Page 126 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

whaling expeditions, had decided to get out while the going was
good and seek a new place to settle among their cousins across
the North Sea. And the traders listen sympathetically to their
hard-luck story, and unobtrusively raise their prices for the axes

that the refugees will need to clear their new village site, tak­
ing in exchange whatever valuables—and it is often amber—the
Scandinavians have managed to salvage.
There will be many tales to tell when the young north­

country men return to their families in the Lake District after
years on the trade routes. But they will probably attach little im­
portance to one of their minor experiences, the occasion when

they were present at the founding of Stonehenge.
It was on their way south to the Downland farmers that they
had first stopped over with their kinsmen of the upper Thames

valley. And there they had seen, and maybe taken part in, the
religious ceremonies of that people. Like traders and young men
of any age, they are not overly fanatical themselves in religious

questions, though they are (far more than we) very conscious of
the presence all about them of unseen forces and both benevolent
and malevolent influences. These they are very careful to propi­

tiate, by the ritual and offerings appropriate to those engaged in
the hazardous occupation of commerce. But they tolerate the
religions of others, and naturally feel that it is wise to conform

to the customs of the people among whom they happen to be,
and to follow the rituals which are known by experience to pla­
cate the local gods, who are, of course, no less real or powerful

than their own.
In this point of view they are conscious of differing from the
settlers of the west coast, who with missionary zeal have for gen­

erations been insisting on the universal validity of their Medi­
terranean religion, with its squat cubical statues of a goddess
whose face is dominated by a pair of eyes which seem to follow

you wherever you turn, and with a ritual centered on the court­
yards outside the entrances to their immense stone communal
tombs. The ax traders do not feel that their own god will turn his

face from them if they occasionally, when in the neighborhood,
lay a dish of porridge among the offerings in the forecourts.
They meet, after all, many different religions in their travels.