While the Home-Coming Kentuckians were enjoying their meeting, in Louisville, in the month of June, 1906, Doctor Thomas E. Pickett published a newspaper article which he had written for the Home-Coming Week, the object of which was to present the theory of Paul B. Du Chaillu as to the descent of the English-speaking people from the Scandinavians instead of the Teutons; and to show that the descendants of these Scandinavians were still existing in different countries, and especially in Kentucky. The author sent me a copy of his article, and after reading it I deemed it an ethnological paper worthy of a more certain and enduring preservation than a daily newspaper could promise, and concluded that it would be suitable for one of the publications of The Filson Club. I wrote to the author about it, and suggested that if he could enlarge it enough to make one of the annual publications of the Club, of the usual number of pages, and have it ready in time, it might be issued for the Club publication of 1907. The author did as I suggested, and the book to which this is intended as an introduction is number twentytwo of The Filson Club publications, entitled "The Quest for a Lost Race," by Thomas E. Pickett, M. D., LL. D., member of The Filson Club.

Many persons of the English-speaking race of to-day believe that the English originated in England. The race doubtless was formed there, but it came of different peoples, principally foreign, who only consolidated upon English soil. Half a dozen or more alien races combined with one native to make the English as we now know them, and many years of contention and change were required to weld the discordant elements into a homogeneous whole.

The original inhabitants of England, found there by Julius CÆsar fifty-five years before the Christian era and then first made known to history, were Celts, who were a part of the great Aryan branch of the Caucasian race. Their numbers have been estimated at 760,000, and they were divided into thirty-eight different tribes with a chief or sovereign for each tribe. They were neither barbarians nor savages in the strict sense of these terms. They were civilized enough to make clothes of the skins of the wild animals they killed for food; to work in metals, to make money of copper and weapons of iron, to have a form of government, to build cabins in which to live, to cultivate the soil for food, and to construct war chariots with long scythes at the sides to mow down the enemy as trained horses whirled the chariots through their ranks. They had military organizations, with large armies commanded by such generals as Cassivelaunus, Cunobelin, Galgacus, Vortigern, and Caractacus, and once one of their queens named Boadicea led 230,000 soldiers against the Romans. The bravery with which Caractacus commanded his troops, and the eloquence with which he defended himself and his country before the Emperor Claudius when taken before him in irons to grace a Roman triumph, compelled that prejudiced sovereign to order the prisoner's chains thrown off and him and his family to be set at liberty. There were enough brave men and true like Caractacus among these Celts, whose country was being invaded and desolated, to have secured to the race a better fate than befell them. After being slaughtered and driven into exile into Brittany and the mountains of Wales by Roman, Saxon, and Dane for eight hundred years, the few of them that were left alive were not well enough remembered even to have their name attached to their own country.

The Celt was entirely ignored and a name combined of those of two of the conquerors given to their country. Who will now say that Anglo-Saxon is a more appropriate name for historic England than the original Albion, or Britannia, or Norman-French, or Celt? Anglo-Saxon, compounded of Anglen and Saxon, the names of two tribes of Low Dutch Teutons, can but suggest the piracy, the robbery, the murder and the treachery with which these tribes dealt with the Celts; while Norman-French reminds us of the courage, the endurance, and the refinement which were infused into the English by the Norman Conquest. Celt is a name which ought to have been respected for its antiquity of many centuries since it left its ancient Bactria and found its way to England without a known stain upon its national escutcheon. These Celts were once a mighty people occupying France, Spain, and other countries besides England, but their descendants are now scattered among other nations, without a country or a name of their own.

There may be doubts whether the Angles, the Jutes, the Saxons, and the Danes—all of whom shared in partial conquests of England and in the establishment of the English race—were Scandinavians or Teutons, Normans or Germans. They all belonged to the great Aryan branch of the Caucasian race, and whatever differences or similarities originally existed between them must have changed in the thousands of years since they emigrated from their first home. There can be no doubt, however, about the nationality of William the Conqueror. He was Scandinavian by descent from a long line of noble Scandinavian ancestors. The home of his ancestors was in Norway, far to the north of the home of the Teutons in Germany. In this bleak land of Arctic cold and sterility, on the western coast of Norway, where innumerable islands form a kind of sea-wall along the shore, his ancestor, Rognvald, who was a great earl holding close relations with King Harold of Norway, had his home and his landlocked harbor, in which ships were built for the vikings who sailed from that port to the shores of all countries which they could conquer or plunder. Here, his son Gongu Hrolf, better known as Rollo or Rolf, was born and received his training as a viking. On his return from one of his viking raids to the East he committed some depredations at home, for which King Harold banished him. He then fitted out a ship and manned it with a crew of his own choice and sailed for the British Channel islands. When he reached the river Seine he went up it as far as Paris, and, according to the fashion of the times, laid waste the country as he went. King Charles of France offered to buy him off by conveying to him the country since known as Normandy and giving him his daughter in marriage, on condition that he would become a Christian and commit no more depredations in the King's domain. Rollo accepted the King's offer and at once ceased to be a viking, and began to build up, enlarge and strengthen the domain which had been given him with the title of Duke. In the course of time his dukedom of Normandy, with the start Rollo had given it and its continuance under his successors, became one of the most powerful and enlightened countries of the period.

