Paul Belloni du Chaillu was a French-American traveler and anthropologist. He became famous in the 1860s as the first modern outsider to confirm the existence of gorillas, and later the Pygmy people of central Africa. He later researched the prehistory of Scandinavia.

After some years' residence in America, during which he wrote several books for the young based on his African adventures, Du Chaillu turned his attention to northern Europe. After a visit to northern Norway in 1871, over the following five years, he made a study of customs and antiquities in Sweden, Norway, Lapland and Northern Finland. He published in 1881 The Land of the Midnight Sun (dedicated to his friend Robert Winthrop of New York), as a series of Summer and Winter Journeys, in two volumes.

His 1889 work The Viking Age (also in two volumes) was a very broad study of the early history, manners, and customs of the ancestors of the English-speaking nations. He labored for eight and a half years and carefully read hundreds of Sagas that describe the life of the people who inhabited the Scandinavian peninsula from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages (including literary remains). This scholarly work demonstrates what is now generally recognized, the importance of the Norse, including Norway, Sweden, and Denmark to the cultural dimension and transformation of British Isles during the fifth to eleventh centuries. This view was then unfamiliar and was ridiculed by Canon Isaac Taylor. This book (in two volumes) is now a very collectible item. In 1900, he also published The Land of the Long Night.... More • http://en.wikipedia. ... du_Chaillu View • Books • Images • Videos • Search Related • Explorers • Scientists • 1860s • Africa • Anthropology • France • Industrial Revolution • Naturalists • Nature • Réunion • Scandinavia • USA • Vikings • Wildlife • Writers • People