# The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway/Volume 1/Chapter 1

THE
HEIMSKRINGLA
OR,
CHRONICLE OE THE KINGS OF NORWAY,
PRELIMINARY DISSERTATION.
CHAPTER I.
OF THE LITERATURE AND INTELLECTUAL CONDITION OF THE NORTHMEN.
Snorro Sturleson's Heimskringla is a work known to few English readers. Heimskringla—the world's circle—being the first prominent word of the manuscript that catches the eye, has been quaintly used by the northern antiquaries to designate the work itself. One may well imagine that the librarian, or the scholar, in the midst of the rolls and masses of parchments of the great public and private libraries of Copenhagen and Stockholm, has found his advantage in this simple way of directing an unlettered assistant to the skin he wishes to unfold. It is likely that the illuminated initial letters of ancient manuscripts, and of the early printed books, may have had their origin in a similar use or convenience in the monastic libraries of the middle ages. Snorro himself is guiltless of this pedantic conceit; for he calls his work the Saga or Story of the Kings of Norway. It is in reality a chronicle, or rather a connected series of memoirs, of kings and ​other personages, and of the events in which they have been engaged in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, England, and other countries, from those early ages in which mythology and history are undistinguishably blended together, down to the period nearly of Snorro Sturleson's own birth, to 1178. Snorro begins with Odin and the half-fabulous tales of the Yngling dynasty, and, showing more judgment than many of the modern Saga scholars and antiquaries, passes rapidly over these as an unavoidable introduction to authentic historical times and narratives. From the middle of the 9th century, from Halfdan the Black, who reigned from about the year 841 to about 863, down to Magnus Erlingsson, who reigned from about 1162 to 1184, he gives a continuous narrative of events and incidents in public and private life, very descriptive and characteristic of the men and manners of those times,—of the deeds of bold and bloody sea-kings,—of their cruises, of their forays, of their adventures, battles, conquests in foreign lands,—and of their home fireside lives also; and he gives, every now and then, very graphic delineations of the domestic manners, way of thinking, acting, and living in those ages; very striking traits of a semi-barbarous state of mind, in which rapacity, cruelty, and bloody ferocious doings, are not unfrequently lightened up by a ray of high and generous feeling; and he gives too, every now and then, very natural touches of character, and scenes of human action, and of the working of the human mind, which are, in truth, highly dramatic. In rapid narrative of the stirring events of the wild Viking life,—of its vicissitudes, adventures, and exploits,—in extraordinary yet not improbable incidents and changes in the career of individuals,—in touches true to nature,—and in the admirable management of his story, in which episodes, apparently the most unconnected with his subject, come in by and by, at the ​right moment, as most essential parts of it,—Snorro Sturleson stands as far above Ville Hardouin, Joinville, or Froissart, as they stand above the monkish chroniclers who preceded them. His true seat in the Valhalla of European literature is on the same bench —however great the distance between—on the same bench with Shakspeare, Carlysle, and Scott, as a dramatic historian; for his Harald Haarfager, his Olaf Tryggvesson, his Olaf the Saint, are in reality great historical dramas, in which these wild energetic personages, their adherents and their opponents, are presented working, acting, and speaking before you.
This high estimate of the literary merit of Snorro Sturleson's work will scarcely pass unquestioned by English readers,—accustomed indeed to hear of the Anglo-Saxon literature, language, and institutions, as of great importance to the historian and antiquary, and as a study necessary for those who wish to become perfectly acquainted with our own, but who would never discover from the pages of Hume, or of any other of our historical writers, that the northern pagans who, in the ninth and tenth centuries, ravaged the coasts of Europe, sparing neither age, sex, nor condition—respecting neither churches, monasteries, nor their inmates—conquering Normandy, Northumberland (then reckoned, with East-Anglia, equal to one third of all England)—and, under Swein and Canute the Great, conquering and ruling over the whole of England,—were a people possessing any literature at all, or any laws, institutions, arts, or manners connecting them with civilised life. Our historians have confined themselves for information entirely to the records and chronicles of the Anglo-Saxon monks, who, from their convent walls, saw with horror and dismay the bands of these bloodthirsty pagans roving through the country, ravaging, burning, and murdering; and who naturally represent them as the ​most ferocious and ignorant of barbarians, and without any tincture of civilisation. Our historians and their readers are apt to forget altogether that, pagan and barbarian as these Danes or Northmen of the 9th and 10th centuries undoubtedly were, they were the same people, only in a different stage of civilisation, as the Anglo-Saxons themselves, and were in the 10th century, in their social state, institutions, laws, religion, and language, what the Anglo-Saxons had been in the 5th century, when they first landed on the Isle of Thanet. They forget, too, that the introduction of Christianity, and with it of the Latin language, and of the learning which had a reference only to the church, and the introduction of social arrangements, establishments, and ideas of polity and government, cast in one mould for all countries of Christendom by the Romish church, had during these five centuries altered, exhausted, and rendered almost effete, the original spirit and character of Anglo-Saxon social institutions. They do not sufficiently consider the powerful moral influence of this fresh infusion, in the 10th century, of the same spirit, from the same original source, upon the character, ideas, and even forms of government and social arrangements of the whole English population in the subsequent generations, and through them upon the whole of modern society. They do not sufficiently appreciate the social effects of the settlements of these Northmen in England immediately previous to the Norman conquest, when for four generations of kings, viz. Swein, Canute, Harald, and Hardicanute, they had been sole masters of the country, and had possessed and held under their own Danish laws, for many previous generations, what was reckoned equal to one third of all England. The renovation of Anglo-Saxon institutions, the revival of principles and social spirit which were exhausted in the old Anglo-Saxon race, may be ​traced to this fresh infusion from the cognate northern people. This subject is very curious and important.
Two nations only have left permanent impressions of their laws, civil polity, social arrangements, spirit, and character, on the civilised communities of modern times—the Romans, and the handful of northern people from the countries beyond the Elbe which had never submitted to the Roman yoke, who, issuing in small piratical bands from the 5th to the 10th century, under the name of Saxons, Danes, Northmen, plundered, conquered, and settled on every European coast from the White Sea to Sicily. Under whatever name, Goths, Visigoths, Franks, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, or Northmen, these tribes appear to have been all of one original stock,—to have been one people in the spirit of their religion, laws, institutions, manners, and languages, only in different stages of civilisation, and the same people whom Tacitus describes. But in Germany the laws and institutions derived from the Roman power, or formed under it after the Roman empire became Christianized, had buried all the original principles of Teutonic arrangements of society as described by Tacitus; and in France the name was almost all that remained of Frank derivation. All the original and peculiar character, spirit, and social institutions of the first inundation of this Germanic population, had become diluted and merged under the church government of Rome,—when a second wave of populations from the same pagan north inundated again, in the 9th and 10th centuries, the shores of Christendom. Wheresoever this people from beyond the pale and influence of the old Roman empire, and of the later church empire of Rome, either settled, mingled, or marauded, they have left permanent traces in society of their laws, institutions, character, and spirit. Pagan and barbarian as they were, they seem to have carried with them something more natural, ​something more suitable to the social wants of man, than the laws and institutions formed under the Roman power. What traces have we in Britain of the Romans? A few military roads, and doubtful sites of camps, posts, and towns,—a few traces of public works, and all indicating a despotic military occupation of the country, and none a civilised condition of the mass of the inhabitants,—alone remain in England to tell the world that here the Roman power flourished during four hundred years.
In every province of the ancient Roman empire, even in Italy itself, the remains of Roman power are of the same character—whether those remains be of material objects, as edifices, public works, roads, temples, statues—or of moral objects, as law, government, religion, and social arrangement; and that character is of a hard iron despotism, in which all human rights, all individual existence in wellbeing, all the objects for which man enters into social union with his fellowman, are disregarded in favour of ruling classes or establishments in the social body, noble, military, or clerical. The Saxon occupation of England lasted for a similar period to the Roman, for about four hundred years. This first wave of the flood of northern populations has left among us traces of laws and institutions, and of a social character and spirit, in which many outlines of freedom and of just principles of social union are distinguishable; and left the influences on the social body of ideas, manners, language, which still exist. But these traces were nearly obliterated, and it is not to be denied that their influence on society was effete, — that in Anglo-Saxon England, as in the rest of Europe, all social arrangement, character, and spirit were assuming one shape and hue under the pressure of superstition, and of the Roman power, institutions, and ascendency, revived through the influence of the church of Rome which had been in full operation for ​four centuries and a half, assimilating every thing to one form and principle,—when the second wave of the northern populations, the Danes or Northmen, came, under Swein and Canute the Great, to invigorate and renew the social elements left by the first. The moral power of this people—the Anglo-Saxons and Northmen being essentially the same people—has left deeper impressions on society, and of a nobler character, than the despotic material power of the Romans. It is in activity at the present hour in European society, introducing into every country more just ideas than those which grew up amidst the ruins of the Roman empire, of the social relations of the governing and the governed. The history of modern civilisation resolves itself, in reality, into the history of the moral influences of these two nations. All would have been Roman in Europe at this day in principle and social arrangement,—Europe would have been, like Russia or Turkey, one vast den of slaves, with a few rows in its amphitheatre of kings, nobles, and churchmen, raised above the dark mass of humanity beneath them, if three boats from the north of the Elbe had not landed at Ebbsfleet in the Isle of Thanet fourteen hundred years ago, and been followed by a succession of similar boat expeditions of the same people, marauding, conquering, and settling, during six hundred years, viz. from 449 to 1066. All that men hope for of good government and future improvement in their physical and moral condition—all that civilised men enjoy at this day of civil, religious, and political liberty—the British constitution, representative legislature, the trial by jury, security of property, freedom of mind and person, the influence of public opinion over the conduct of public affairs, the Reformation, the liberty of the press, the spirit of the age—all that is or has been of value to man in modern times as a member of society, either in Europe or in the New ​World, may be traced to the spark left burning upon our shores by these northern barbarians.
Our English writers and readers direct their attention too exclusively to the Anglo-Saxon branch of this great Teutonic race of people, and scarcely acknowledge the social influence of the admixture of their Danish conquerors,—of that fresh infusion in the 10th century, from the same original stock, of the original spirit, character, and social institutions. The schoolman and the political antiquary find it classical or scholarlike to trace up to obscure intimations, in the treatise of Tacitus on the ancient Germans, the origin of parliaments, trial by jury, and all other free institutions, assuming somewhat gratuitously that the seafaring Saxons, who, four hundred years after the days of Tacitus, crossed the sea from the countries north of the Elbe, and conquered England, were identical in laws and social institutions with the forest Germans on the Rhine whom Tacitus describes; and forgetting that a much nearer and more natural source of all the social elements they are tracing back to the forests of Germany in the time of Agricola, was to be found in full vigour among the people who had conquered and colonised the kingdoms of Northumberland and East Anglia, reckoned equal then to one third of England, and had held them for several generations, and who conquered and ruled over all England for nearly half a century immediately previous to its final conquest by their own Norman kinsmen. The spirit, character, and national vigour of the old Anglo-Saxon branch of this people, had evidently become extinct under the influence and pressure of the church of Rome upon the energies of the human mind. This abject state of the mass of the old Christianised Anglo-Saxons, is evident from the trifling resistance they made to the small piratical bands of Danes or Northmen who infested and settled on their coasts. It is evident ​that the people had neither energy to fight, nor property, laws, or institutions to defend, and were merely serfs on the land of nobles, or of the church, who had nothing to lose by a change of masters. It is to the renewal of the original institutions, social condition, and spirit of Anglo-Saxon society, by the fresh infusion of these Danish conquerors into a very large proportion of the whole population in the 11th century—and not to the social state of the forest Germans in the 1st century—that we must look for the actual origin of our national institutions, character, and principles of society, and for that check of the popular opinion and will upon arbitrary rule which grew up by degrees, showing itself even in the first generation after William the Conqueror, and which slowly but necessarily produced the English constitution, laws, institutions, and character. The same seed was no doubt sown by the old Anglo-Saxons, and by the Northmen—for they were originally the same people; but the seed of the former had perished under Romish superstition and church influence, during five centuries in which the mind and property in every country were subjugated to the priesthood whose home was at Rome; and the seed of the latter flourished, because it was fresh from a land in which all were proprietors with interests at stake, and accustomed, although in a very rude and violent way, to take a part, by Things, or assemblies of the people, in all the acts of their government.
