Hadeland is the land of the Hadar, "warrior people" that's what the word means.  Who were the warriors who gave their name to our ancestral "bygd" in Norway in Norway and us, their Hadeland descendants? For the answer to this question we must go back to prehistoric times, before the time of recorded history, and read the story told by finds of various kinds dug out of the earth. Norwegian archeologists like Haakon Shetelig and Sigurd Grieg have made extensive studies in this field.

   Remains from the iron age, especially its later or Roman period, are of interest and value in this connection. One of the most important groups of finds consists of Hadeland graves, from the 3rd and 4th centuries of the Christian Era. Graves of one definite type are seen to have been markedly concentrated within one definite area, namely Hadeland and Toten and Valdres, the two latter belonging in ancient times to the same tribal territory.  There burial remains and customs have been traced to a Germanic tribe which in the early days of the Roman Empire settled in what is now Bohemia, called by the Romans Marcomanni.  You can read about them in your high school histories, but they don't tell you that there were men from Hadeland down there many hundreds of years ago.  The remains of which we have spoken represent an element of foreign civilization unlike any found elsewhere in Norway.  The explanation given is that returning warriors, after taking part in the fight of the kinsmen along the Danube during the Great Migration ("Folkevandring") of Germanic tribes ("barbarians" the Romans and after them the school histories call them) found homes in their native district and there organized themselves to make, get and keep the mastery of the dominion ever since.  Their descendants to this day have migrated to strange lands and everywhere have made themselves conquerors, not now, fortunately, with weapons of iron but with thought and labor, truly Hadar of the later age, worthy of their ancestors of old.  Let us be proud, and prove ourselves worthy of the Hadelending race, by being ""warrior peoples" for justice and truth.

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