Excerpt from The Normans: Told Chiefly in Relation to Their Conquest of England Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam, Survey our empire and behold our home. - byron. The gulf stream flows so near to the southern coast of Norway, and to the Orkneys and Western Islands, that their Climate is much less severe than might be supposed. Yet no one can help wonder ing why they were formerly so much more populous than now, and why the people who came westward even so long ago as the great Aryan migration, did not persist in turning aside to the more fertile coun tries that lay farther southward. In spite of all their disadvantages, the Scandinavian peninsula, and the sterile islands of the northern seas, were inhabited by men and women whose enterprise and intelli gence ranked them above their neighbors. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.