Some German, Anglo-American, and English writers, with a silly vanity, and a kind of party feeling, claim a pre-eminence of the Anglo-Saxon race among the European people of our times, in the social, moral, political, and religious elements of society, and even in physical powers—in intellect and in arms. This is the echo of a bray first heard in the forgotten controversy about the authenticity of Ossian's Poems. ​Pinkerton contended stoutly for the natural intellectual superiority of the Gothic over the Celtic race, insisting that no intellectual achievement, not even the almost physical achievement of the conquest of a country by force of arms, was ever accomplished by Celts. The black hair, dark eye, and dusky skin of the small-sized Celt, were considered by those philosophers to indicate an habitation for souls less gifted than those which usually dwell under the yellow hair, blue eye, and fair skin of the bulky Goth. This conceit has been revived of late in Germany, and in America; and people talk of the superiority of the Gothic, Germanic, or Anglo-Saxon race, as if no such people had ever existed as the Romans, the Spaniards, the French—no such men as Cæsar, Buonaparte, Cicero, Montesquieu, Cervantes, Ariosto, Raphael, Michael Angelo. If the superiority they claim were true, it would be found not to belong at all to that branch of the one great northern race which is called Teutonic, Gothic, Germanic, or Anglo-Saxon—for that branch in England was, previous to the settlements of the Danes or Northmen in the 10th and 11th centuries, and is at this day throughout all Germany, morally and socially degenerate, and all distinct and distinguishing spirit or nationality in it dead; but to the small cognate branch of the Northmen or Danes, who, between the 9th and 12th centuries brought their paganism, energy, and social institutions, to bear against, conquer, mingle with, and invigorate the priest-ridden, inert descendants of the old Anglo-Saxon race. It was not, perhaps, so much an overwhelming number of these Northmen, as the new spirit they brought with them, that mixed with and changed the social elements of the countries they settled in. A spark will set tire to a city, if it find stuff to kindle. This stuff was in human nature; and these Northmen, a handful as they were of mere barbarians, did kindle ​it with their spark of a free social existence, in which all men had property or interests, and a right to a voice in the affairs of their government and in the enactment of their laws. It must he admitted, whatever we think of the alleged superiority of the Teutonic race over the Celtic or Slavonic, that this Northern branch has been more influential than the older Anglo-Saxon branch of their common race on the state of modern society in Europe. We have only to compare England and the United States of America with Saxony, Prussia, Hanover, or any country calling itself of ancient Germanic or Teutonic descent, to be satisfied that from whatever quarter civil, religious, and political liberty, independence of mind, and freedom in social existence may have come, it was not from the banks of the Rhine, or the forests of Germany.
The social condition, institutions, laws, and literature of this vigorous, influential branch of the race, have been too much overlooked by our historians and political philosophers; and this work of Snorro Sturleson gives us very different impressions of this branch, in its pagan and barbarous state, from the impressions which the contemporary Anglo-Saxon writers, and all our historians on their authority, afford us. Let us first look at their literature, and compare it with that of the Anglo-Saxon of the same ages.
Our early historians, from the Venerable Bede downwards, however accurate in the events and dates they record, and however valuable for this accuracy, are undeniably the dullest of chroniclers. They were monks, ignorant of the world beyond their convent walls, recording the deaths of their abbots, the legends of their founders, and the miracles of their sainted brethren, as the most important events in history; the facts being stated without exercise of judgment, or inquiry after truth, the fictions with a dull credulity unenlivened by a single gleam of genius. The ​Historia Ecclesiastica venerabilis Bedæ, and Asser's Life of Alfred, embrace the earlier portion of the same period, viz. the latter half of the 8th century, of which the first Sagas of the Heimskringla of Snorro Sturleson treat. The Saxon Chronicle is a dry record of facts and dates, ending about 1155, or about the same period (within twenty years) at which the Heimskringla ends. Matthew Paris begins his history about 1057, and carries it down to about 1250, which is supposed to be about the period of his own death. He was a contemporary of Snorro, who was born in 1178, and murdered in Iceland in 1241. Matthew Paris was no unlettered, obscure monk. He was expressly selected by the Pope, in 1248, for a mission to Norway to settle some disputes among the monks of the order of Saint Benedict, in the monastery of Nidarholm, or Monkholm, in the diocese of Dronthiem; and after accomplishing the object of his mission he returned to his monastery at St. Albans. It is not to be denied that all this connected series of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman history, from the dissolution of the Roman empire in Britain in the middle of the 5th century down to the middle of the 13th century, although composed by such writers of the Anglo-Saxon population as Bede and Matthew Paris, men the most eminent of their times for learning and literary attainments among the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants, is of the most unmitigated dulness, considered as literary or intellectual production; and that all the historical compositions of the old Anglo-Saxon branch during those eight centuries, either in England or in Germany, are, with few if any exceptions, of the same leaden character. They are also, with the exception of the Saxon Chronicle, and of the translation into Anglo-Saxon of Bede by the great King Alfred, all, or almost all, composed in the Latin tongue, not in the native national tongue of the country in which they ​were composed and of which they treat;—composed not for the people, and as part of the literature of the country, but for a tribe of cloistered scholars spread over the country, yet cut off by their profession from all community of interests, feelings, or views, with the rest of the nation; a class centralised in Rome, and at home only in her church establishment. It was their literature, not the literature of the nation around them, that these writers composed; and its influence, and even all knowledge of its existence, was confined to their own class. It was not until the 13th century that Ville Hardouin composed his Memoirs in the vernacular tongue of his countrymen; and he and Joinville, who wrote about the end of the 13th century, are considered the earliest historical writers who emancipated history from the Latinity and dulness of the monkish chroniclers.
When we turn from the heavy Latin records of the Anglo-Saxon monks to the accounts given of themselves in their own language, during the very same ages, by the Northmen, we are startled to find that these wild bloody sea-kings, worshippers of Thor, Odin, and Frigga, and known to us only from the Anglo-Saxon monks as ferocious pagans, overthrowing kings, destroying churches and monasteries, ravaging countries with fire and sword, and dragging the wretched inhabitants whom they did not murder into slavery, surpassed the cognate Saxon people they were plundering and subduing, in literature as much as in arms—that poetry, history, laws, social institutions and usages, many of the useful arts, and all the elements of civilisation, and freedom, were existing among them in those ages in much greater vigour than among the Anglo-Saxons themselves. We cling, to the early impression given us by Hume, and all our best historians, upon the authority of our monkish chroniclers, that these pagan Danes or Northmen were ​barbarians of an almost brutal ignorance and ferocity, without a spark of civilisation or literature. We see that these Vikings, or marauders from the North, were bloody, daring, capable of incredible enterprises and exertion, and of incredible outrages and cruelty when successful—and that a few hundreds of them landing from row-boats, could daunt and subdue extensive tracts of country, and all their inhabitants; yet we do not draw the natural conclusion from these facts, that this terrifying, conquering few must have been superior in mental power, energy, and vigour of action, to the daunted, conquered many. All conquests that history tells of will be found to resolve themselves into the superior mental powers of the conquerors. The Romans conquered nations armed in the same way as themselves, by superior tactics, discipline, military arrangement, and perseverance; that is, by superior mental power applied to the same material means. The moderns in America, India, and in Europe, conquer by the superiority of fire-arms, or of what belongs to the efficiency of fire-arms, in a campaign. This too is the superiority of mental power in the invention, construction, or application of material means. The Northmen, armed with the same weapons as the inhabitants of England, men of the same physical powers as the Anglo-Saxons, land in small piratical bands, altogether insignificant in numbers, on the coasts of England and France, and terrify, paralyse, and conquer, as the Spaniards with their fire-arms and horses, did in Mexico or Peru. What is this but the superiority of mind, of intellectual power, energy, spirit, over the inert passive Anglo-Saxon inhabitants, tamed down by the church influence and superstition of five centuries into a state of listless existence, without spirit or feeling as a nation, or confidence and self-dependence as individuals, and looking for aid from saints, prayers, and miracles? ​It was the human mind in a state of barbarous energy and action, and with the vitality of freedom, conquering the human mind in a state of slavish torpidity and superstitious lethargy. The paucity of numbers of these Danes or Northmen was not compensated by any superiority of the weapons, discipline, or tactics they used; but they were men fighting to acquire property by plunder or conquest, who had laws and institutions which secured to them its enjoyment; and they had as opponents only a population of serfs or labourers, with no property in the soil, no interests to fight for, nothing to lose or to defend but what they could save as well by flying or submitting as by fighting.
It might be surmised by a philosophic reader of the history of those times, that all the vigorous action and energy of mind of these barbarous Danes or Northmen could not be showing itself only in deeds of daring enterprise abroad,—that some of it must be expending itself at home, and in other arts and uses than those of a predatory warfare. It will not, at least, surprise such a reader that some of this mental power was applied at home in attempts, however rude, at history and poetry; but he will be surprised to find that those attempts surpass, both in quality and quantity, all that can be produced of Anglo-Saxon literature during the same ages, either in the Anglo-Saxon language or in the Latin. These literary attempts also, or, to give them their due title, this body of literature, is remarkably distinguished from that of the Anglo-Saxons, or of any other people of the same period, by being composed entirely in the native national tongue, and intended to instruct or amuse an audience of the people; and not in a dead language, and intended merely for the perusal of an educated class in the monasteries. With the exception of Theodoric the Monk, who wrote in Latin in the time of King Swerrer, ​viz. between 1177 and 1202, a history of the kings of Norway down to the end of the reign of Sigurd the Crusader in 1130, and who appears to have been a foreigner, all the literary attempts among this northern branch of the one great race, during the five centuries in which the other branch, the Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon, was confining all intellectual communication in history or poetry to Latin, and within the walls of the cloisters, were composed in the vernacular tongue of the country, intelligible to, and indeed altogether addressed to, the people of all classes. This singular instance in Europe of a national literature diffused among a barbarous and rude people, who had not even received the civilisation which accompanies the Christian religion under every form, before the beginning of the twelfth century, who were pagans in short fully five hundred years after every other part of Europe was, with the exception of some districts perhaps on the coasts of the Baltic, fully Christianised, has not been sufficiently considered by historians in estimating the influence of literature on national mind, character, and social arrangement. To the influence of this rude national literature we probably owe much of what we now pride ourselves upon as the noblest inheritance from our forefathers,—that national energy, activity, independence of mind, and value for civil and political freedom, which distinguish the population of England from that of all other countries, and have done so ever since the admixture of the Northmen with the old Anglo-Saxons. It may be said that the influence of sagas or songs, of the literature, such as it may be, upon the spirit and character of a people, is overstated, and that it is but a fond exaggeration, at any rate, to dignify with the title of a national, influential literature, the rude traditionary tales and ballads of a barbarous pagan population. But a nation's literature is its breath of life, without ​which a nation has no existence, is but a congregation of individuals. However low the literature may be in its intellectual merit, it will nationalise the living materials of a population into a mass animated with common feeling. During the five centuries in which the Northmen were riding over the seas, and conquering wheresoever they landed, the literature of the people they overcame was locked up in a dead language, and within the walls of monasteries. But the Northmen had a literature of their own, rude as it was; and the Anglo-Saxon race had none, none at least belonging to the people. The following list will show the reader that in the five centuries between the days of the Venerable Bede and those of Matthew Paris, that is from the 9th to the end of the 13th century, the northern branch of the common race was not destitute of intellectuality, notwithstanding all their paganism and barbarism, and had a literature adapted to their national spirit, and wonderfully extensive. The list is taken from that given by Thormod Torfæus, in his "Series Dynastarum et Regum Daniæ," from that given by Müller in his "Sagabibliothek," and from that of Biorn Haldorson. The notes on the date and contents are extracted chiefly from Müller's work. The words historical or fabulous indicate only that the work is founded on facts apparently, or is a work of fiction.
* Adonius Saga (of a king and duke in Syria). Fabulous.
* Alafleks Saga (of a son of a King Richard of England). Fabulous.
* Amloda Saga (of Hamlet, freely translated from Saxo). Fabulous.
* Alexander Mikla Saga (of Alexander the Great, translated by Bishop Brand Johnson, by order of Hakon Hakonson). Historical.
* Andra Rimur,—rhymes of or concerning Andreas. Ans Saga (of An Bueswinger). Mythologico-Historical.
* Asmundar ok Tryggve Rinur. Arna Biskups Saga (of Bishop Arne, flourished 1260). Historical.
* Arans Saga Hiorleifs sonar (of Aran son of Hiorleif). Historical. ​
* Amicus ok Amilius Rimur (of Amicus and Amilius—belongs to the story of the Seven Wise Men). Fabulous.
* Bandamanna Saga (of the Confederates—account of an Icelandic law process in the eleventh century). Local History.
* Bardar Saga Snæfelz (of Bard, son of King Dumo, a giant). Fabulous.
* Barlaams Saga.
* Befus Saga (of Bevis, son of an English Count Ginar). Fabulous.
* Biorns Saga Hitdæla Kappa (of Biorn of Hitdale, a contemporary of King Olaf the Saint). Historical.
* Blomstrvalla Saga (a translation from the German by Biorn, in Hakon Hakonson's time. The name Blomstrvalla is from a place near Alexandria, where the scene is laid).
* Bose ok Herauts Saga (of Bose and Heraut). Fabulous.
* Bua Saga (of Bue Andredsson). Fabulous.
* Bœrings Saga fagra (of the beautiful Bœring, a Saxon king). Fabulous.
* Brodhelga Saga (of a chief who died about 974). Historical.
* Brandkrossa Thattr (traits of Helge Asbiornson and Helge Droplauga's sons). Fabulous.
* Bodvars Biarka Saga. Historical.
* Breta Sögur (Saga of Wales, called Breta and Bretland; and the parts of England occupied by the Anglo-Saxons was called Saxland by the Northmen. This is from Geoffrey of Monmouth's work).
* Damusta Saga (of a Damusta who killed Ion, king of a country south of France, and became king of Greece). Fabulous.
* Draplaugar Sona Saga (of the sons Helga and Grim of Draplaug). History and fable mixed; the period, the tenth century.
* Dinus Saga Dromblata (of Dionysius the Proud, son of King Ptolemy, in Egypt).
* Drauma Jons Saga (of John the Dreamer and Earl Henry). Fabulous.
* Egils Saga Eindhendta (of Egil the One-handed, and Asmund). Fabulous.
* Egils Saga Skallagrims sonar (of Egil, son of Skallagrim). Historical; period from the middle of the ninth to the end of the tenth century.
