Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/64

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Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.

of those ancient Gothic people who are known to have lived east of the Vistula.

The Jutes who settled in England had much in common with the Frisians; so also had the Goths. In the mythological genealogies given in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and elsewhere, Godwulf appears as the father of Fin, which probably refers to a very remote connection between the Frisians and the Goths, for later on the name Fin occurs as a representative of the Frisian nation.[1] The languages, as far as Frisian and the Mœso-Gothic are concerned, point to a similar connection. There is evidence of a large Frisian immigration in various parts of England, and much of the country was evidently settled by them under the names Saxons and Angles. As Goths and Frisians were connected in their mythological names, and the great mythological Frisian is Fin,[2] his name perhaps refers to an ancient link also with the Fin race, thus faintly transmitted through some remote connection. The accounts which the Frisians have of the expedition of Hengist are similar to those which we possess of him among the Jutes of Kent.

The Jutes, like the Angles, in all probability, were originally located in Scandinavia, for Ptolemy, writing in the second century of our era, places the Gutæ in the south of that peninsula. In Bede’s time Jutland was known by its present name, and no doubt took it from the Jutes, but the time of their settlement in Kent and that of Bede are separated by nearly three centuries, and during this interval the Jutes may have become located also in Jutland. There is neither contemporary history nor tradition that a people so called were there before Bede’s time. His statement that those who settled in England came from Jutland is, as Latham has pointed out, only an inference from the fact that when he wrote

  1. Lappenberg, J. M., ‘History of the Anglo-Saxon Kings,’ i. 24, note.
  2. ‘The Traveller’s Song.’