The Passing of the Great Race
By Madison Grant

Part II - European Races In History

Chapter 8
THE EXPANSION OF THE NORDICS

THE men of Nordic blood to-day form all the population of Scandinavian countries, as also a majority of the population of the British Isles, and are almost pure in type in Scotland and eastern and northern England. The Nordic realm includes all the northern third of France, with extensions into the fertile southwest; all the rich lowlands of Flanders; all Holland; the northern half of Germany, with extensions up the Rhine and down the Danube; and the north of Poland, and of Russia. Recent calculations show that there are about 90,000,000 of purely Nordic physical type in Europe out of a total population of 420,000,000.

Throughout southern Europe a Nordic nobility of Teutonic type everywhere forms the old aristocratic and military classes, or what now remains of them. These aristocrats, by as much as their blood is pure, are taller and blonder than the native populations, whether these be Alpine in central Europe or Mediterranean in Spain or in the south of France and Italy.

The countries speaking Low German dialects are almost purely Nordic, but the populations of High German speech are very largely Teutonized Alpines, and occupy lands once Celtic-speaking. The main distinction between the two dialects is the presence of a large number of Celtic elements in High German.

In northern Italy there is a large amount of Nordic blood. In Lombardy, Venice, and elsewhere throughout the country the aristocracy is blonder and taller than the peasantry, but the Nordic element in Italy has declined noticeably since the Middle Ages. From Roman times onward for a thousand years the Teutons swarmed into northern Italy, through the Alps, chiefly by way of the Brenner Pass. With the stoppage of these Nordic invasions this strain seems to have grown less all through Italy.

In the Balkan Peninsula there is little to show for the floods of Nordic blood that have poured in for the last 3,500 years, beginning with the Achaeans of Homer, who first appeared en masse about 1400 B.C., and were followed successively by the Dorians, Cimmerians, and Gauls, down to the Goths and the Varangians of Byzantine times.

The tall stature of the population along the Illyrian Alps from the Tyrol to Albania on the south, is undoubtedly of Nordic origin, and dates from some of these early invasions, but these Illyrians have been so crossed with Slavs that all other blond elements have been lost, and the existing population is essentially of brachycephalic Alpine type. What few remnants of blondness occur in this district, more particularly in Albania, are probably to be attributed to later infiltrations, as are the so-called Frankish elements in Bosnia. In Russia and in Poland the Nordic stature, blondness, and long skull grow less and less pronounced as one proceeds south and east from the Gulf of Finland.

It would appear that in all those parts of Europe outside of its natural habitat, the Nordic blood is on the wane from England to Italy, and that the ancient, acclimated, and primitive populations of Alpine and Mediterranean race are subtly reasserting their long lost political power through a high breeding rate and democratic institutions.

In western Europe the first wave of the Nordic tribes appeared about three thousand years ago, and was followed by other invasions with the Nordic element becoming stronger until after the fall of Rome whole tribes moved into its provinces Germanizing them more or less for varying lengths of time.

These incoming Nordics intermarried with the native populations and were gradually bred out, and the resurgence of the old native stock has proceeded steadily since the Frankish Charlemagne destroyed the Lombard kingdom, and is proceeding with unabated vigor to-day. This process has been greatly accelerated in western Europe by the crusades and the religious and Napoleonic wars. The world war, now in full swing with its toll of millions, will leave Europe much poorer in Nordic blood. One of its most certain results will be the partial destruction of the aristocratic classes everywhere in northern Europe. In England the nobility has already suffered in battle more than in any century since the Wars of the Roses. This will tend to realize the standardization of type so dear to democratic ideals. If equality cannot be obtained by lengthening and uplifting the stunted of body and of mind, it can be at least realized by the destruction of the exalted of stature and of soul. The bed of Procrustes operates with the same fatal exactness when it shortens the long as when it stretches the undersized.

The first Nordics in Spain were the Gauls who crossed the Pyrenees about the seventh century before our era, and introduced Aryan speech into the Iberian Peninsula. They quickly mixed with Mediterranean natives and the composite Spaniards were called Celtiberians by the Romans.

