navian forefathers before they became Christians, as aid to the study of our own earliest heroic poem, Beowulf, we are indebted chiefly to the northern colonists of Iceland. Iceland. Iceland, touching the Arctic circle on the north, is a fifth larger than Ireland. It is volcanic, and deeply indented with fiords on all sides except the south. The chief moun-. tains are in the south. In the south-east is a mass of glacier, covering an area of 3,500 square miles, the VatnaJökull Westward, between this and Bláfell,† Hekla, Torfa Jökull, is ground rising in sweeps towards the glaciers. North of this, on the eastern half of the island, is a desert plain crossed by three tracks, the routes being marked by stone pyramids or heaps of turf. These regions include. 20,000 square miles of barren country, imperfectly explored. Ice, desert, geysers, and volcanoes, swamps, lakes, and chasms in the earth, leave in the whole island about 4,000 square miles of habitable ground. At Reykjavik, on the south-west peninsula, the mean temperature of the year is 39° 2'; at Akureyri, in the north, it is 32°. In winter there is the aurora, there are electric flames about metals, and streams from the heads of men like glories of saints. There are mock suns--sometimes nine at once, storm-rings about the moon, meteors; also fierce hurricanes and whirlwinds. Iceland was discovered in the year 860 by Naddothr, a Norwegian Vikingr, who was voyaging to the Faroe Islands. * Vatn, water; jökull, an icicle, a glacier; First English gicel, whence is-gicel, icicle. + Blá, blue of waves or horizon, but in the east of Iceland it means a meadow covered with half-melted snow. Fell, a single wild hill, in plural a range of hills. Hekla-fjall, abridged to Hekla, so called from its cowl of snow, hekla being the name of a sort of cowled or hooded frock. Torfa, turf, or a green spot, or a place where many farms are built together. Vikingr was the man who went on a víking. Viking was a freebooting voyage, named from the vik, or small bay, out of which the pirate vessel ran, or within which it lurked. But free-booting was so far from He looked out on it from a hill on the east coast, and called it Snjá-land, Snow-land. In the year 864, Garthr, a Swede, went round Iceland in his ship and called it Garthrhólm.* In 868 Floki Rafn, another Norwegian, explored the south and west of the island, and it was he who called it Ís-land, Iceland. Soon afterwards, when Harold Harfagr (Fairhaired) had been crushing the petty chiefs of Norway, Ingolfr and Hjorleifr were the first to seek independent life in Iceland. They were followed by bands of such exiles, with their servants, cattle, household goods, their national traditions, and their spirit of freedom. Ingolfr had killed his adversary on a small barren island, whither they had gone to fight alone together to the death, after the way known as a "holmgang." As Harold would make him answerable, he sailed away with all his household and his household goods, and with the door-posts of his Norwegian home, which he cast into the sea near Iceland, that he might establish his new home wherever they were cast ashore. But this was in the ninth century, in the days when our Alfred succeeded to a kingdom which he had to save from ruin by the Danes. The earliest piece of Icelandic literature, the " Íslendiga Bók," is ascribed to Ari Fróthi,† who was not born until the The Íslenyear after the Norman Conquest of England. diga Bók. He gathered into this book, as accurately as he could, the traditions of the island. He cites various people, upon whose testimony he gives facts and dates, but only once quotes written authority, that being for the year 870, being regarded as discreditable, that an old Scandinavian scarcely had social position until he had distinguished himself in a bold raid by land or sea. * Hólmr an islet, whence the name of Holms in the Orkneys and the Bristol Channel. Ari, an old Norse word for Eagle. Fróthi, learned. The most thorough account of Ari and his writings was by Professor Werlauf, who published, at Copenhagen in 1808, a Dissertation " De Ario Multiscio." the date of the death of St. Edmund, after whom, as his place of interment, Bury St. Edmunds is named. Ari's book is a plain chronicle of facts which it was desired to put accurately upon record. It is the most ancient piece of Scandinavian history, and filled only twenty-six quarto pages when first printed at Skalholt in 1688. The Landnama Bók. The "Landnama Bók" was a development from the work of the priest Ari Fróthi, the son of Thorgil, and from another of the same kind. Its author was Sturla Thortharson, a judge in the Higher Court, who died in 1284, aged seventy. His work was edited by Hauk Erlendsen, who was himself a judge in the Higher Court from 1294 to 1334, and his "Landnama Bók" is Thortharson's with addition of facts from a history