At the death of Rollo his dukedom was inherited by his son, William, and after passing through four generations of his descendants who were dukes of Normandy it descended to a second William, known as the Conqueror. Duke William, therefore, could trace his Scandinavian descent through his paternal ancestors back to Rognvald, the great earl of Norway, and even further back through the earls Eystein Glumra, Ivar Uppland, and possibly other noblemen of hard names to write or pronounce or remember. It is possible that some of his ancestors were with Lief the Scandinavian when he made his discovery of America, nearly five hundred years before the discovery of Columbus.

In 1066, Duke William took advantage of a promise, solemnized by an oath, which Harold had made before he was King of England, to assist him to the throne of England, but which he had not kept. Hence William invaded England with a great army, and at the battle of Hastings slew King Harold and gained a complete victory over his forces. Duke William was soon after crowned King of England, and at once began that wise policy which in a few years enabled him to lay firmly the foundation of the great English nation. His conquest, though not complete at first, was more so than had been that of the Romans, or the Angles and Jutes, or the Saxons or the Danes. At the time of the Conquest of William there were hostile Celts, Romans, Angles, Jutes, and Danes in every part of his kingdom. It was not his policy to destroy any more of them than he deemed necessary, but to make as many of them citizens loyal to him as possible; hence his numerous army and the still more numerous hosts that were constantly coming from Normandy to England in time became reconciled to the people and the people to them, until all were consolidated into one homogeneous nation. English history may be said to have begun with the Conquest of William, for all previous history in the island was but little more than the record of kings and nobles and pretenders contending against kings, nobles, and pretenders, and sections and factions and individuals seeking their own aggrandizement. The Conquest of William began with the idea of all England under one sovereign, and he and his successors clung to this view until it was accomplished. England never went backward from William's Conquest as it did from others, but kept right on in the course of empire until it became one of the greatest countries in the world, and this conquest was made by Scandinavians, who, if they did not make Scandinavians of the conquered, so Scandinavianized them that it would be difficult to distinguish them from Scandinavians.

The evolution of the English race from so many discordant national elements reminds one of the act of the witches of Macbeth, casting into the boiling cauldron so many strange things to draw from the dark future a fact so important as the fate of a king. Who would have thought that from the mingling of the Celts and the Romans and the Angles and the Jutes and the Saxons and the Danes and the Normans and the French in the great national cauldron that such a race as the English would be evolved? But it is not certain that such a race would have been produced if William the Scandinavian and his French had been left out. He came at a time when a revolution was needed in manners and language as well as in politics, and imparted that refinement which the French had gotten from the Romans and other nations. The French language so imparted soon began to infuse its softening influence into the jargon of the conglomeration of tongues in vogue, and the French manners to refine the clownish habits which had come down from original Celt, Saxon, and Dane. The Saxons and Danes had inhabited England for the four hundred years which followed the same period occupied by the Romans, without materially changing the manners or the language of the English, but it was not as long as either of these periods after the Conquest before the Englishman acted and spoke like a gentleman and belonged to a country which commanded the respect as well as fear of all other nations. The Scandinavian's fondness for war soon infused itself into the English and made them invincible upon both land and sea, and now with a land which so envelopes the earth that they boast the sun always shines on some part of it, they may look back some hundreds of years to the origin of their greatness and find no one thing which contributed more to the glory of England than the Norman-French Conquest.

But the reader had better learn the views of Paul B. Du Chaillu, an accomplished ethnologist and explorer, about the descent of the English from the Scandinavians instead of the Teutons as set forth in Doctor Pickett's book than from me in an introduction to it. Doctor Pickett explains the Du Chaillu theory, and gives examples of similar tastes and habits between English and Scandinavians which are striking. He also gives a long list of names borne by Scandinavians in England and Normandy eight hundred years ago which are the same as names borne by Kentuckians to-day. In this introduction, I have rather confined myself to such historic matters as are involved, without alluding to the ethnological facts so well presented in the text by the author. The work is beautifully and copiously illustrated with halftone likenesses of the author and Du Chaillu and by a number of distinguished Kentuckians of Scandinavian descent. There was both good taste and skill in placing among the illustrations the likenesses of Theodore O'Hara, John T. Pickett, Thomas T. Hawkins, and William L. Crittenden, who joined the filibustering expeditions of Lopez to Cuba. These distinguished citizens, like the Scandinavian vikings whom they imitated, lost nothing of their character by raiding upon a neighbor's lands, and are among the best examples of the theory of the descent of the English-speaking people from Scandinavians rather than Teutons. To be an admirer of this work it is not necessary to be a believer in the theory of Du Chaillu, that the English are descended from Scandinavians instead of Teutons. The truth is, all the northern nations connected with England were kinsmen descended from the same stock—Celts, Romans, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, and Danes all being of the Aryan branch of the great Caucasian race. They are so much alike in some particulars that fixed opinions about differences or likenesses between them are more or less untenable. There is one thing, however, in the book about which there can be no two opinions, and that is the value and importance of the list of names copied from records eight hundred years old, in England and Normandy. As many of them are the same as names now borne by living families in Kentucky, they can hardly fail to be of help to those in search of family genealogy. Doctor Pickett has presented in this work the theory of Du Chaillu in charming words and with excellent taste, as the theory of Du Chaillu and not as his own, and such has been my effort with regard to myself in this introduction. It is simply the resumption of a "Quest."

R. T. Durrett,
President of The Filson Club.