In Portugal and Spain there are in the physical structure of the population few traces of these early Celtic-speaking Nordic invaders, but the Suevi, who a thousand years later occupied parts of Portugal, and the Vandals and Visigoths who conquered and held Spain for 300 years, have left some small evidence of their blood, and in the provinces of northwestern Spain a considerable percentage of light colored eyes reveals these Nordic elements in the population.

Deep seated Castilian traditions associate aristocracy with blondness, and the sangre azul, or blue blood of Spain, refers to the blue eye of the Goth, whose traditional claim to lordship is also shown in the Spanish name for gentleman, "hidalgo," or son of the Goth.

As long as this Gothic nobility controlled the Spanish states during the endless crusades against the Moors, Spain belonged with the Nordic kingdoms, but when their blood became impaired by losses in wars waged outside of Spain and in the conquest of the Americas, the sceptre fell from this noble race into the hands of the little, dark Iberian, who had not the physical vigor or the intellectual strength to maintain the world empire built up by the stronger race.

The splendid conquistadores of the New World were of Nordic type, but their pure stock did not long survive their new surroundings, and to-day they have vanished utterly, leaving behind them only their language and their religion. After considering well these facts we shall not have to search further for the causes of the collapse of Spain.

Gaul at the time of Caesar's conquest was under the rule of the Nordic race, which furnished the bulk of the population of the north as well as the military classes elsewhere, and the power and vigor of the French nation have been based on this blood and its later reinforcements. In fact, in the Europe of to-day the amount of Nordic blood in each nation is a very fair measure of its strength in war and standing in civilization.

When, about 1OOO B.C., the first Nordics crossed the lower Rhine they found the Mediterranean race in France everywhere overwhelmed by an Alpine population, except in the south, and before the time of Caesar the Celtic language of these invaders, which was related to the Goidelic language still spoken in parts of Ireland and in the Scotch Highlands, had been imposed upon the entire population, and the whole country had been saturated with Nordic blood. These earliest Nordics in the west were known to the ancient world as Gauls. These Gauls or "Celts," as they were called by Csesar, occupied in his day the centre of France. The actual racial complexion of this part of France was overwhelmingly Alpine then and is so now, but this population was Celticized thoroughly by the Gauls, just as it was Latinized as completely at a later date by the Romans.

The northern third of France, that is, above Paris, was inhabited in Caesar's time by the Belgae, a Nordic people of the Cymric division of Celtic speech. They were largely of Teutonic blood, and in fact should be regarded as the immediate forerunners of the Germans, and they probably represent the early Teutons who had crossed from Sweden and adopted the Celtic speech of their Nordic kindred whom they found on the mainland. These Belgae had followed the earlier Goidels across Germany into Britain and Gaul, and were rapidly displacing their Nordic predecessors, who by this time were much weakened by mixture with the autochthones, when Rome appeared upon the scene and set a limit to their conquests by the Pax Romana.

The Belgae of the north of France and the Low Countries were the bravest of the peoples of Gaul, according to Caesar's well-known remark, but the claim of the Belgians of to-day to descent from this race is without basis and rests solely on the fact that the present Kingdom of Belgium, which only became independent and assumed its proud name in 1830, occupies a small and relatively unimportant corner of the land of the Belgae. The Flemings of Belgium are Nordic Franks speaking a Low German tongue, and the Walloons are Alpines whose language is an archaic French.

The Belgae and the Goidelic remnants of Nordic blood in the centre of Gaul, taken together constituted probably only a minority in blood of the population, but were everywhere the military and ruling classes. These Nordic elements were later reinforced by powerful Teutonic tribes, namely, Vandals, Visigoths, Alans, Saxons, Burgundians, and most important of all, the Franks of the lower Rhine, who founded modern France and made it for long centuries the "grand nation" of Christendom.