* Egils Saga (of Elis or Julius and Rosamund). Translated from the French, 1226, by Monk Robert, by order of Hakon Hakonson.
* Edda Sæmunds (the elder Edda). Mythological.
* Edda Snorros (the younger Edda). Mythological.
* Eric Rauda Saga (of Eric Red, who discovered Greenland, and Vinland or America). Historical; period from near the end of the ninth to beginning of the tenth century.
* Eyrbyggia Saga (of Thorgrim, whose forefather, Rolf, came from the Isle of Moster in the north of Norway, and first planted Iceland with people from his island (eyrbiggia, isle-settlers) to escape Harald Haarfager). Historical; period from the first colonising Iceland to the middle of the eleventh century. ​
* Erics Saga Vidforla (of Eric the Wanderer, who goes in search of the land of immortality.) Mythological.
* Edwardar Saga hins helga (of Saint Edward of England).
* Fertrams Saga ok Plato (of Fertram and Plato, sons of King Arthur). Fabulous.
* Finaboga Ramma Saga (of Finabog the Strong). Fable and history, from middle of tenth to eleventh century.
* Flateyar Annall (the Flatö Codex, so called from the Isle of Flatö in Breidafiord in Iceland, in which the manuscript was discovered in 1650. The Annals end in 1395. It contains many Saga transcribed into it, and is considered a most important historical collection. The MSS. was written by Ion Thordsen, priest, and Magnus Thorhalsen, priest, between the years 1387 and 1395). Historical.
* Færeyinga Saga (of the Færo Islands). Historical.
* Floamanna Saga (of a Thorgill and his ancestors, original settlers in Iceland, and of his adventures in Greenland. Thorgill died 1033). Historical.
* Flores ok Leo (of Flores and Leo).
* Florents Saga Fraka Konungs (of Florent King of the Franks, invented by Master Simon in Lyons).
* Fridthiofs Saga (of Fridthiof the Bold). This beautiful story has been the groundwork of several poetic and dramatic imitations, of which Bishop Tegner's, in Swedish, has been translated into English.
* Flores Konungs Saga ok Sona hans (of King Floris and his sons).
* Gibbons Saga (of Gibbon, son of the French king William).
* Gaunga Hrolfs Saga (of Rolf Ganger, the conqueror of Normandy). Historical.
* Gisla Saga Secos sonar (of Gisle the son of Secos. Events of the tenth century in Iceland). Historical.
* Gretters Saga sterka (of Gretter the Strong). Adventures, fabulous and historical, mixed, of Gretter and his forefathers, in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries.
* Guimars Saga (of Guimar, an English knight).
* Gudmundar Biskups Saga (of Bishop Gudmund); being part of the third book of the Sturlunga Saga, or account of the Sturlung family, which ends 1264, and of which the first books are supposed to have been written 1201.
* Grœnlandinga Thattr (events in Greenland from 1122, and a list of nine bishops and fifteen churches). Historical.
* Gunnars Saga fifls (of Gunnar the Idiot). Fabulous.
* Gunlaugs Saga Ormstungu (of Gunlaug the Serpent-tongued). Historical; the period about 1006.
* Gunnors Saga Thedbrand bana (of Gunnor who killed Thedbrand). Historical; supposed to be written about the end of the twelfth century.
* Gullthoris Saga (of Gold Thorro, or Torskfindinga Saga). Fabulous.
* Grims ok Hialmers rimur (rhymes concerning Grim and Hialmer).
* Halfs Saga (of Half, who, if not altogether a fabulous personage, lived about the eighth century; or in the sixth, according to others).
* Halfdanar Saga Brannfostre (of Halfdan, foster-son of Bran). Fabulous.
* Halfdanar Saga Eystein sonar (of Halfdan, son of Eystein). Fabulous.
* Haraldz Saga Hringsbana (of Harald, who slew Hring).
* Hrolf Kraka Saga (a collection of Sagas, some historical, some fabulous).
* Hemings Saga (of Heming, a fabulous personage of Olaf the Saint's time).
* Hervarar Saga (of Hervar). Mythological.
* Hialmthers ok Olvers Saga (of Hialmther and Olver). Fabulous.
* Hogne ok Hedins Saga. Mythological.
* Holmverra Saga (of one Hord). Mixed fable and historical fact regarding Iceland.
* Hrafnkels Goda Saga. Historical; of Harald Haarfager's times.
* Hrims ok Tryggve rimur.
* Hralf Saga Gotreks sonar (of Hralf, son of Gotrek). Mythological.
* Hrolfs Saga Skugga fifls (of Hrolf, son of Skugga the Idiot).
* Hromundar Saga Grips sonar. Fabulous.
* Hungr-vaka (the Hunger-waking is the name of a Saga of the Bishops of Skalholt down to 1178; the author supposing it would raise an appetite for more).
* Hönse Thoris Saga (of Thorer the hen-merchant). Historical.
* Hrafns Saga Swinbiornar sonar (of Hrafn, son of Swinhiorn).
* Hallfredar Saga Vandræda Skalldz (of Halfred "the scald, desperate or difficult to deal with," who lived in King Olaf the Saint's time). Historical.
* Hakonar Konungs Saga Hakonar sonar (of King Hakon Hakonson, who was horn 1203, and died 1274). Historical; by Sturle Thordson, a contemporary.
* Hugo Scaplars Saga (Hugo of the Scapulary). Fabulous.
* Hakonar Saga Hareks sonar (of Hakon the son of Harek).
* Hakonar Saga Iverson sonar (of Hakon Iverson). Historical.
* Haralds Rimur Kvingiarna (rhymes of or concerning Harald the Woman-lover.)
* Hermodar Rimur (rhymes of Hermod).
* Islandinga Bok Ara Froda (Book of Iceland—concerning the first colonisation of Iceland, the introduction of Christianity, &c., usually called Are Frode Schedæ; written about 1120). Historical.
* Isfirdinga Saga (of a division of Iceland called Isfirding). Historical.
* Jarlmans Saga (of Jarlman and Herman). Fabulous.
* Illugo Saga Gridar fostra (of Illugo, foster-son of Grida). Fabulous.
* Jokuls Saga Bue sonar (of Jokul, son of Bue). Fabulous.
* Jomsvikinga Saga (of the Vikings of Jomsburg, in the island of Wollen). Historical.
* Jans Biskups Saga (of John the Bishop, viz. Ion Ogmundson, who died 1121, bishop of Skalholt). Historical.
* Ivents Saga. Fabulous; translated from the French by order of Hakon Hakonson.
* Ions Saga Leiksveins (of John the Juggler). Fabulous. ​
* Jonales Rimur (rhymes of Jonales).
* Ions Saga Baptistæ (of John the Baptist).
* Ions Saga Gudspialla mana (of Saint John the Evangelist).
* Karlamagnus Saga (of Charlemagne).
* Ketils Saga (of Ketil Hæng and Grim Lodiskins). Fable and history.
* Knytlinga Saga (of the Danish kings of the Canute dynasty, from Harald Gormson to Canute VII.; supposed to be by Olaf Thordson, who died 1259). Historical.
* Konrads Saga Keysara sonar (of Konrad; son of the Emperor).
* Kormaks Saga (of Kormak the Scald). Fable and history.
* Kroka Refs Saga (of Ref the Cunning). Fabulous.
* Klarus Saga Keysara sonar (of ClaruS; son of the Emperor). Fabulous.
* Kotler Draumr (the Dream of Cotla).
* Kristus Saga (of the introduction of Christianity into Iceland; from 981 to 1000). Historical.
* Kirialax Saga (of the Emperor Alexis; viz. Kurios Alexis ; but this is a fabulous emperor).
* Kallinius Rimur (rhymes of Callinius).
* Kraks Spa (Prophecy of Krak).
* Landnama Bok (events in Iceland from the original settlement in the ninth to the end of the tenth century; with names of the first settlers; and of their lands; to the number of about 3000 names of persons; and 1400 of places; supposed to have been written in the last half of the thirteenth century). Historical.
* Langfidgatal (series of dynasties and kings in the North). Historical.
* Laxdæla Saga (of the descendants of Auda; who settled in Laxdale). Historical.
* Liosvetninga Saga (Lives of the Descendants of Thorgier and Gudmund; and their own Lives; between the middle of the tenth and end of the twelfth century). Historical; written about the end of the twelfth century.
* Laurentius Biskups Saga (of Bishop Laurence, who was born 1267). Historical, by a contemporary.
* Mabels Sterku Rimer (rhymes of or concerning Mabel the Strong).
* Maria Saga (of Mary, viz. the Virgin).
* Margaretor Saga (of Margaret and Sigurd, in Magnus the Good’s time).
* Magus Jarls Saga (of Earl Magus, or Marus, in Saxland). Fabulous.
* Mirmants Saga (of Mirmant, a king in Sicily). Fabulous.
* Magnus Saga Orkneya Jarls (of Saint Magnus, Earl of Orkney, who was killed 1110). Historical.
* Mottuls Saga (of the magic cloak at the court of King Arthur).
* Nials Saga (of Nial). Historical; and supposed to be written by Sæmund Frode, in the 11th century.
* Nikulass Saga leikara (of Nicolas the Juggler, son of King Faustus of Hungary). Fabulous.
* Nitida Frægn Saga (of the celebrated Nitida, daughter of a Frank king Richard). Fabulous.
* Nikulass Saga Erksbiskups (of Nicholas, Archbishop of Lucca).
* Œrverodde Saga (of Odde the Archer; literally, Arrow-Odde). Fabulous.
* Olver Rimur (rhymes of Olver).
* Petrs Saga Postula (of Peter the Apostle).
* Partalopa Saga.
* Polistutors Rimur.
* Parcevals Saga (of Parceval, one of King Arthur’s worthies). Fabulous.
* Pals Biskups Saga (of Bishop Paul, the seventh bishop of Skalholt, who died in 1211; supposed by a contemporary). Historical.
* Ragners Saga Lodbroker (of Ragner Lodbrok). History with fable.
* Reinalds ok Rosa Rimur (rhymes of Ronald and Rosa).
* Sigurdr Saga Thogla (of Sigurd the Silent, son of King Lodver in Saxland). Fabulous.
* Sigrgardz Saga frækna (of a king of Tartary, Sigurd the Bold). Fabulous.
* Saulus Saga ok Nicanors (of Saul and Nicanor, two foster brothers, one of Galatia, and one of Italy). Fabulous.
* Sturlunga Saga (of the family of Sturle, of which Snorro Sturleson was a descendant, from the beginning of the 12th century to 1284). Historical.
* Storla Stærka Saga (of Storle the Strong). Fabulous.
* Sveins Rimur Muk sonar (rhymes of Svein the Monk’s son).
* Sigurdar Fots Saga (of Sigurd Foot).
* Skida Rima (rhyme of Skida).
* Sverris Saga (of King Swerrer, from 1177, when Snorro Sturleson’s Heimskringla ends, to King Swerrer’s death). Historical.
* Stuffs Thattr (Traits of Stuff the Scald, who lived in the time of Harald Sigurdson, about 1050). Historical.
* Skaldhelga Rimur (rhymes of the Scald Helga).
* Svarfdæla Saga (of Thorstein, who first settled in Svarfdal in Iceland; and fabulous adventures of his successors). History and fable.
* Samsonar Saga Fagra (of Samson the Fair). Fabulous.
* Stiarna Odda Draumr (Star Odda, viz. the Astrologer Odda’s Dream).
* Thomas Saga Erksbiskups (of Archbishop Thomas of Canterbury).
* Tyodels Saga Riddara (of the knight Tyodel. He could transform himself into a bear).
* Thidreks Saga af Bern (of Dietric of Bern). The same as the German story.
* Thordar Hredu Saga (of Thorder the Terrible, who, in 975, left Norway, and settled in Iceland). Historical.
* Thorer Haliggs Rimur.
* Thorsteins Saga Sidu Halls sonar (of Thorstein, son of Sidu Hall). Historical.
* Thorsteins Saga Vikings sonar (of Thorstein son of the Viking). Fabulous.
* Thormodar Saga Kalbrunar Skalldz (of Thormod Kalbrun the Scald). Historical.
* Thorsteins Saga Oxafots. Fabulous. ​
* Thorlak Biskups Saga (of Bishop Thorlak). Historical.
* Thorleif Saga Jarla Skalldz (of Thorleif the Scald of the Earls of Orkney). Historical.
* Ulfars Saga Stærka ok Onundar Fagra (of Ulfar the Strong, and Onund the Fair; the one became a king in Africa, the other in Asia). Fabulous.
* Vatsdæla Saga (of Ketil Thrumr, his son Thorstein, Ingimund and Sæmund, his grandsons, who settled in Vatsdal in Iceland). Historical.
* Voldemar's Saga (of Valdemar, son of King Philip of Saxland).
* Valnaliots Saga (of Valnaliot, an Icelander; the story of the 12th century). Historical.
* Victors Saga ok Blaus (of Victor and Blaus). Fabulous.
* Vigagleims Saga (of Gleim, son of Eyolf, who went to settle in Iceland 922). Historical.
* Vilhialms Saga Siods (of William of the Treasure, a son of King Richard in England). Fabulous.
* Vilmundar Saga (of Vilmund and Hierande, a son of a king in Frankland). Fabulous.
* Ulfs Saga Ugga sonar (of Ulf the son of Ugga). Fabulous.
* Ulfhams Rimur (Rhymes of Ulfham).
* Valvers Thattr (Traits of the Life of Valver).
