 565, the Seven Spanish Bishops in 734, the Basques in 990
may or may not have sighted their islands of "Antillia," of "Atlantis,"
of the "Seven Cities." They cannot be verified or valued, any more than
the journeys of the Enchanted Horse or the Third Calendar. We only know
for certain a few unimportant, half-accidental facts, such as the visits
of Irish hermits to Iceland and the Faeroes during the eighth century,
and the traces of their cells and chapels--in bells and ruins and
crosses--found by the Northmen in the ninth.

It was in 787 that the Vikings first landed in England; by the opening
of the next century they were threatening the whole coast line of
Christendom, from Gallicia to the Elbe; in 874 they began to colonise
Iceland; in 877 they sighted Greenland; in 922 Rolf the Ganger won his
"Normandy" from Charles the Simple, by the Treaty of Clair-sur-Epte; as
early as 840 was founded the first Norse or Ostman kingdom in Ireland,
and in 878 the Norse earldom of the Orkneys, while about the same time
the first Vikings seem to have reached the White Sea and the extreme
North of Europe.

This advance is almost as rapid as that of the early Saracens; within a
hundred years from the first disturbance of Danes and Northmen by the
growing, all-including power of the new national kingdoms,--within three
generations from Halfdan the Black,--first the flying rebels, and then
the royalists in pursuit of them, had reached the farthest western and
northern limits of the known world, from Finisterre in "Spanland" to
Cape Farewell in Greenland, from the North Cape in Finland to the
Northwest Capes of "Irland," from Novgorod or "Holmgard" in Russia to
"Valland," between the Garonne and the Loire.

The chief lines of Northern advance were three--by the north-west,
south-west, and north-east, but each of these divided, after a time,
with important results.

The first sea-path, running by Caithness, Orkneys, Shetlands, and
Faeroes, reached Iceland, Greenland, and at last Vinland on the North
American Continent; but from the settlements on the coasts and islands
of northern Scotland, a fresh wave of pirate colonists swept down
south-west into the narrow seas of St. George's Channel an