The Frankish dynasties long after Charlemagne were of purely Teutonic blood, and the aristocratic land owning and military classes down to the great Revolution were everywhere of this type, which by the time of the creation of the Frankish kingdom had incorporated all the other Nordic elements of old Roman Gaul, both Gaulish and Belgic.

The last invasion of Teutonic-speaking barbarians was that of the Danish Northmen, who were, of course, of pure Nordic blood, and who conquered and settled Normandy in 911 A.D. No sooner had the barbarian invasions ceased than the ancient aboriginal blood strains, Mediterranean and Alpine, and elements derived from Paleolithic times, began a slow and steady recovery. Step by step, with the reappearance of these primitive and deep rooted stocks, the Nordic element in France declined, and with it the vigor of the nation.

The chief historic events of the last thousand years have hastened this process, and the fact that the Nordic element everywhere forms the fighting section of the community caused the loss in war to fall disproportionately as among the three races in France. The religious wars greatly weakened the Nordic provincial nobility, which was at first largely Protestant, and the process of exterminating the upper classes was completed by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. These last wars are said to have shortened the stature of the French by four inches; in other words, the tall Nordic strain was killed off in greater proportions than the little brunet.

When by universal suffrage the transfer of power was completed from a Nordic aristocracy to lower classes predominantly of Alpine and Mediterranean extraction, the decline of France in international power set in.

The survivors of the aristocracy, being stripped of political power and to a large extent of wealth, quickly lost their caste pride and committed class suicide by mixing their blood with inferior breeds. One of the most conspicuous features of many of the French nobility of to-day is the strength of the Levantine and Mediterranean strain in them. Being, for political reasons, ardently clerical, the nobility welcomes recruits of any racial origin, as long as they bring with them money and devotion to the Church.

The loss in war of the best breeding stock through death, wounds, or absence from home has been clearly shown in France. The conscripts who were examined for military duty in 1890-2 were those descended in a large measure from the military rejects and other stay-at-homes during the Franco-Prussian War. In Dordogne this contingent showed seven per cent more deficient statures than the normal rate. In some cantons this unfortunate generation was in height an inch below the recruits of preceding years, and in it the exemptions for defective physique rose from the normal six per cent to sixteen per cent.

When each generation is decimated or destroyed in turn, a race can be injured beyond recovery, but it more frequently happens that the result is the annihilation of an entire class, as in the case of the German gentry in the Thirty Years' War. Desolation of wide districts often resulted from the plagues and famines which followed the armies in old days, but deaths from these causes fall most heavily on the weaker part of the population. The loss of valuable breeding stock is far more serious when wars are fought with volunteer armies of picked men than with conscript armies, because in the latter cases the loss is more evenly spread over the whole nation. Before England resorted in the present war to universal conscription the injury to her more desirable and patriotic classes was much more pronounced than in Germany, where all types and ranks are called to arms.

In the British Isles we find, before the arrival of the Nordic race, a Mediterranean population and no perceptible element of Alpine blood, so that we have to deal with only two of the main races instead of all three as in France. In Britain there are, as elsewhere, representatives of earlier races, but the preponderant strain of blood was Mediterranean before the first arrival of the Aryan-speaking Nordics.

Ireland was connected with Britain and Britain with the continent until times very recent in a geological sense. The depression of the Channel coasts is progressing rapidly to-day, and is known to have been substantial during historic times. The close parallel in blood and culture between England and the opposite coasts of France also indicates a very recent land connection, probably in Neolithic times. Men either walked from the continent to England and from England to Ireland, or they paddled across in primitive boats or coracles. The art of ship-building, or even archaic navigation, cannot go much further back than late Neolithic times.

The tribes of Celtic speech came to the British Isles in two distinct waves. The earlier invasion of the Goidels arrived in England with a culture of bronze about 800 B.C., and in Ireland two centuries later, and was part of the same movement which brought the Gauls into France. The later conquest was by the Cymric-speaking Belgae who were equipped with iron weapons. It began in the third century B.C., and was still going on in Caesar's time. These Cymric Brythons found the early Goidels, with the exception of the aristocracy, much weakened by intermixture with the Mediterranean natives, and would probably have destroyed all trace of Goidelic speech in Ireland and Scotland, as they actually did in England, if the Romans had not intervened. The Brythons reached Ireland in small numbers only in the second century B.C.