* Volsunga Saga. Mythological.
It does not appear that any saga-manuscript now existing has been written before the 14th century, however old the saga itself may be. The Flatö manuscript is of 1395. Those supposed to have been written in the ​13th century are not ascertained to be so on better data than the appearance and handwriting. It is known that in the 12th century Are Frode, Sæmund, and others began to take the sagas out of the traditionary state, and fix them in writing; but none of the original skins appear to have come down to our times, but only some of the numerous copies of them. Bishop Müller shows good reasons for supposing that before Are Frode's time, and in the 11th century, sagas were committed to writing; but if we consider the scarcity of the material in that age—parchment of the classics, even in Italy, being often deleted, to be used by the monks for their writings—these must have been very few. No well-authenticated saga of ancient date in Runic is extant, if such ever existed; although Runic letters occur in Gothic, and even in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, mixed with the other characters.
To these Torfæus adds,—Historical Fragments concerning Ivar Vidfadme, Hrærer Staungraubang, Helgius the Acute, and the Battle of Bravalla: also the Codex Flateyensis, as above noticed,—a manuscript so called from the island Flatö, on the west side of Iceland, in which it was discovered, containing the genealogies and annals of the Norwegian kings and chiefs: also a manuscript called by him The Fair Skin—Fagrskinnan; being a breviary of the history of Norway, or chronological compendium from Halfdan the Black to Swerrer's reign; and also several ancient annals, which, being without titles, he cannot cite in his catalogue. Besides these, the following works, no longer extant in any known manuscripts, are referred to in the ancient histories, viz.: The history of Einar the son of Gisle, who killed Giafald, one of the court of King Magnus Barefoot, is cited in the end of the "Life of Saint John Bishop of Holen." The history of Sigurd Cervus is cited by ​Snorro Sturleson in his "Life of Halfdan the Black." The life of Alfgeir is cited in the "History of Holmen." The history of Grim the son of Krop, who killed Eyda the son of Skegg of Midfiord, is mentioned in the "Life of Gretter the Strong." The life of Thorgils the son of Hall, and the history of the people of Niardvik, are cited in the "History of the Laxdale People." The "Landnama" mentions histories of Bodmod, of Gerpis, of Grimelf, and the life of Thord Getter. The same work mentions also the history of the Thorskfiord people, and a life of Vibiorn, who was one of the original settlers in Iceland when it was uninhabited. The history of the Sturlung family shows that formerly there were extant a history of the Berserker and Viking Hraungrid, and lives of Olaf king of the Lidmen or army, of Hrok the Black, and of Orm the Poet. Snorro appears to have read a history of the Skioldung family, that is, of the progenitors of the Danish dynasty. The "Life of Hrolf Krak" cites a life of Thorer the Dogfooted, and a life of Agnar son of Hroar king of Denmark. The "Life of Rolf the Walker, the Conqueror of Normandy," cites a history of the Hiodnarg people. The history of Skiold the son of Dag, and of Hermann, is cited in the "Life of Illug Grid's Foster-son." The "Life of Bose" mentions a life of Sigurd Hring. Mention of the histories of Ulf, son of Sebb, and of Earl Kvik, is made in the historical relation of some incidents by the scalds of Harald Haarfager. The "History of the Liosvatn People" cites a history of the people of Espholen. The writings of Are, who lived ​about the year 1117, and first committed to writing the Icelandic compositions, and of Sæmund, who flourished about the year 1083, and had studied at universities in Germany and France, and of Oddo the Monk, who flourished in the 12th century, are almost entirely lost. Kolskegg, a contemporary of Are, and, like him, distinguished by the surname of Frode—the wise, or the much knowing,—Brandus, who lived about the year 1163, Eiric, the son of Oddo, and his contemporary Karl, abbot of the monastery of Thringö, in the north of Iceland, and several others, appear to have been collectors, transcribers, and partly continuators of preceding chronicles; and all these flourished between the time of Bede in the end of the 7th and beginning of the 8th century, when the devastations of these piratical Vikings were at the worst, and the time of Snorro Sturleson in the middle of the 13th century, when the Viking life was given up, invasions of Northmen even under their kings had ceased, and the influence of Christianity and its establishments was diffused.
Now we have here a vast body of literature, chiefly historical, or intended to be so, and all in the vernacular tongue of the Northmen. It is for our Anglo-Saxon scholars and antiquaries to say, whether in the Anglo-Saxon tongue, or in the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin together, such a body of national literature was produced,—whether such intellectual activity existed between the days of the Venerable Bede, our earliest historian, in the beginning of the 8th century, and the days of Matthew Paris, the contemporary of Snorro Sturleson, in the first half of the 13th? And these were Pagans, these Northmen, whether in Denmark, Norway, or Iceland, for more than half of these five centuries! This body of literature may surely be called a national literature; for on looking over the subjects it treats of, it will be found to con​sist almost entirely of historical events, or of the achievements of individuals, which, whether real or fabulous, were calculated to sustain a national spirit among the people for whom they were composed; and scarcely any of it consists of the legends of saints, of homilies, or theological treatises, which constitute the greater proportion of the literature of other countries during the same ages, and which were evidently composed only for the public of the cloisters. It is distinguished also from any contemporary literature, and indeed from any known body of literature, by the peculiar circumstance of its having been for many centuries, and until the beginning of the 12th century, or within 120 years of Snorro Sturleson's own times, an oral not a written literature, and composed and transmitted from generation to generation by word of mouth, and by memory, not by pen, ink, and parchment. This circumstance may affect the historical value of these documents, if the authenticity of what they relate be not supported by internal or collateral evidence, but does not affect their literary value as the compositions, during five centuries, of the North men, and as such to be compared with the compositions, during the same five centuries, of the cognate Anglo-Saxon people. It is of great importance, however, to examine the value, as historical documents, of these compositions.
The early history of every people can only have been preserved by traditionary stories, songs, ballads, until the age when they were fixed by writing. The early history of Tome, for many centuries, has had no other foundation than such a saga-literature as this of the Northmen. Homer, whether the Iliad and Odyssey be the works of one mind or of several, has had traditionary accounts as the historical foundation and authority for the events and personages he celebrates. Snorro Sturleson has done for the history ​of the Northmen what Livy did for the history of the Romans. The traditionary works of the predecessors of Livy in his historical field, the sagas of the Romans, have unfortunately not reached us. The ancient Roman writers themselves regret that the songs and legends, the sagas from which the historical accounts of their ancestors are derived, and which it appears from two passages in Cicero were extant in the time of the elder Cato, and, like the sagas of the Northmen, were sung or recited at feasts, had fallen into oblivion. Such documents in verse or prose are common to the early history of every people, and on such and on the similar transmission of them by memory, the historical Scriptures of the Old Testament themselves rest. These sagas have been preserved among the Northmen, or at least have not perished so entirely but that the sources from which their historian Snorro drew his information may be examined. They constitute the body of literature of which the list of sagas given above is an imperfect catalogue—imperfect because many sagas, songs, or other compositions referred to in those which are extant no longer exist, and probably never had been taken out of the traditionary state, in which they existed then as matter of memory, and been fixed in writing. If we consider the scarcity of the material—parchment—in the middle ages, even in the oldest Christianised countries of Europe, and the still greater scarcity of scribes, and men of learning and leisure, who would bestow their time and material on any subjects but monastic legends ​in the Latin language, we must wonder that so many of these historical tales had been committed to writing in Iceland; not that so many which once were extant in the traditionary state have not been preserved.
Every intelligent reader of English history who is startled at this view of the comparative literature and intellectual condition of the two branches, the pagan and the Christian, of the one great northern race, between the 8th and the 13th centuries, will desire information on the following points: —Who were the scribes, collectors, or compilers, who preceded Snorro Sturleson in writing down, gathering, or reducing to history, those traditionary narratives called Sagas which had floated down on the memory, in verse or in prose, from generation to generation? Who were the original authors of these compositions; and what was the condition of the class of men, the Scalds, who composed them? What were the peculiar circumstances in the social condition of the Northmen in those ages, by which such a class as the Scalds was kept in bread, and in constant employment and exertion among them, and even with great social consideration; while among the Anglo-Saxons, a cognate branch of the same people, the equivalent class of the Bards, Troubadours, Minstrels, Minnesingers, was either extinct, or of no more social influence than that of the Court Jesters or the Jougleurs?
Snorro Sturleson tells us, in the preface to his work, that "the priest Are hinn Frode (hinn Frode is applied to several writers, and means the Wise, the Learned; le Prud'homme perhaps of the Norman-French, although antiquaries render it into the more assuming Latin appellative, Polyhistor), was the first man in Iceland who wrote down in the Norse tongue both old and new narratives of events." The Landnama Saga (Liber Originum Islandiæ), which treats of the first occupation of Iceland by the Norwegians, and ​of their descendants; the Islindinga Bok, or Book of Iceland, usually quoted by the title of the Latin translation, "Schedæ Arii Polyhistoris," which is an account of the introduction of Christianity, and of other affairs in Iceland, and of the judges and other considerable personages; and the Flateyiar Annall, forming part of the important manuscript on parchment quoted so often by northern antiquaries by the name of the Codex Flateyensis,—are works of Are still extant. The Flateyiar Annall appears to have been a chronicle begun by Are, and continued by his successors in his parochial charge. It does not appear that any writing of Are upon parchment is extant, and his labours as a compiler appear to be known from the testimony only of Snorro Sturleson, or from copies such as those in the Codex Flateyensis, made from his writings. Are hinn Frode is reckoned by Torfæus to have been born about the year 1068, and to have written " the old and new narratives of events," which Snorro tells us he did, "two hundred and forty years after the first occupation of Iceland by the Norwegians about the year 1117. A manuscript of Biorn of Skardza, which Torfæus says was once in his possession, speaks of an older compiler than Are. Isleif, the first bishop of Iceland, who was consecrated by Adalbert, archbishop of Bremen, in 1056, and who died in 1080, is stated to have written a life of Harald Haarfager and his successors, down to Magnus the Good, who died about 1047, compiled from the current sagas; and his son, Bishop Gissur, is stated to have also collected and written down histories in the common tongue. Are hinn Frode was brought up as a foster-son in the house of Teit, another son of this Bishop Isleif, and, Torfæus supposes, may have used the materials collected by Isleif; and thus the labours of the two, as compilers or scribes of the ancient sagas, may have been attributed to the one of most ​celebrity. The celibacy of the clergy appears not to have been regarded in the northern countries in the 11th or 12th centuries. We read of the wives and sons of priests down to a late period; and Bishop Isleif was not singular in having sons.
Sæmund, also designated as hinn Frode, was a contemporary of Are. He was born in 1056, and after travelling and studying in Germany and France returned to Iceland, and settled as priest of the parish of Odda, in the south of Iceland, and commenced the Annals, which were continued by his successors in the clerical charge of Odda, and are hence called "Annales Oddenses" by the northern antiquaries. The older Edda, of which the Edda of Snorro Sturleson is but an epitome for explaining the mythological language and allusions of the poetical saga, is attributed to him; but unfortunately it is almost entirely lost, so that we know little of the doctrines or establishments of the ancient Odin-worship. Odd the Monk, who lived in the following century, refers to an historical work of Sæmund, which is also lost. Sæmund died in 1133. His contemporary Are survived him, and died in 1148.
Kolskegg, also hinn Frode, was another contemporary of Are, whose name is known as a compiler, or scribe, but his works are not extant.
Brand, bishop of the diocese of Holen in Iceland, ordained 1164, and who died 1201, was also a diligent transcriber of sagas from the memory to parchment. He was a contemporary of Saxo Grammaticus, the Danish historian. Saxo himself, in the preface to his work, gives the strongest testimony to the diligence and importance of the historical researches and traditional records of the Icelanders. "Nor is the industry of the Tylenses (by which name Saxo designates the people of Tyle, Thule, or Iceland) to be passed over in silence, who, from the sterility of their native soil, ​being deprived of every luxury of food, exercise a perpetual sobriety, and turn every moment of their lives to the cultivation of a knowledge of the affairs of other countries, and, compensating their poverty by their ingenuity, consider it their pleasure to become acquainted with the transactions of other nations, and hold it to be not less honourable to record the virtues of others than to exhibit their own; and whose treasures in the records of historical transactions I have carefully consulted, and have composed no small portion of the present work according to their relations, not despising as authorities those whom I know to be so deeply embued with a knowledge of antiquity." Saxo appears to have had access to many sagas, either in manuscript, or in vivâ voce relation, which are not now extant. Theodoric the Monk, a contemporary also of Saxo, who flourished about the year 1161, and wrote a history of the kings of Norway in Latin, and almost the only historical work of the middle ages composed in that language in Norway, gives a similar testimony to the great amount of historical knowledge among the Icelanders transmitted through their songs and sagas. The causes of this peculiar turn among the Icelanders will be inquired into afterwards.
Eiric, the son of Odd, wrote a history of King Harald Gille's sons, Sigurd and Inge, who succeeded him, as joint kings of Norway, about 1136, to the death of each of them; and gives also the history of King Magnus the Blind, and of Sigurd Slembidegn. As King Inge fell in battle in the year 1161, the work of Eiric is to be placed after that date. Karl, abbot of the monastery of Thing Isle in the north or Iceland, who was ordained in 1169, and died in 1213, wrote a life of his contemporary King Swerrer, who reigned from 1177 to 1202. His work is highly esteemed.
