第14章 LETTER VI(5)

Perhaps it was this very seclusion which stimulated into almost miraculous exuberance the mental powers already innate in the people.Undistracted during several successive centuries by the bloody wars,and still more bloody political convulsions,which for too long a period rendered the sword of the warrior so much more important to European society than the pen of the scholar,the Icelandic settlers,devoting the long leisure of their winter nights to intellectual occupations,became the first of any European nation to create for themselves a native literature.Indeed,so much more accustomed did they get to use their heads than their hands,than if an Icelander were injured he often avenged himself,not by cutting the throat of his antagonist,but by ridiculing him in some pasquinade,--sometimes,indeed,he did both;and when the King of Denmark maltreats the crew of an Icelandic vessel shipwrecked on his coast,their indignant countrymen send the barbarous monarch word,that by way of reprisal,they intend making as many lampoons on him as there are promontories in his dominions.Almost all the ancient Scandinavian manus are Icelandic;the negotiations between the Courts of the North were conducted by Icelandic diplomatists;the earliest topographical survey with which we are acquainted was Icelandic;the cosmogony of the Odin religion was formulated,and its doctrinal traditions and ritual reduced to a system,by Icelandic archaeologists;and the first historical composition ever written by any European in the vernacular,was the product of Icelandic genius.The title of this important work is "The Heimskringla,"or world-circle,[Footnote:So called because Heimskringla (world-circle)is the first word in the opening sentence of the manu which catches the eye.]and its author was--Snorro Sturleson!It consists of an account of the reigns of the Norwegian kings from mythic times down to about A.D.1150,that is to say,a few years before the death of our own Henry II.;but detailed by the old Sagaman with so much art and cleverness as almost to combine the dramatic power of Macaulay with Clarendon's delicate delineation of character,and the charming loquacity of Mr.Pepys.His stirring sea-fights,his tender love-stories,and delightful bits of domestic gossip,are really inimitable;--you actually live with the people he brings upon the stage,as intimately as you do with Falstaff,Percy,or Prince Hal;and there is something in the bearing of those old heroic figures who form his dramatis person,so grand and noble,that it is impossible to read the story of their earnest stirring lives without a feeling of almost passionate interest--an effect which no tale frozen up in the monkish Latin of the Saxon annalists has ever produced upon me.

As for Snorro's own life,it was eventful and tragic enough.Unscrupulous,turbulent,greedy of money,he married two heiresses--the one,however,becoming the COLLEAGUE,not the successor of the other.This arrangement naturally led to embarrassment.His wealth created envy,his excessive haughtiness disgusted his sturdy fellow-countrymen.He was suspected of desiring to make the republic an appanage of the Norwegian crown,in the hope of himself becoming viceroy;and at last,on a dark September night,of the year 1241,he was murdered in his house at Reikholt by his three sons-in-law.

The same century which produced the Herodotean work of Sturleson also gave birth to a whole body of miscellaneous Icelandic literature,--though in Britain and elsewhere bookmaking was entirely confined to the monks,and merely consisted in the compilation of a series of bald annals locked up in bad Latin.It is true,Thomas of Ercildoune was a contemporary of Snorro's;but he is known to us more as a magician than as a man of letters;whereas histories,memoirs,romances,biographies,poetry,statistics,novels,calendars,specimens of almost every kind of composition,are to be found even among the meagre relics which have survived the literary decadence that supervened on the extinction of the republic.

It is to these same spirited chroniclers that we are indebted for the preservation of two of the most remarkable facts in the history of the world:the colonization of Greenland by Europeans in the 10th century,and the discovery of America by the Icelanders at the commencement of the 11th.

The story is rather curious.

Shortly after the arrival of the first settlers in Iceland,a mariner of the name of Eric the Red discovers a country away to the west,which,in consequence of its fruitful appearance,he calls Greenland.In the course of a few years the new land has become so thickly inhabited that it is necessary to erect the district into an episcopal see;and at last,in 1448,we have a brief of Pope Nicolas "granting to his beloved children of Greenland,in consideration of their having erected many sacred buildings and a splendid cathedral,"--a new bishop and a fresh supply of priests.At the commencement,however,of the next century,this colony of Greenland,with its bishops,priests and people,its one hundred and ninety townships,its cathedral,its churches,its monasteries,suddenly fades into oblivion,like the fabric of a dream.The memory of its existence perishes,and the allusions made to it in the old Scandinavian Sagas gradually come to be considered poetical inventions or pious frauds.At last,after a lapse of four hundred years,some Danish missionaries set out to convert the Esquimaux;and there,far within Davis'Straits,are discovered vestiges of the ancient settlement,--remains of houses,paths,walls,churches,tombstones,and inions.[Footnote:On one tombstone there was written in Runic,"Vigdis M.D.