The distinction of tribes inhabiting northern Europe being granted, and authentic history assuring us that the Scythian Goths were the last people that reached western Europe,—the Slavi, their hereditary enemies, scarcely penetrating to the centre,—we naturally inquire, “At what period did they arrive?” Most antiquaries of the north, as we have already shown, have not hesitated to affirm that it was immediately after the deluge, and, consequently, that the Goths were the original inhabitants. Other writers, however, are satisfied with a more recent origin, and place this arrival about two thousand years before Christ. Others, again, are willing to deduct a full millenium from this latter antiquity; but it may be doubted whether a single tribe of Goths had set foot in the north five centuries before Odin’s arrival. Few tribes of them were probably there when he introduced a new faith. The opposition which his followers encountered in their political, no less than their religious character,—in their conquests no less than their preaching,—confirms this supposition; and the fact that nearly all the kings of the north boasted of their descent from some one of Odin’s royal sons, almost elevates this hypothesis to the dignity of an historic fact. As the Goths—both those who accompanied Odin and those who had preceded him—were the conquering and, therefore, the dominant caste, the sceptre was generally held by princes of that nation; the conquerors were comparatively few in number; and the original inhabitants, though they constituted the bulk of the population, were constrained to bend in sullen acquiescence before the power of the strangers. By degrees, the amalgamation of these strangers with the former race (or, perhaps, races) produced that form of society peculiar to the north. The more we reflect on this subject the more we incline to the opinion that prior to the Odinic times the Goths were not very numerous in Scandinavia. They might have kings four or five centuries before Christ; probably there were immigrations of Goths from Asia before even that period; still there is more safety, because more reason, in the conclusion that, from remote antiquity to the arrival of Odin, the bulk of the population in those countries were of native, that is, of Finnish or Jutish stock, and that the sons of the Asiatic conqueror were the first Gothic _monarchs_ of the north.[10]