Odd the Monk, also hinn Frode, was next to, or ​perhaps contemporary with, these writers, and composed a life of King Olaf Tryggvesson, containing circumstances not found in other accounts of that reign; from which it is supposed that he had access to sagas not now extant.
These are the principal historical writers who compiled or composed from the ancient unwritten sagas, between the days of Are hinn Frode in 1117, and the days of Snorro Sturleson in the beginning of the following century. In these hundred or hundred and twenty years between Are and Snorro, the great mass of literature in the vernacular tongue committed to parchment proves a state of great intellectual activity among these Northmen. It is not the literary or historical value, or the true dates or facts of these traditionary pieces called sagas, written down for the first time within those hundred and twenty years, that is the important consideration to the philosophical reader of history; but the extraordinary fact, that before the Norman conquest of England here was a people but just Christianised, whose fathers were pagans, and who were still called barbarians by the Anglo-Saxons, yet with a literature in their own language diffused through the whole social body, and living in the common tongue and mind of the people. The reader would almost ask if the Anglo-Saxons were not the barbarians of the two,— a people, to judge from their history, without national feeling, interests, or spirit, sunk in abject superstition, and with no literature among them but what belonged to a class of men bred in the cloister, using only the Latin language, and communicating only with each other, or with Rome. In the same period in which the intellectual powers of the pagan or newly Christianised Northmen were at work in the national tongue upon subjects of popular interest, what was the amount of literary production among the Anglo-Saxons? Gildas, ​the earliest British, writer, was of the ancient British, not of the Anglo-Saxon people, and wrote about the year 560, or a century after the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in England. Gildas Albanius, or Saint Gildas, preceded him by about a century; and both wrote in Latin, not in the British or the Saxon tongue. The "Historia Ecclesiastica Venerabilis Bedæ" was written in Latin about the year 731; and King Alfred translated this work of the Venerable Bede into Anglo-Saxon about 858, or by other account some time between 872 and 900. Asser wrote "De Vita et Rebus Gestis Alfredi" about the same period, for he died 910. Nennius, and his annotator Samuel, are placed by Pinkerton about the year 858. Florence of Worcester wrote about 1100; Simeon of Durham about 1164; Giraldus Cambrensis hi the same century. The "Saxon Chronicle" appears to have been the work of different hands from the 11th to the 12th century. Roger of Hovedon wrote about 1210; Matthew Paris, the contemporary of Snorro Sturleson, about 1240. These are the principal writers among the Anglo-Saxons referred to by our historians, down to the age of Snorro Sturleson; and they all wrote in Latin, not in the language of the people—the Anglo-Saxon.
This separation of the mind and language, and of the intellectual influence of the upper educated classes, from the uneducated mass of the Anglo-Saxon people, on the Continent as well as in England, by the barrier of a dead language, forms the great distinctive difference between the Anglo-Saxons and the Northmen; and to it may be traced much of the difference in the social condition, spirit, and character of the two branches of the Teutonic or Saxon race at the present day. It is but about a century ago, about 1740, that this barrier was broken down in Germany, and men of genius or science began to write for the German ​mind in its own German language. With the exception of Luther's translation of the Bible, little or nothing had been written before the 18th century for the German people in the German tongue. That beautiful language itself had become so Latinised by the use and application of Latin in all business and intellectual production—a circumstance which both Goethe and Jean Paul Richter, its greatest masters, deplore—that it was, and to a considerable degree remains in the present times, a different language in writing from the spoken vernacular tongue of the people of Germany. They have to acquire it, as, in some sort, a dead language to them, to understand and enter into the meaning and spirit of their own best writers. Their Plat Deutch, the spoken tongue of the mass of the people, does not merely differ as our Scotch, Yorkshire, or Somersetshire dialects differ from English, only in tone of voice, pronunciation, and in the use of a few obsolete words; but in construction and elements, from the too great admixture of foreign elements from the Latin into the cultivated German. A striking proof of this is, that no sentiment, phrase, popular idea, or expression from the writings of Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Richter, or any other great German writer, is ever heard among the lower classes in Germany, the peasants, labouring people, and uneducated masses; while, with us, sentiments, expressions, phrases, from Shakspeare, Pope, Burns, Swift, De Poe, Cobbett,—from Cervantes, Le Sage, Moliere,—have crept into common use and application, as proverbial sayings circulating among our totally uneducated classes, who certainly never read those authors, but have caught up from others what is good and natural, because the thought is expressed in language which they are as familiar with as the writer was himself. In our branch of the Saxon race, the intellectuality of the educated ​class has always worked downwards through a language common to all. The moral influence of this uninterrupted circulation of ideas from the highest to the lowest is very striking in our social condition, and in that of all the people descended from the Northmen, the younger branch of the great Anglo-Saxon race. Under every form of government, whether despotic as in Denmark, aristocratic as in Sweden, democratic as in the United States, or mixed as in England, they are, under all circumstances, distinguished from the other, the old Anglo-Saxon branch, by their strong nationality and distinct national characters. What is this but the diffusion of one mind, one spirit, one mode of thinking and doing, through the whole social body of each of these groups, by a common language and literature, such as it may be, giving one shape and tone to the mind of all? Turn from these groups of the European population, and look at the nationality or national character of the other branch of the race—or rather look for it. Where is it? Have Prussians, Saxons, Hanoverians, Hessians, Baden-Badenians, or whatever their rulers call them, any jot of this national feeling, any national existence at all? Have the Germans as a whole mass, or has any one group of them, any national character at this day, any common feeling among all classes upon any one subject? There is a want of that circulation of the same mind and intelligence through all classes of the social body, differing only in degree, not in kind, in the most educated and the most ignorant, and of that circulation and interchange of impressions through a language and literature common to all, which alone can animate a population into a nation. It would be a curious subject for the political philosopher to examine, what have been the effects of the literature, of a people upon their social condition. English literature works much more ​powerfully upon the great mass of the English people, although uneducated, and unable to receive its influence and impression direct, than German literature, although much more abundant, works upon the people of Germany. The circulation of ideas stops there at a certain class, and the mass remains unmoved by, impenetrable to, and unintelligent of the storms that may be raging on the surface among the upper educated people. The literature of the Northmen in their own tongue undoubtedly kept alive that common feeling and mind—that common sense on matters of common interest, which in England grew up into our national institutions. They had a literature of their own, however rude, a history of their own, however barbarous,—had laws, institutions, and social arrangements of their own; and all these through a common language influencing and forming a common mind in all; and when men, or the children of men whose minds had been so formed, came to inhabit, and not merely to conquer, but to colonise a very large proportion of the surface of England, we may safely assume that what we call the Anglo-Saxon institutions of England, and the spirit and character on which alone free institutions can rest, were the natural productions of this national mind, reared by the Northmen in England, and not by the Anglo-Saxons.
What were the peculiar circumstances in the social condition of this branch of the Saxon race, which kept alive a national literature, history, spirit, and character, and peculiar laws and institutions, while all that was peculiar to or distinctive of the other branch had long been extinguished in Germany, and in a great measure in England? This question can only be answered by looking at the original position of this northern branch of the same stock, on the European soil.
The race of men who under Odin established them​selves in the countries north of the Baltic were undoubtedly of Asiatic origin. The date of this inundation may have been 400 years before or 400 years after the Christian era (antiquaries have their theories, for both periods), or there may have been different Odins, or the name may have been generic and applied to all great conquerors; and the causes, as well as the dates of this vast movement, are lost in the night of antiquity. The fact itself admits of no doubt; for it rests not only on the concurrent traditions and religious belief of the people, but upon customs retained by them to a period far within the pale of written history, and which could only have arisen in the country from which they came, not in that to which they had come. The use, for instance, of horse-flesh could never have been an original indigenous Scandinavian custom, because the horse there is an animal too valuable and scarce ever to have been an article of food, as on the plains of Asia; but down to the end of the 11th century the eating of horse-flesh at the religious feasts, as commemorative of their original country, prevailed, and was the distinctive token of adhering to the religion of Odin: and those who ate horse-flesh were punished with death by Saint Olaf. A plurality of wives also, in which the most Christian of their kings indulged even so late as the 12th century, was not a custom which, in a poor country like Scandinavia, was likely to prevail, and appears more probably of Asiatic origin. But what could have induced a migrating population from the Tanais (the Don), on which traditionary history fixes their original seat, after reaching the southern coasts of the Baltic, to have turned to the north and crossed the sea to establish themselves on the bleak inhospitable rocks, and in the severe climate of Scandinavia, instead of overspreading the finer countries on the south side of the Baltic? The political causes from preoccupation, ​or opposition of tribes as warlike as themselves, cannot now be known from any historical data; but from physical data we may conjecture that such a deviation from what we would consider the more natural run of the tide of a population seeking a living in new homes, may have been preferable to any other course in their social condition. We make a wrong estimate of the comparative facilities of subsisting, in the early ages of mankind, in the northern and southern countries of Europe. If a tribe of red-men from the forests of America had been suddenly transported in the days of Tacitus to the forests of Europe beyond the Rhine, where would they, in what is called the hunter state, that is, depending for subsistence on the spontaneous productions of nature, have found in the greatest abundance the means and facilities of subsisting themselves? Unquestionably on the Scandinavian peninsula, intersected by narrow inlets of the sea teeming with fish, by lakes and rivers rich in fish, and in a land covered with forests, in which not only all the wild animals of Europe that are food for man abound, but from the numerous lakes, rivers, ponds, and precipices in this hunting-field, are to be got at and caught with much greater facility than on the boundless plains, on which, from the Rhine to the Elbe, and from the Elbe to the Vistula, or to the steppes of Asia, there is scarcely a natural feature of country to hem in a herd of wild animals in their flight, and turn them into any particular tract or direction to which the hunters could resort with advantage, and at which they could depend on meeting their prey. At this day Norway is the only country in Europe in which men subsist in considerable comfort in what may be called the hunter state,—that is, upon the natural products of the earth and waters, to which man in the rudest state must have equally had access in all ages,—and derive their food, fuel, clothing, and lodging from the forest, ​the Fielde, the fiords, and rivers, without other aid from agriculture, or the arts of civilised life, than is implied in keeping herds of reindeer in a half tame state, or a few cows upon the natural herbage of the mountain glens. We, in our state of society, do not consider that the superior fertility of the warmer climes and better soils of southern countries, adds nothing to the means of subsistence of those who do not live upon those products of the earth which are obtained by cultivation. A hermit at the present day could subsist himself, from the unaided bounty of nature, much better at the side of a fiord in Norway, than on the banks of the Tiber, or of the Tagus, or of the Thames. Iceland, which we naturally think the last abode to which necessity could drive settlers, had in its abundance of fish, wild fowl, and pasturage for sheep and cows, although the country never produced corn, such advantages that it was the earliest of modern colonies, and was a favourite resort of emigrants in the 9th century. The Irish monk Dicuil, who wrote in 825 his work "De Mensura Orbis Terræ," published by C. A. Walckenaer in Paris in 1828, says that for 100 years, that is from 725, the desire for the hermit life had led many Irish clerks to the islands to the north of the British sea, which, with a fair wind, may be reached in two days' sail from the most northerly British isles. These were most likely the Feroe Isles, or Westmann Isles. "These isles," he says, "from the creation of the world uninhabited, and unnamed, are now, in 825, deserted by the hermits on account of the northern sea robbers. They have innumerable sheep, and many sorts of sea fowl." This would show that even before the settlement of the Northmen in Iceland about 825 (and in one of the sagas it is said the first settlers found in the Westmann Isles books and other articles of Irish priests), the facility of subsistence had drawn some individuals to those rocks in the northern ocean, and they were ​then known lands. Sweden had a still stronger attraction for the warlike tribes from the interior of Asia, who were pressing upon the population of Europe south of the Baltic, and which has been overlooked by the historians who treat of the migrations of mankind from or to the north in the rude ages. Sweden alone had iron and copper for arms and utensils close to the surface of the earth, and, from the richness of the ores, to be obtained by the simplest processes of smelting. This natural advantage must, in those ages, have made Sweden a rallying point for the Asiatic populations coming into Europe from the north of Asia, and from countries destitute of the useful metals in any abundant or easily obtained supply. To them Sweden was a Mexico or Peru, or rather an arsenal from which they must draw their weapons before they could proceed to Germany. This circumstance itself may account for the apparently absurd opinion of the swarms of Goths who invaded Europe having come from Scandinavia; and for the apparently absurd tradition of Odin, or the Asiatics invading and occupying Scandinavia in preference to the more genial countries and climes to the south of the Baltic; and for the historical fact of a considerable trade having existed, from the most remote times, between Novogorod and Sweden, and of which, in the very earliest ages, Wisby, in the Isle of Gotland, was the entrepôt or meeting-place for the exchange of products. The great importance of this physical advantage of Scandinavia in the abundance of copper and iron, to an ancient warlike population, will be understood best if we take the trouble to calculate what quantity of iron or copper must have been expended in those days as ammunition, in missile weapons, by an ordinary army in an ordinary battle. We cannot reckon less than one ounce weight of iron, on an average, to each arrowhead, from twenty to twenty-four drop, or an ounce ​and a quarter to an ounce and a half, being considered by modern archers the proper weight of an arrow; and we cannot reckon that bowmen took the field with a smaller provision than four sheaves of arrows, or heads for that number. A sheaf of twenty-four arrows would not keep a bowman above ten or twelve minutes; and in an ordinary battle of three or four hours, allowing that arrows might be picked up and shot back in great numbers, we cannot suppose a smaller provision belonging to and transported with a body of bowmen than ninety-six rounds