These Nordic elements in Britain, both Goidelic and Brythonic, were in a minority during Roman times, and the ethnic complexion of the island was not much affected by the Roman occupation, as the legions stationed there represented the varied racial stocks of the Empire.

After the Romans abandoned Britain, and about 400 A.D., floods of pure Nordics poured into the islands for nearly six centuries, arriving in the north as the Norse pirates, who made Scotland Scandinavian, and in the east as Teutonic Saxons and Angles, who founded England.

The Angles came from somewhere in central Jutland, and the Saxons came from coast lands immediately at the base of the Danish Peninsula. All these districts were then, and are now, purely Teutonic; in fact, this is part of old Saxony, and is to-day the core of Germany.

These Saxon districts sent out at that time swarms of invaders not only into England but into France and over the Alps into Italy, just as at a much later period the same land sent swarming colonies into Hungary and Russia.

The same Saxon invaders passed down the Channel coasts, and traces of their settlement on the mainland remain to this day in the Cotentin district around Cherbourg. Scandinavian sea peoples, called Danes or Northmen, swarmed over as late as 900 A.D. and conquered all eastern England. This Danish invasion of England was the same that brought the Northmen, or Normans, into France. In fact the occupation of Normandy was probably by Danes, and the conquest of England was largely the work of Norsemen, as Norway at that time was under Danish kings.

Both of these invasions, especially the later one, swept around the greater island and inundated Ireland, driving the aborigines and their Celtic-speaking masters into the bogs and islands of the extreme west.

The blond Nordic element to-day predominates in Ireland as much as in England. It is derived, to some extent, from the early invaders of Celtic speech, but the Goidelic element has been in Ireland, as in England and Scotland, very largely absorbed by the Iberian substratum of the population, and is found to-day rather in the form of Nordic characters in brunets, than as the pure blond individuals who represent later and purer Nordic strains. The combination of black Iberian hair with blue or gray Nordic eyes is frequently found in Ireland and also in Spain, and in both these countries is greatly admired for its beauty.

The tall, blond Irishmen are to-day chiefly Danish with the addition of English, Norman, and Scotch elements, which have poured into the lesser island for a thousand years, and have imposed the English speech upon it. The more primitive and ancient elements in Ireland have always showed great ability to absorb newcomers, and during the Middle Ages it was notorious that the Norman and English colonists quickly sank to the cultural level of the natives. Indications of Paleolithic man appear in Ireland frequently as unit characters, as well as individuals. Being, like Brittany, situated on the extreme western outposts of Eurasia, it has more than its share of generalized and low types surviving in the living populations, and these types, the Firbolgs, have imparted a distinct and very undesirable aspect to a large portion of the inhabitants of the west and south, and have greatly lowered the intellectual status of the population as a whole.

In England much the same ethnic elements are present, namely the Nordic and the Mediterranean. There is, especially in Wales and in the west central counties of England, a large substratum of ancient Mediterranean blood, but the later coming Nordic elements are everywhere imposed upon it.

Scotland is by race Anglian in the south and Norse in the Highlands, with underlying Goidelic and Brythonic elements which are exceedingly hard to identify.

The Nordic species of man in his various races, but chiefly Teutonic, made Gaul the land of the Franks, and made Britain the land of the Angles, and the Englishmen who built the British Empire and founded America were of the Nordic and not of the Mediterranean type.

One of the most vigorous Nordic elements in France, England, and America was contributed by the Normans, and its influence on the development of these countries cannot be ignored. The descendants of the Danish and Norse Vikings who settled in Normandy as Teutonic-speaking heathen, and who as Normans crossed over to Saxon England and conquered it in 1066, are among the finest and noblest examples of the Nordic race. Their only rivals in these characters were the early Goths.

