§ 2. The Bronze-period.
The inhabitants of Denmark, during the bronze-period, were the people who first brought with them a peculiar degree of civilization. To them were owing the introduction of metals, the progress of agriculture and of navigation, not to mention that the previously uninhabited districts in the interior of the country were, by them, cleared of wood and rendered productive. This people stood therefore in the same degree of civilization as the Celts, and exercised as important an influence over the civilization of the north, as the Celts over that of the west of Europe. Is it then probable that the people of the bronze-period must themselves be regarded as a Celtic race?
The ancient written accounts of the early times of the North afford no sufficient authority for assuming that the Celts ever lived in the North; but they contain certain indications which, it has been thought, may possibly refer to something of the kind. Tor instance, the earliest Scandinavian traditions and songs mention that those races who had last migrated into the North, lived on friendly terms with a people named the Alfs, who, at an earlier period, lived at Alfheim, in the south of Norway, and in the north of Jutland. Since the Alfs, from what is related of them, must have possessed some civilization, and have been acquainted with agriculture, several historians have recognised in them the remains of Celtic tribes, who had formerly possessed larger portions of Denmark, from which they had been gradually ejected by other races. It is likewise said, that the peninsula of Jutland was inhabited by the Cimbri, who were probably of Celtic origin, and hence that it acquired the name of the Cimbric peninsula. These Cimbri, in such case, were to be regarded as the remains of the ancient and universally diffused Celtic population. By means of such naturally unfounded conclusions, it might be rendered apparently probable, that the inhabitants of the country during the bronze-period were Celts, particularly as antiquities of bronze