each, which, for a body of 4000 men only, would amount to above fourteen tons weight of iron in arrow-heads alone. For casting spears or javelins, of which in ancient armies, as in the Roman, more use was made than of the bow, we cannot reckon less than six ounces of iron to the spear head, or less than two spears to each man; and this gives us nearly two tons weight more of iron for 4000 men as their provision in this kind of missile. Of hand-weapons, such as swords, battleaxes, halberds, spears, and of defensive armour, such as head-pieces and shields, which every man had, and coats of mail or armour, which some had, it is sufficient to observe that all of it would be lost iron to the troops who were defeated, or driven from the field of battle leaving their killed and wounded behind, and all had to be replaced by a fresh supply of iron. We see in this great amount of iron or bronze arms, to be provided and transported with even a very small body of men in ancient times, why a single battle was almost always decisive, and every thing was staked upon the issue of a single day; and we see why defeat, as in the case of the battle of Hastings and many others, was almost always irrecoverable with the same troops. They had no ammunition on the losing side after a battle. We may judge from these views how important and valuable it must have been for an invading army of ​Goths, or whatever name they bore, coming from Asia to Europe, to have got possession of Sweden; so important, indeed, that it is reasonable to believe that if ever an Asiatic people invaded Europe north of the Carpathian mountains, the invaders would first of all proceed north along the Vistula and other rivers falling into the Baltic, and put themselves in communication, by conquest or commerce, with the country which supplied their ammunition, and would then issue armed from the north, and break into the Roman empire, and be considered as a people coming originally from some northern hive. Scandinavia certainly never had food for more human beings than its present inhabitants, and could never have poured out the successive multitudes who, by all accounts, are said to have come in from the north upon the Roman provinces; but in this view it is likely that the flood of people actually did pour in from the north, to which the march must of necessity have been first directed from Asia. It may be objected to these views, that iron or metal was not of such prime necessity as we make it to these barbarians in their warfare; that flint or other stones were much used for arrow-heads, and that we find such commonly in museums, and even stones that have evidently been intended for javelins or battleaxes. If we look, however, at what exists out of museums, we find that stones which admit of being chiselled, sharpened, or brought to an edge or point that would pierce cloth, leather, or any defensive covering, and inflict a deadly wound, are among the rarest productions. Granite, gneiss, sandstone, limestone, all rise in lumps and cubical masses, scarcely to be reduced by any labour or skill to shapes suitable for a spear or arrow head. Countries of vast extent are without stone at all near the surface of the earth, and many without such a kind of stone as could be edged or pointed, without such skill and ​labour as would make stone arrow-heads more scarce and valuable than metal ones. Of such stones as might be substituted for metal in missile weapons it happens, singularly enough, that Scandinavia itself is more productive than any part of the north of Europe, if we except perhaps the districts of England abounding in flint. Our ordinary museum arrow-heads of stone, or what our country people, when they turn them up by the plough, call elf-bolts, from an obscure impression that they do not belong to the soil, but are, from the regularity of their shape, an artificial production, are in reality the organic fossil called by geologists the Belemnite, which, tapering to a point at both ends from regular equally poised sides, is, in its natural fossil state, an arrow-head. This fossil, and the sharp schists, which could easily be formed into effective points for missile weapons, abound particularly in that great indenture of the Norwegian coast called the Skager Rack, and in the middle ages called Vicken, or the Wick, or Vik, between the Naze of Norway and the Sound or the coast of Jutland, and from which Pinkerton conjectures the Scottish Picts or Victi, if they were a Gothic tribe, originally proceeded. He founds his conjecture on the similarity of name; and the Vikings or pirates probably derived their name from this district of Viken in which they harboured, and for the obvious reason that here the means of replenishing their ships with the missile arms of the age abounded. Hardsteinagriot, or small hard stones, appear to have been even an article of export at a very early date from Telemark, and to have been shipped from the coast to which they were transported in quantities of 1500 loads at a time from the interior. Stones for throwing by hand (the sling, on account of the space required around the ​slinger, seems never to have been in use) were so important an article in the sea fights of those times, that the ships of war, or long-ships, were always accompanied on the viking cruises by transports or ships of burden, to carry the plunder, clothes, and provisions, the ships of war being loaded with arms and stones. We find two transport vessels to ten ships of war in the Saga of Saint Olaf, as the number with him when he left his ships of war at the mouth of the Humber, after a long viking expedition, and returned to Norway, with 220 men, in his two transport ships. Earl Rognwald, the son of Kofi, invaded Earl Paul in Orkney with six ships of war, five boats of a size to cross the sea from Norway, and three ships of burden; and in all their expeditions ships of burden were required in some proportion to the ships of war, owing to the great stowage necessary for their weapons. In the Færeyinga Saga, in which the exploits of a viking called Sigmund Brestisson are related minutely, we read of his walking across a small island on the Swedish coast, and discovering five ships of another viking at anchor on the opposite side, and he returned to his own ships, passed the whole night in landing his goods and plunder, and breaking up stones on shore, and loading his vessel with them, and at daylight he went to attack the other viking, and ​captured his vessels. In the engagement of Earl Paul in Orkney with the friends of Earl Rognwald he refused the assistance of men from Erling of Tankerness, off which place the battle was fought, because he had as many men as could find room to fight in his vessels, but required his assistance in carrying out stones from the shore to his vessels as long as the enemy would allow it to be done safely. Stones could not be transported or distributed in a conflict on land; and on this account the Northmen appear generally to have kept to their ships in their battles, and, even when marauding on land, to have had their ships far up the rivers to retire upon. This circumstance, namely, the great bulk in stowage, and in transport by land, of the usual arms of the age, arrows, casting spears, and stones, in any considerable quantities for a body of troops, and the difficulty of concentrating stores of them just at the spot where they are needed on land, accounts in a great measure for the success of comparatively small bodies of invaders landing on the coasts of England, or Normandy, in those ages. The invaders had the advantage of a supply of weapons in their vessels to retire upon, or to advance from; while their opponents having once expended what they carried with them, which could scarcely exceed the consumption in one ordinary battle of a few hours' duration, would be totally without missiles.
In the settlement of an Asiatic population in Scandinavia, which, whatever may have been the cause or inducement for preferring that side of the Baltic, undoubtedly did take place at an unascertained date, under a chief called Odin, we find a remarkable difference of social arrangement—and a sufficient cause for it—from that social arrangement which grew up among the people who invaded and seized on the ancient Roman empire. The latter were settling in countries of which the land was already appropriated; ​and however warlike and numerous we may conceive these invaders to have been, they could he but a handful compared to the numbers of the old indigenous inhabitants. They of necessity, and for security, had to settle as they had conquered, in military array, under local military chiefs whose banners they had followed in war, and were, for safety and mutual protection, obliged to rally around in peace. The people had the same military duties to perform to their chiefs, and their chiefs to the general commander or king, as in the field. They were, in fact, an army in cantonments in an enemy's country; and this, which is the feudal system, is the natural system of social arrangement in every country taken possession of by invaders in spite of the indigenous original inhabitants. It is found in several provinces of India, in several of the South Sea Islands, and wheresoever men have come into a country and seized the land of the first occupants. But where there is none to disturb the invaders—where they are themselves the first occupants, this military arrangement is unnecessary, and therefore unnatural. The first invaders of Scandinavia have entered into an unhinhabited or unappropriated country, or if inhabited, it has been by a wandering or very unwarlike population, like the present Laplanders, or the Fenni of Tacitus. We are entitled to draw this conclusion from the circumstance that these invaders did not occupy and sit down in the country feudally. Each man possessed his lot of land without reference to or acknowledgment of any other man,—without any local chief to whom his military service or other quit-rent for his land was due,—without tenure from, or duty or obligation to any superior, real or fictitious, except the general sovereign. The individual settler held his land, as his descendants in Norway still express it, by the same right as the king held his crown—by udal ​right, or adel,—that is, noble right; subject to no feudal burden, servitude, escheat, or forfeiture to a superior from any feudal casualty. This was the natural arrangement of society, and the natural principle of possession in a country not previously occupied, and in which the settlers had consequently no reason for submitting to feudal obligations and to a military organisation. When the very same people, these unfeudalised Northmen, came to conquer and settle in Normandy, in a country appropriated and peopled, and which they had to defend as well as to invade and occupy, they naturally adopted the feudal social arrangement necessary for their security, and maintained it in all its rigour. In the very same century the kinsmen of the same chief, Rolf Ganger, who was conquering and feudally occupying Normandy, came to settle in Iceland, where they had no occasion for the military organisation and principle of the feudal system in the unappropriated, uninhabited island; and they occupied it not feudally, but, as their ancestors had occupied the mother country itself, udally. The udal landowners, although exempt from all feudal services, exactions, or obligations to any other man as their local chief, or, in feudal language, the superior of their lands, were by no means exempt from services or taxes to the king or general chief, who was udal-born to the sovereignty of the whole or of a part of the country, and was acknowledged by the Thing or assembly of the landowners of the district. The kingly power was as great as in any feudally constituted country, either for calling out men and ships for his military expeditions abroad or at home, or for raising taxes. The scatt was a fixed land-tax, paid to the king either in money or in kind, that is, in natural products of the land, and was collected by his officers yearly in each district, or even let for a proportion of the amount to his friends or lendermen ​during life or pleasure. This class of lendermen appears to have been the nearest approach to a feudal class in their social arrangements; but the lend was a temporary, not an hereditary holding, and was not accompanied by any feudal privileges or baronial powers. The kings also received in their royal progresses through the country free lodging and entertainment for themselves and a certain fixed number of herdmen, that is a court, for a certain fixed number of days in each district. All the most minute particulars of the supplies which each farm or little estate—for each little farm was a distinct udal estate—had to furnish, the turns in which each locality was liable to this entertaining of the king and court, the time and numbers of the court followers to be entertained, were matters of fixed law, and settled by the Things of each district. In these circuits the kings assembled the district Things, and with the assistance of the lögman, who appears to have been a local judge, either hereditary or appointed by the Thing, settled disputes between parties, and fixed the amount of money compensation or fine to be paid to the injured party. All offences and crimes, from the murder of the king himself down to the very slightest injury, or infraction of law, were valued and compensated for in money, and divided in certain portions between the party injured, (or his next of kin if he was murdered,) and the king. The offender was an outlaw until he, or his friends for him, had paid the mulct or compensation, and could be slain, without any mulct or fine for his murder. The friends of the injured or murdered party could refuse to accept of any compensation in money, but could lawfully wait an opportunity, and take their revenge in kind. The king could only remit his own share of the mulct, but not that of the friends of the murdered party; and not to revenge an injury received and not compromised by a compen​sation, appears to have been considered highly dishonourable. The revenues of the kings appear to have been drawn, in some considerable proportion, from this source. When not engaged in warfare they appear to have been subsisted, as their ordinary mode of living, on these royal circuits or progresses through the country. The kings had no fixed residence or palace in Norway; but had estates or royal domains in every district, and houses on them in which they could lodge for a time, and receive what was due for their entertainment in victuals from the neighbourhood; but these houses appear to have been no better mansions than the houses on any other estates, and the kings were usually lodged, with their courts, as well as subsisted, by the landowners or bonders. This usage of royal progresses for the subsistence of the royal household appears to have been introduced into England at the Norman, or rather at the previous Danish conquest; and the purveyance for it was a royal right, which continued to be exercised down to the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign.
Before the introduction or general diffusion of writing, it is evident that a class of men whose sole occupation was to commit to memory and preserve the laws, usages, precedents, and details of all those civil affairs and rights, and to whose fidelity in relating former transactions implicit confidence could be given, must of necessity have existed in society—must have been in every locality; and from the vast number and variety of details in every district, and the great interests of every community, must have been esteemed and recompensed in proportion to their importance in such a social state. This class were the scalds—the men who were the living books, to be referred to in every case of law or property in which the past had to be applied to the present. Before the introduction of Christianity, and with ​Christianity the use of written documents, and the diffusion, by the church establishment, of writing in every locality, the scald must have been among the pagan landowners what the parish priest and his written record were in the older Christianised countries of Europe. In these all civil affairs were in written record either of the priest or the lawyer; and the scalds, in these Christianised countries, were merely a class of wandering troubadours, poets, story-tellers, minnesingers, entertained, like the dwarfs, court-jesters, or jugglers, by the great barons at their castles, for the entertainment which their songs, music, stories, or practical jokes might afford. Here, in this pagan country, they were a necessary and most important element in the social structure. They were the registrars of events affecting property, and filled the place and duty of the lawyer and scribe in a society in which law was very complicated; the succession to property, through affinity and family connexion, very intricate, from the want of family surnames, and the equal rights of all children; and in which a priesthood like that of the church of Rome, spread over the country, and acquainted more or less with letters, the art of writing, and law, was totally wanting. The scalds of the north disappeared at once when Christian priests were established through the country. They were superseded in their utility by men of education, who knew the art of writing; and the country had no feudal barons to maintain such a class for amusement only. We hear little of the scalds after the first half of the 12th century; and they are not quoted at all in the portion of Magnus Erlingsson's reign given by Snorro Sturleson within the 12th century.
