DENMARK is, in no respect, behind either Sweden or Norway in its claims to antiquity. In the valuable collection of Langebek, we find a list of monarchs in Icelandic[5] as old, at least, as the tenth century, sufficiently ample for the vanity of any nation. It begins with Noah; passes down through the intervening generations to Odin, “that king of the Turks whom the Romans forced towards the north;” and ends with Hardecanute. Another branch of the same list deduces the regal genealogy from Odin to Harald Harfagre, the well-known monarch of Norway.[6] In both cases, the names must be considered as strictly belonging to the Asiatic potentates, who were never alleged to have set foot in the north of Europe. During _their_ reigns, fabulous or true, Scandinavia was not without its petty kings, or, if the reader pleases, hereditary chieftains, whose authority was similar to the patriarchal. Their names are given by Saxo Grammaticus and other native writers, who, following their own traditionary songs, knew little of the Asiatic predecessors of Odin, and were therefore unable to enumerate them. Thus, too, with the Swedes, who, as we have seen, had their internal, no less than their external, kings,—their domestic, no less than their foreign, potentates. Hence, in all these states, two distinct races of rulers,—the native and the foreign,—the former indigenous, the latter wholly strangers, to the regions of northern Europe.[7] That the Goths were resident in the north of Europe before the times which we denominate historic,—that they had for ages, perhaps, been there when the Romans came into contact with them, is very probable. “Many vestiges,” says Gibbon, “which cannot be ascribed to popular vanity, attest the residence of the Goths in the countries beyond the Baltic.” Still no man in the least conversant with antiquity—unless, indeed, like Joannes Magnus and Rudbeck, he has prejudices which no information can remove—will contend that they were the _first_ settlers: it may even be doubted whether they constituted the second immigration into those regions. The Cimmerians, or Cimbri, were in Jutland, at least, before them; but whether even these were the first people that forsook their Asiatic abodes for western Europe is very doubtful: probably they were preceded by some other swarms whose very name time has destroyed, just as _they_ were the predecessors of the Celts, a race sprung from themselves. The Finns and the Lapps, whose manners, language, and character are so different from those of the other European nations, are probably tribes of some race which arrived in more southern regions at a period lost in the depth of antiquity; and which the hostile incursions of Cimmerians, Celts, Goths, and other barbarians, exiled into the snows of the north.[8]