Map from Clark Hall's prose translation of Beowulf, 1901 dated but interesting
see here for the amber routes A direct passage across the North Sea may also be suspected

"Inhumation in (tree-trunk) coffins was already starting to be practised in Schleswig-Holstein in the beginnings of its Bronze Age ... especially in Jutland. ... The same rite of boat- or coffin-burial appears simultaneously in Britain in the middle centuries of the second millenium, when the North Sea trade route was flourishing ... penetrating the Wessex culture ... but more prominent on the east coast, especially in Yorkshire, where the Irish route over the Pennines reached the sea. The ... Gristhorpe coffin-burial near Scarborough ... the great barrow of Loose Howe on the Cleveland Moors ... serve to show how the same rite took hold among the seafarers of both sides of the North Sea between about 1600 and 1400 B.C." From The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe; C.F.C.Hawkes, Methuen 1940; pp 365-66. "The Wessex people were rich in Baltic amber no less than in Irish gold ... it becomes clear that they made a strong magnet on one flank of an Irish-Baltic trade whose richest exchange was in gold and amber. ... But the more direct routes between Ireland and the Baltic lay across North England and Scotland ..." Ibid, pp 324-25.
A SeafarerScyld Scefing Sceaf (as is reported) was driven when a youth upon a certain island of Germany called Scandza, which is mentioned by Jordanes, the historian of the Goths; he arrived sleeping in a ship, but with no rowers, and a sheaf of corn was placed at his head; hence his name Sceaf. The natives of the district received him as if he had been miraculously sent to them, and trained him up carefully; and when he came to manhood he reigned in the town then called Slaswic, but now Haitheby. The country is called Old Angeln, and from it the Angles came into Britain; and it is situated between the Saxons and the Goths.From: A History of the Church of Durham by Simeon of Durham; translated from the original Latin by Joseph Stevenson MA. First published 1855 by Seeleys of London in the series "The Church Historians of England". Facsimile reprint 1993: Llanerch Publishers, Felinfach.Simeon's Chronicles of the Angles: Vol III. (Early 1100s). p.757. 
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