Besides the payment of scatt, and the maintenance of the king's household in the royal progresses, the whole body of the landowners were bound to attend ​the king in arms, and with ships, whenever they were called upon to serve him either at home or abroad. The king appears, in fact, not only not to have wanted any prerogative that feudal sovereigns of the same times possessed, but to have had much more power than the monarchs of other countries. The middle link in the feudal system—a nobility of great crown vassals, with their sub-vassals subservient to them as their immediate superiors, not to the crown—was wanting in the social structure of the Northmen. The kingly power working directly on the people was more efficient; and the kings, and all who had a satisfactory claim to the royal power, had no difficulty in calling out the people for war expeditions. These expeditions, often merely predatory in their object, consisted either of general levies, in which all able-bodied men, and all ships, great and small, had to follow the king; or of certain quota of men, ships, and provisions, furnished by certain districts according to fixed law. All the country along the coasts of Norway, and as far back into the land "as the salmon swims up the rivers," was divided into ship-districts or ship-rathes; and each district had to furnish ships of a certain size, a certain number of men, and a certain equipment, according to its capability; and other inland districts had to furnish cattle and other provision in fixed numbers. This arrangement was made by Harald Haarfager's successor, Hakon, who reigned between 933 and 961; and as Hakon was the foster-son of Athelstan of England, and was bred up to manhood in his court, it is not improbable that this arrangement may have been borrowed from the similar arrangement made by King Alfred for the defence of the English coast against the Northmen; unless we take the still more probable conjecture that Alfred borrowed it himself from them, as they were certainly in all naval and military affairs superior to his own ​people in that age. It is to be observed, that, for the Northmen, these levies for predatory expeditions were by no means unpopular or onerous. "To gather property" by plundering the coasts of cattle, meal, malt, wool, slaves, was a favourite summer occupation. When the crops were in the ground in spring, the whole population, which was seafaring as well as agricultural in its habits, was altogether idle until harvest; and the great success in amassing booty, as vikings, on the coasts, made the Leding, as it was called, a favourite service during many reigns: and it appears that the service might be commuted sometimes into a war tax, when it was inconvenient to go on the levy. Every man, it is to be observed, who went upon these expeditions, was udal born to some portion of land at home; that is, had certain udal rights of succession, or of purchase, or of partition, connected with the little estate of the family of which he was a member. All these complicated rights and interests connecting people settled in Northumberland, East Anglia, Normandy, or Iceland, with landed property situated in the valleys of Norway, required a body of men, like the scalds, whose sole occupation was to record in their stories trustworthy accounts, not only of the historical events, but of the deaths, intermarriages, pedigrees, and other family circumstances of every person of any note engaged in them. We find, accordingly, that the sagas are, as justly observed by Pinkerton, rather memoirs of individuals than history. They give the most careful heraldic tracing of every man's kin they speak of, because he was kin to landowners at home, or they were kin to him. In such a social state we may believe that the class of scalds were not, as we generally suppose, merely a class of story-tellers, poets, or harpers, going about with gossip, song, and music; but were interwoven with the social institutions of the country, and ​had a footing in the material interests of the people. To take an interest in the long-past events of history is an acquired intellectual taste, and not at all the natural taste of the unlettered man. When we are told of the Norman baron in his castle-hall, or the Iceland peasant's family around their winter fireside in their turf-built huts, sitting down in the 10th or 11th century to listen to, get by heart, and transmit to the rising generation, the accounts of historical events of the 8th or 9th century in Norway, England, or Denmark, we feel that, however pleasing this picture may be to the fancy, it is not true to nature,—not consistent with the human mind in a rude illiterate social state. But when we consider the nature of the peculiar udal principle by which land or other property was transmitted through the social body of these Northmen, we see at once a sufficient foundation in the material interests, both of the baron and the peasant, for the support of a class of traditionary relators of past events. Every person in every expedition was udal born to something at home,—to the kingdom, or to a little farm; and this class were the recorders of the vested rights of individuals, and of family alliances, feuds, or other interests, when written record was not known. For many generations after the first Northmen settled in England or Normandy, it must, from the uncertain issue of their hostilities with the indigenous inhabitants, have been matter of deep interest to every individual to know how it stood with the branch of the family in possession of the piece of udal land in the mother-country to which he also was udal born, that is, had certain eventual rights of succession; and whether to return and claim their share of any succession which may have opened up to them in Norway must have been a question with settlers in Northumberland, Normandy, or Iceland, which could only be solved by the information ​derived from such a class as the scalds. Before the clergy by their superior learning extinguished the vocation of this class among the Northmen, the scalds appear to have been frequently employed also as confidential messengers or ambassadors; as, for instance, in the proposal of a marriage between Olaf King of Norway and the daughter of King Olaf of Sweden, and of a peace between the two countries to be established by this alliance. The scalds, by their profession, could go from court to court without suspicion, and in comparative safety; because, being generally natives of Iceland, they had no hereditary family feuds with the people of the land, no private vengeance for family injuries to apprehend; and being usually rewarded by gifts of rings, chains, goblets, and such trinkets, they could, without exciting suspicion, carry with them the tokens by which, before the art of writing was common in courts, the messenger who had a private errand to unfold was accredited. When kings or great people met in those ages they exchanged gifts or presents with each other, and do so still in the East; and the original object of this custom was that each should have tokens known to the other, by which any bearer afterwards should be accredited to the original owner of the article sent with him in token, and even the amount of confidence to be reposed in him denoted. We, with writing at command, can scarcely perhaps conceive the shifts people must have been put to, when even the most simple communication or order had to be delivered vivâ voce to some agent who was to carry it, and who had to produce some credential or token that he was to be believed. Every act of importance between distant parties had to be transacted by tokens. Our wonder and incredulity cease when we consider that such a class of men as those who composed and transmitted this great mass of saga literature were evidently a necessary element ​in the social arrangements of the time and people, and, together with their literature or traditional songs and stories, were intimately connected with the material interests of all, and especially of those who had property and power. They were not merely a class of wandering poets, troubadours, or story-tellers, living by the amusement they afforded to a people in a state too rude to support any class for their intellectual amusement only. The scalds, who appear to have been divided into two classes,—poets, who composed or remembered verses in which events were related, or chiefs and their deeds commemorated; and saga-men, who related historical accounts of transactions past or present,—were usually, it maybe said exclusively, of Iceland.
It is usually considered a wonderful and unaccountable phenomenon in the history of the middle ages, that an island like Iceland, producing neither corn nor wood, situated in the far north, ice-bound in part even in summer, surrounded by a wild ocean, and shaken and laid waste by volcanic fire, should, instead of being an uninhabited land, or inhabited only by rude and ignorant fishermen, have been the centre of intelligence in the north, and of an extensive literature. It is wonderful; but, if we consider the causes, the phenomenon is naturally and soberly accounted for. Iceland was originally colonised by the most cultivated and peaceful of the mother country; the nobility and people of the highest civilisation then in the north flying, in the 9th century, and especially after the battle of Hafursfiord, from what they considered the tyranny of Harald Haarfager, and the oppression of the feudal system which he was attempting to establish in Norway. It was an emigration from principle. The very poor and ignorant, and those who merely sought gain without any higher motive for their emigration, could not go to Iceland; because a suitable ​vessel, with, the necessary outfit and stock, could only be afforded by people of the highest class, and they only had to dread the jealousy and power of Haarfager. Their friends, retainers, housemen, and servants attached to their families, went with them; but the landnammen, the origines gentis, were the sons and brothers of the nobles and kings, as they were called, who from the very same cause, the dread and hatred of Haarfager's power, went out to plunder and conquer on the coasts of England and France. At the very same period that Rolf Ganger set out on his expedition, which ended in the conquest of Normandy, one of his brothers sought a peaceful asylum in the uninhabited Iceland; and the more peaceful of the higher class in those days were, we may presume, the most civilised and cultivated of their age. New England, perhaps, and Iceland, are the only modern colonies ever founded on principle, and peopled at first from higher motives than want or gain; and we see at this day a lingering spark in each of a higher mind than in populations which have set out from a lower level. The original settlers in Iceland carried with them whatever there was of civilisation or intelligence in Norway; and for some generations at least were free from the internal feuds, and always were free from the external wars and depredations on their coasts, which kept other countries in a state of barbarism. They enjoyed security of person and property. The means of subsistence in Iceland were not so very different from the means in Norway, nor of so much more difficult attainment, as might on a hasty view be supposed. The south coast of Iceland is not higher north than the country about Drontheim fiord, and the most northerly part is barely within the Arctic Circle. A large proportion of the population of Norway lived in those ages, and five now, in as high a latitude; and, from not being surrounded by the ocean ​on all sides, in a severer climate; and under the local disadvantage, from the shape of the country, that the Fielde or mountain ridges in Norway approach much closer to the shore, and leave much less flat level pasture land between them and the sea than the mountains of Iceland. The cultivation of corn is as much out of the question in a great proportion of Norway as in Iceland. The people in the upland districts of every province of Norway, and almost all the population north of the Namsen river, draw the main part of their subsistence at present from the natural products of the land and water,—the pasture for their cattle, and the fishing in the rivers, the lakes, and the sea. These natural products are as abundant in Iceland as in Norway; and the butter, cheese, wool, dried meat, fish, oil, feathers, skins, the wadmal or coarse woollen cloth, and the coarse linen spun and woven in their households, would be more in demand, more readily exchangeable, and of higher comparative value in former times, than such Icelandic products are now. With the surplus of such articles beyond their own consumpt the Icelanders could supply their own most pressing wants. These were for corn and wood—articles of first necessity, which did not admit of the population sinking into indolence and apathy in providing them. An intercourse and regular trade with England and Denmark for meal and malt, and with Norway for wood, tools of metal, and other necessaries of life, must have existed from the first years of the colonisation of Iceland. The Icelanders had consequently from the first more easy and regular opportunities of visiting foreign countries, and returning again to their own, than the natives of any other country in the north in those ages. They appear also to have traded without molestation, and never to have molested others. No Icelandic viking is mentioned in the sagas, even in the ages when a viking cruise was ​deemed an honourable occupation. Iceland men are mentioned in the sagas, occasionally, as being in the service of vikings of Norway, as hired men; but no long-ship, or viking belonging to Iceland, is mentioned. The necessity of trading in peace across the sea, and of giving no pretext for capture or retaliation on Iceland vessels, may have been one cause for this remarkable abstinence from the favourite pursuit of the nobles of those ages in other northern countries. It could not be from the cause to which it is usually attributed, the want of wood in the country to build long-ships. The Icelanders had to buy merchant ships in Norway of a size to cross the sea, and appear to have had them in abundance; and the same class of people who fitted out viking expeditions in other countries could have purchased long-ships as easily as ships of burden. Their neighbours in the Feroe Islands were equally destitute of wood; yet they had a very celebrated viking, Sigmund Breestesen. The Orkney Islands had their Swein, a renowned viking, so late as the 12th century. But in none of the sagas in which the exploits of these vikings are related, is there any mention of any Iceland viking at any period. The fair inference is, that the men who emigrated from Norway to Iceland, and who were of the class and had the means to fit out long-ships for piracy, were men more advanced in civilisation and intelligence, and of higher principle, than men of the same class in that age in the other northern countries. In all the sagas there appears a kind of reluctance to dwell upon or approve of that part of the hero's life passed in viking expeditions, or in "gathering property" by piracy. One imagines, at least, that in the Saga of Olaf Tryggvesson, of Olaf the Saint, and of other great chiefs, the saga-man shows a disposition to hurry over this part of their lives, to throw it into the years of extreme youth, and not to approve himself of that part of his ​tale. The comparatively safe intercourse which the Icelanders undoubtedly had with other countries gave them a higher education, that is, the means of acquiring a greater stock of information on what was doing in other countries, than any other people of those times. When we consider that these Icelandic colonists were connected by the udal law of succession with the principal families and estates in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, England, and France, and were deeply interested in the conquests, revolutions, battles, or changes going on, and in which their friends and relations were the chief actors, we can understand that an historical spirit must have grown up in such a population—a great desire to know, and a great talent to remember and relate. Heritable interests and rights of families in Iceland were involved in what was going on in Normandy and Northumberland as much as in Drontheim; and the consideration in which the scald or saga-man who could give accounts of such events was held, may not be exaggerated in the sagas. In a community of such colonists, the class of scalds remembering and relating past transactions was an essential element, and must have been held in the highest honour. To return home to Iceland appears, indeed, to have been the end which the most favoured scald at the courts of kings proposed to himself. From their opportunities of visiting various countries, the Icelandic scalds were undoubtedly the educated men of the times when books did not in any way contribute to intelligence, or to forming the mind; but only extensive intercourse with men, and the information gathered from it. Having by the lapse of time no family feuds even with the people of Norway, no injuries, national or private, to avenge or to fear vengeance for from others, the Icelander could travel through other countries on private or public affairs with a degree of personal security which people of the ​highest rank and power belonging to the country were strangers to in those unhappy ages. This advantage was sufficient of itself to make them a useful class in every court. They were not only neutral men in every strife; but, from their travel and experience, men of intelligence, prudence, and safe counsel, compared to men of no intellectual culture at all, and acquainted only with arms and violence. They had also the advantage of speaking in its greatest purity what was the court language in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, England, and at Rouen. The moral influence which the scalds enjoyed, as counsellors and personal friends and advisers of many of the kings, may not be exaggerated in the sagas; for it appears to be that which knowledge and education would naturally obtain amidst ignorance and barbarity. The class of scalds and saga-men, supported by intellectual labour in the north of Europe, may not have been very numerous at any one time; but owing to the favourable circumstances peculiar to the Icelanders, the profession centred in Iceland. We hear of no scalds of any other country, not even of Norway. All the intellectual labour of the kind required in the north of Europe was derived from Iceland. We may surely reckon the population in the north of Europe using a common tongue in those times,—of Scandinavia, Denmark, Jutland, and Schleswig; of the kingdom of Northumberland, East Anglia, and of parts of Mercia; of Normandy, in some proportion of its inhabitants; of the Hebrides and Isle of Man, in some proportion; of the Orkney, Shetland, and Feroe Islands, altogether,—to have ​amounted to two millions of people. Small as the demand might be for intellectual gratification among these two millions, yet they were scattered over countries widely apart, and they used a common tongue, and had a real and effective relationship of families among them all; and the desire for news of what was doing in other lands, and for narratives of events which might be of importance in their family interests, would be sufficient to give an impulse to such a small population as that of Iceland, which never exceeded sixty or sixty-four thousand people, to give employment to all the surplus talent of such a population, and to keep up a literary tone, if it may be so called, of the public mind in such a handful of people. Men of any talent would naturally endeavour to qualify themselves for that profession in which several, and probably a considerable number, attained distinction, wealth, or high consideration. It was better than the chance of advantage from embarking as a private seaman or man-at-arms in viking forays and cruises under a sea-king; better than staying at home tending cattle, cutting peats, making hay, and catching and curing fish. The same motives operate in the same way at this day in the social economy of Iceland. The youth of talents and ambition study, come to the university of Copenhagen, become often men of very great attainments and learning, and with as few chances or examples before them of substantial reward for their labours as the scalds, their predecessors, could have had. The impulse to mind in any community being once given, either by accidental or physical circumstances, the movement in the same direction goes on, and seems to be permanent—never to cease. The perpetuity of intellectual movement, of the direction of mind and mental energy in the same way, even when laws, government, and all social arrangements, and even religion itself, are altered, ​and the old forms not even remembered, is one of the most singular and interesting of the phenomena in the nature of man. It is strikingly illustrated in Iceland. The Icelandic youth prepare themselves now for a learned profession, as the scalds did 800 years ago, exactly from the same intellectual impulse, although in a different field; and the movement of the public mind towards intellectual occupation appears to have remained in this small community unchanged, undiminished, and only less visible because it is not now the only community in the north with the same movement. The continued tendency of mind in Iceland to literary pursuits appears when we compare them, in numbers not exceeding at present 56,000 individuals, with any equal number of the British population. The Icelanders had a printing-press among them in the first half of the 16th century; and many works in Latin and in Icelandic have been printed at Skalholt, Holen, and other places. The counties of Orkney and Shetland, with an equal population,—of Caithness, Sutherland, Ross, with probably double the population,—have not at this day any such intellectual movement, or any press that could print a book, or any book produced within themselves to print. The whole Celtic population in Scotland, since the beginning of time, never produced in their language a tithe of the literature that has been composed and printed in Icelandic by the Icelanders for their own use within this century. The modern literature of Iceland, or even its saga literature, may not be considered by the critic of a very high class or value, or of merit in itself; but, in judging of the intellectuality of a people, the philosopher will regard its amount and diffusion as of much more importance than its quality. That belongs to the author, and measures merely the genius and talents of the individual: the amount and diffusion measure the intellectual con​dition of the society. Apply this measure to any town or county in Great Britain of 56,000 inhabitants, and we will find little reason to boast of a more advanced intellectual condition among us than that which the Icelanders appear to retain at this day from bygone times, when an intellectual character was impressed on the public mind in their small community by the scalds; and little reason to believe that the monkish historians of the Anglo-Saxons, in the same ages in which the scalds flourished, have left more deep or influential traces of their literature in the parts of Europe in which they were the only men engaged in those ages in intellectual occupation, than the scalds have done in the narrow circle in which alone they could have influence on posterity.
