ABSTRACT
According to the testimony of history as well as of saga, the original home of the English was the Cimbrian peninsula, and the adjacent portion of the mainland, eastward from the Elbe. Here dwelt the several small tribes into which this people were divided: in the north were the Jutes; and next to them, the Angles, whose name the point of land between the Fiord of Flensburg and the Slei still preserves; farther southward the Saxon prevailed over a wide region. They were an ambitious, enterprising race, steeled by a ceaseless struggle with the sea, whose proximity often became a terror to them: a terror chiefly in the spring, and on the approach of autumn when, under the pressure of fierce storms, the billows surged with resistless, destroying power upon the low coasts. Wearisome and relentless was the sway of the winter, which bound the flood in its ‘ice-fetters.’ So that the coming of summer, when the mild winds blew from the sea, and the waters gleamed graciously again in the sunbeams, was like a deliverance.
