sible that many objects which we regard as foreign, were actually manufactured in Denmark; for not only are able smiths mentioned in our ancient records, but it is also self-evident that a people who were in active communication with other countries, where civilization had made greater advances, and who could build ships with which the Vikings were enabled to undertake many and distant voyages, must have learned to manufacture trinkets and other objects of comfort and luxury, when at a later period such great riches were brought to the North by the expeditions of the Vi- kings.
It has already been shewn in the previous pages, that Antiquities from the stone and bronze-period occur very plentifully in Denmark, and the south-west part of the present Sweden, but very rarely or only in single specimens in the other parts of Sweden, and the whole of Norway. With regard to the objects from the iron-period the circumstances are wholly reversed. The swords and other weapons characteristic of that period, the oval clasps for the breast, the mosaic beads, &c., are so common in Sweden and Norway, that traces of them are discovered in nearly every barrow which has been examined there; on the contrary, in Denmark (with the exception of Bornholm, which in an antiquarian point of view is connected with Sweden) they occur but very rarely indeed, when compared with the objects of stone and bronze. In places of historical note for instance, as Leire and Jellinge, which we must consider as having been tolerably well peopled in the pagan times, swords and trinkets belonging almost exclusively to the bronze-period alone have been exhumed; but none from the iron-period, although numerous graves in the neighbourhood have been opened. This can scarcely be a matter of accident, since the Royal Museum of Northern Antiquities in Copenhagen, which during a series of years has received accessions from different parts of the country, and from many hundred barrows, possesses only a very few