In these observations on the saga literature, nothing is said of or allowed for the Runic writing inscribed on rocks, monumental stones, wooden staves, drinking cups of horn or metal, arms, or ornaments, for which at one period a high antiquity was claimed. It seems to be now admitted that a Runic character, apparently borrowed from the Gothic and Roman, and adapted to the material on which it was usually cut, viz. hard stone or wood, by converting all the curves of the letters into straight lines for the facility of cutting, has existed from a very early age among the Northmen. It would, indeed, be absurd to suppose that an intelligent people roaming over the world, who had appeared in the Mediterranean in the days of Charlemagne, and had a regular body of troops, the Væringer, in the pay of the Greek Emperors at Constantinople, should not have adopted, or imitated, what would be useful at home, as far as applicable to their means. This appears to have been precisely the extent to which Runic writing was applied. From want of means to write,—that is, the want of the parchment, paper, ink, and writing tools,—the writing in Runic ​was almost entirely confined to short monumental inscriptions recording the death of an individual, the name of the person who erected the stone to his memory, and also the name of the person who cut the letters—a proof that the use of the Runic characters was rare, and confined to a few. Of these Runic inscriptions, of which a thousand or more have been examined by antiquaries, few can be placed before the introduction of Christianity in the 11th century. The sign of the cross may, in the dreams of the zealous antiquary, appear the sign of Thor's hammer; but there is no evidence that the pagans used such a symbol, and the obvious interpretation of such a mark upon a tombstone is that it belongs to the age of Christianity. Torfæus, whose antiquarian zeal was tempered with a love of truth, and whose antiquarian knowledge has not been surpassed, says not only that the Runic inscriptions throw no light upon history, but are so intricate and confused, that what you may imagine you catch by the eye you cannot by the understanding; and in proof of his remark he refers to conflicting interpretations of the two greatest Runic antiquaries, Wormius and Verelius, of the meaning of Runic inscriptions, on which they both agree perfectly as to the strokes or incisions in the stone. Bartholinus also says, in his Danish Antiquities, that, excepting four or five, none of these Runic inscriptions are in any way illustrative of history, and in general are so obscure that the names of the persons for whom the stones are erected can scarcely be extracted, and much is matter of mere conjecture. The opinions of these great antiquaries are singularly confirmed by the recent discovery made by chemical science, that one of the few Runic inscriptions supposed to be illustrative of history,—one upon a rock ​Hoby, near Runamoe, in the Swedish province of Bleking, which is mentioned by Saxo Grammaticus as being, in his time (namely, about 1160), considered inexplicable, and which modern Runic scholars interpreted a few years ago to relate to the battle of Braavalle fought about the year 680,—is in reality no inscription at all, but a mere lusus naturæ; merely veins of one substance interspersed in the body of another substance, and forming marks which resemble Runic letters in the fancy of the antiquary, but which is an appearance in rocks of granitic formation with veins of chlorite interspersed, not unfamiliar to the eye of the mineralogist. Another of the Runic inscriptions, supposed to be illustrative of history, is that on a rock called Korpeldinte, in the island of Gotland, which, in Runic characters, told that
   "Aar halftridium tusanda utdrog Helge med Gutanum sinum;"
that is, "in the year half three thousand,—videlicet, two thousand five hundred,—went out Helge with his Goths." This inscription must be, as Wormius himself admits, a gross fabrication; for the pagan Northmen did not reckon by years, but by winters, and could have known nothing of the computation of time from the creation of the world, which is derived from the Bible, and was unknown to them in the year of the world 2500. But before the year 1636 somebody had been at the trouble to attempt to impose upon the world by this inscription in Runic letters, although in modern language, and of modern conception. We may believe that inscriptions on stones in memory of the dead,—rude calendars cut in wood,—charms on amulets, rings, shields, or swords,—and tokens of recognition to be sent by messengers to accredit them to friends at a distance, may have existed among the Northmen from their first arrival in Europe; and Odin himself may have invented or used the Runic ​character in this way: but we have- no ground for believing that any distinct use of writing, currente calamo, applicable to the transmission of historical events, was known before the introduction of Christianity, and of letters with Christianity, in the 11th century, or was diffused before the diffusion of church establishments over the north. If the Runic had been a written character among the Northmen of the 9th century, it must have been transported to Iceland, in which the first settlers were not of the rude and ignorant, but of the most cultivated of their age in Norway; but few, if any, Runic inscriptions of a date prior to the introduction of Christianity are found in Iceland. If they had possessed the use of written characters, as they had unquestionably a literature in Iceland, it would be absurd to believe that they had not applied the one to the other; but for two hundred and forty years—that is, until the time of Are—should have committed the sagas to memory, instead of to parchment or paper. Are himself would have used the Runic character, if writing Runic had been diffused among the Northmen; and although no manuscript of the time of Are exists, but only early copies of his writings, yet among the mass of sagas in manuscript some must have been in Runic characters, if Runic writing had been diffused among the Icelanders. No Runic manuscript, however, on parchment or paper, of unquestionable antiquity and authenticity, has ever been discovered. A fragment, entitled "Historia Hialmari Regis Biorn​landiæ atque Thulemarkiæ ex Fragmento Runici MS. literis recentioribus descripta cum genuina versione Johannis Peringskoldi," without date, place of publication, or reference to where the original Runic manuscript on skin or paper is to be found, is evidently a translation of a part of the Saga of Hialmar into Runic letters, for the purpose of imposing on the public, and is to be classed with the Korpe Klinte inscription. The controversy concerning the antiquity and historical value of the Runic character and inscriptions ran high in the latter half of the 17th century, and unjustifiable means were used to establish opinions as facts. This fragment of ancient Runic writing on parchment was ascribed by Rudbeck to the 7th century, by Stiernman to the 10th, by Biorner to the 11th or 12th. It was incorporated into Hicks's Thesaurus as a specimen of written Runic. But Archbishop Benzelius, Celsius the elder and Celsius the younger, Erichson, and Ihre, antiquaries of great note and authority in Sweden, expressed their doubts of the authenticity of this fragment at the time it appeared,—about 1690; and Nardin, in an Academical Dissertation, published at Upsal 1774, proves from the language that this Runic manuscript is an impudent forgery.
* ↑ Fagurskinna, Morkinskinna, Hrokkinskinna—fair skin, dark skin, wrinkled skin—are names applied by Torfæus to manuscripts on parchment probably to designate, when he resided at Stavangar in Norway, to his friend and correspondent Arne Magnussen at Copenhagen, the particular skin he wanted to refer to, in a compendious way understood between themselves. It seems now to be doubtful which MSS. they meant by the Morkinskinna and Hrokkinskinna. Arne Magnussen, whose collection of manuscripts is so often quoted under the name of the Arnæ-Magnæi, was the greatest antiquary who never wrote. Although he wrote no books, his judgment and opinions are known from notes, selections, and correspondence, and are of great authority at this day in the Saga literature. Torfæus consulted him in his researches, which gives great weight to the views of Torfæus on many points, as we have in them the combined judgment of two of the greatest northern antiquaries.
* ↑ Hrolf Gangr appears to have been a name in the family; and one of the forefathers of the conqueror of Normandy bore it. The popular tale of his being so stout or corpulent that no horse could carry him, and he was obliged to walk, may therefore be doubted; as such a habit of body would scarcely be consistent with the personal activity of great warriors in those days.
* ↑ Gravissimus auctor in 'Originibus' dixit Cato, morem apud majores hunc epularum fuisse, ut deinceps, qui accubarent, canerent ad tibiam clarorum virorum laudes atque virtutes.—Cicero, Tusc. Quæst. iv. 3. Utinam exstarent ilia carmina quæ multis sæculis ante suam ætatem in epulis esse cantitata a singulis convivis de clarorum virorum laudibus in 'Originibus' scriptum reliquit Cato.—Cicer. Brutus, cap. xix. See on this subject the Preface to "Lays of Ancient Rome, by Thomas Babington Macaulay. London: Longman and Co. 1842."
* ↑ Krafts Beskryvelse, 111.154. Kong Sverrer's Saga, by Jacob Aal, note on cap. 91.
* ↑ Olaf's Saga, cap. 27. Orkneyinga Saga.
* ↑ Viking and sea-king are not synonymous, although, from the common termination in king, the words are used, even by our historians, indiscriminately. The sea-king was a man connected with a royal race either of the small kings of the country, or of the Haarfager family, and who by right received the title of king as soon as he took the command of men, although only of a single ship's crew, and without having any land or kingdom. The viking is a word not connected with the word kongr or king. Vikings were merely pirates, alternately peasants and pirates, deriving the name of viking from the viks, wicks, or inlets on the coast in which they harboured with their long ships or rowing galleys. Every sea-king was a viking, but every viking was not a sea-king.
* ↑ Normandy, it is to be always remembered in reading the history of those ages, was conquered, but not colonised, as Iceland and Northumberland were colonised, by the introduction of a totally new population, with their own laws, manners, and language. In Normandy, so early as the time of Duke Richard, the second in descent from Rolf Ganger, his son had to be sent to Bayeux to acquire the pure northern language, it having been already corrupted at the court.
* ↑ Torfæus, Series Regum Dan. cap. viii.
* ↑ Bartholinus, Antiq. Dan. 1. i. cap. 9.
* ↑ A remarkable proof how little Runic was known, or used, is, that a certain Odd Snabiornsson gave notice to Snorro Sturleson of the conspiracy against his life in September, 1240, in Runic; but neither Snorro (certainly not one of the unlearned of his age in the saga or Icelandic literature), nor any of those with him at the time, could read the Runic characters; and Snorro in consequence fell a victim to the conspiracy, and was murdered in his house on the 22d September, 1240.—Schoning, Pref. to Heimskringla.