This Norman strain, while purely Nordic, seems to have been radically different in its mental makeup, and to some extent in its physical detail, from the Saxons of England, and also from the kindred Scandinavians on the continent.

The Normans seem to have been "fine race," to use a French idiom, and are often characterized by a tall, slender figure, proud bearing and clearly marked features of classic Greek regularity. The type is seldom extremely blond, and is often dark. These Latinized Vikings were and are animated by a restless and nomadic energy and by a fierce aggressiveness. They played a brilliant role during the twelfth and following centuries, but later on the continent this strain ran out. The type is still very common among the English of good families, and especially among hunters, explorers, navigators, adventurers, and officers of the lesser ranks in the British army. These latter-day Normans are natural rulers and administrators, and it is to this type that England largely owes her extraordinary ability to govern justly and firmly the lower races. This Norman blood occurs often among the native Americans, but with the changing social conditions and the filling up of the waste places of the earth, it is doomed to a speedy extinction.

The invasion of the Normans strengthened the Nordic and not the Mediterranean elements in the British Isles, but the connection once established with France, especially with Aquitaine, later introduced from southern France certain brunet elements of Mediterranean affinities.

The Nordics in England are in these days apparently receding before the little brunet Mediterranean type. The causes of this decline are the same as in France, and the chief loss is through the wastage of blood by war and emigration.

An extremely potent influence, however, is the transformation of the nation from an agricultural to a manufacturing community. Heavy, healthful work in the fields of northern Europe enables the Nordic type to thrive, but the cramped factory and crowded city quickly weeds him out, while the little brunet Mediterranean can work a spindle, set type, sell ribbons, or push a clerk's pen far better than the big, clumsy, and somewhat heavy Nordic blond, who needs exercise, meat, and air, and cannot live under Ghetto conditions.

The increase of urban communities at the expense of the countryside is also an important element in the fading of the Nordic type, because the energetic countryman of this blood is more apt to improve his fortunes by moving to the city than the less ambitious Mediterranean. The country villages and the farms are the nurseries of nations, while cities are consumers and seldom producers of men.

If England has deteriorated, and there are those who think they see indications of such decline, it is due to the lowering proportion of the Nordic blood and the transfer of political power from the vigorous Nordic aristocracy and middle classes to the radical and labor elements, both largely recruited from the Mediterranean type.

Only in Scandinavia and north Germany does the Nordic race seem to maintain its full vigor in spite of the enormous wastage of three thousand years of swarming forth of its best fighting men.

Holland and Flanders are purely Teutonic, the Flemings being the descendants of those Franks who did not adopt Latin speech as did their Teutonic kin across the border in Artois and Picardy; and Holland is the ancient Batavia with the Frisian coast lands eastward to old Saxony.

Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are purely Nordic and yearly contribute swarms of a splendid type of immigrants to America, and are now, as they have been for thousands of years, the nursery and broodland of the master race.

In mediaeval times the Norse and Danish Vikings sailed not only the waters of the known Atlantic, but ventured westward through the fogs and frozen seas to Iceland, Greenland, and America. Sweden, after sending forth her Goths and other early Teutonic tribes, turned her attention to the shores of the eastern Baltic, colonized the coast of Finland and the Baltic provinces, and supplied as well a strong Scandinavian element to the aristocracy of Russia.

The coast of Finland is, as a result, Swedish, and the natives of the interior have distinctly Nordic characters with the exception of the skull, which in its roundness shows traces of an ancient Alpine crossing.

The population of the so-called Baltic provinces of Russia is everywhere Nordic, and their affinities are with Scandinavia and Germany rather than with Slavic Moscovy. The most primitive Aryan languages, namely, Lettish, Lithuanian, and the recently extinct Old Prussian, are found in this neighborhood, and here we are not far from the original Nordic homeland.

Continue on to Part 2, Chapter 9 - THE NORDIC FATHERLAND