As to Rollo’s personality, we have only the evidence of later Norman historians of doubtful authority and the Norse saga of Harold Fairhair. If, as seems likely, their accounts relate to the same person, he was known in the north as Hrolf the Ganger, because he was so huge that no horse could carry him and he must needs gang afoot. A pirate at home, he was driven into exile by the anger of King Harold, whereupon he followed his trade in the Western Isles and in Gaul, and rose to be a great Jarl among his people. The saga makes him a Norwegian, but Danish scholars have sought to prove him a Dane, and more recently the cudgels have been taken up for his Swedish origin. To me the Norwegian theory seems on the whole the most probable, being based on a trustworthy saga and corroborated by other incidental evidence. Yet, however significant of Rollo’s importance it may be that three great countries should each claim him as its own, like the seven cities that strove for the honor of Homer’s birthplace, the question of his nationality is historically of subordinate interest, and at a time when national lines were not yet drawn, it is futile to fit the inadequate evidence into one or another theory. The important fact is that Norway, Denmark, and even more distant Sweden, all contributed to the colonists who settled in Normandy under Rollo and his successors, and the achievements of the Normans thus become the common heritage of the Scandinavian race. The colonization of Normandy was, of course, only a small part of the work of this heroic age of Scandinavian expansion. The great emigration from the North in the ninth and tenth centuries has been explained in part by the growth of centralized government and the consequent departure of the independent, the turbulent, and the untamed for new fields of adventure; but its chief cause was doubtless that which lies back of colonizing movements in all ages, the growth of population and the need of more room. Five centuries earlier this land-hunger had pushed the Germanic tribes across the Rhine and Danube and produced the great wandering of the peoples which destroyed the Roman empire; and the Viking raids were simply a later aspect of this same _Völkerwanderung_, retarded by the outlying position of the Scandinavian lands and by the greater difficulty of migration by sea. For, unlike the Goths who swept across the map of Europe in vast curves of marching men, or the Franks who moved forward by slow stages of gradual settlement in their occupation of Roman Gaul, the Scandinavian invaders were men of the sea and migrated in ships. The deep fjords of Norway and the indented coast of the North Sea and the Baltic made them perforce sailors and fishermen and taught them the mastery of the wider ocean. In their dragon ships--shallow, clinker-built, half-decked craft, pointed at either end, low in the middle, where the gunwale was protected by a row of shields--they could cross the sea, explore creeks