of the peninsula, a city of great extent, of great antiquity, and one which enjoyed a high prosperity as early as the ninth century. Blekinge is mentioned as Blecinga-ég, or the Isle of the Blekings, by King Alfred, repeating the description of Wulfstan of his voyage up the Baltic. ‘We had,’ he says, ‘first Blekinge, and Möen and Eowland, and Gothland on our larboard (bæcbord), and these lands belong to Sweden; and Wendland was all the way on our starboard as far as the mouth of the Vistula.’[1] These on the larboard were, without doubt, homelands of some of the early people of the Jutish or Gothic race. There is other evidence of early communications between England and Scandinavian. At Skaäng, in Södermanland, Sweden, there is a runic inscription on a stone of peculiar interest, from its association with England. It has the English sign (⁊) for the word and. This, Stephens tells us, is distinctly English, and only English, in its origin, so that inscriptions having it show English influence of some kind.[2] In considering this he regards it as evidence of early literary communications between the English settlers and their Continental kindred. We should remember also that this Old English sign abounds in Domesday Book. Stephens says: ‘The Saxon and German pagans got their writing-schools as well as their Christianity and culture of movements, direct and indirect, chiefly from England and Anglo- Keltic lands, whose missionaries carried their runes with them, partly for secret writing, and partly for use in Scandinavia.’ It is the evidence of the runes that shows the Scandian origin of the Anglians who settled in Northern England. Stephens’ last words on this subject are: ‘I beg the reader carefully to ponder the following remarkable and interesting and decisive facts in the list showing the numerical result (of runic discoveries) in every class up to June, 1894. It is: in Scando-Anglia,
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Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.