by Styrmer the Learned, wherever Styrmer had anything to add. This "Landnama Bók" (Book of the Taking of the Land), the fullest of the old Icelandic chronicles, is in five parts. The first treats of the discovery and settlement of the island, and the other four are given to a description of its several quarters, including detail as to the families by which each was settled. This record is of great value for the verification of the Sagas. * Irish hermits in Iceland. The first emigrants found on the shores of Iceland a few hermit settlers, whom they called Papar. These deserted the island, not wishing to live among heathen, and they left Irish books, bells, and croziers behind them. The Irish monk, Dicuil, hereafter to be spoken of, who wrote in the earlier part of the ninth century, says that he had spoken with priests who had visited Ultima Thule, and describes the place in a way that points only to Iceland. There remained also records in names of places, Patreksfjord, Papey, Papyli, and Erlendrey, “ey” meaning island. * The "Landnama Bók" was first printed in 1638. There were more elaborate editions in 1774 and 1843. Iceland For sixty years after the arrival of the first emigrants there was a constant influx of settlers. Celts came sometimes, and some were brought home as prisoners peopled. of the vikings. By the year 930 the land was as fully peopled as ever afterwards, and a code of laws was then adopted. An annual meeting was appointed on the plain of Thingvöllr. This meeting, which established the government as a commonwealth, was called the Althing.* The Althing met by the river Öxará, near Armansfell; an assembly had before been held at Kjalarnes. The time of meeting was about the last fortnight in June. The Althing, instituted in the year 930, was reformed in 964; and in the year 1000 it resolved upon the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the land. The colony had been formed as a place of refuge for men who were among the foremost of their land, who took with them their families, their household goods, their old religion, customs, and traditions, and transmitted them to their children's children. Although the actual literature of these Northmen is all later than that year 1000, in which Christianity was adopted as the national faith, the established families in Iceland that had preserved their traditions and advanced their culture were able to furnish to the new church their own bishops and priests, borrowing little from abroad after the consecration of their first native bishop, Isleif, in 1056. To these native priests and bishops the traditions of the faith of their forefathers were of the deepest interest. From life to life, through successive generations, tales and songs had passed for the lightening of time * Völlr meant a field or plain; Thingvöllr was, therefore, the Parliament Field. Thing meant thing, as in English, but as a law-phrase meant also any public meeting, especially for legislation or administration of the law. Al, as a prefix, meant quite--thoroughly-completely; so that Althing meant the supreme or absolute Assembly, as distinguished from such assemblies as that of the hús (or house) thing,-whence our word 'hustings,"—to which a chief summoned his people or guardsmen. " through the long northern winters, among men whose homesteads were thinly scattered in valleys parted by wide solitudes of rock and glacier from nearest settlements outside their own. The Eddas. From the end of the thirteenth century comes the earliest known copy of a collection, begun about the year 1240, of old mythical, religious, and heroic songs and tales, then chanted and told by the grandmothers throughout the land. That earliest copy of them was a parchment book ("Codex Regius," No. 2,365, in Copenhagen), which was sent in 1662 from Iceland, as a present from the Bishop Brynjulfr Sveinsson, of Skalholt, to King Frederick III. of Denmark. The bishop had discovered it in a farmhouse in 1643. This work was ascribed to Sæmund Sigfusson, who was priest, poet, and historian, had a share in forming the ecclesiastical code in Iceland, and died in the year 1135, a hundred years before the collection was made. It has been known, therefore, as Sæmund's Edda, or the Elder, or the Poetical Edda. The old The Younger or Prose Edda-Snorri's Edda--was the book to which the name Edda was first attached, and the author of this was Snorri Sturluson. Snorri Sturluson, poet and historian, was born in 1178, rose to high office in Iceland, and was murdered in 1241. His book called "Edda" was an Ars Poetica, containing the old rules for verse-making and poetic diction; but as the diction included a large number of allusions and phrases derived from the old Northern mythology, a summary was also given of the myths from which they all were drawn. First came two sections, Gylfaginning (the Delusion of Gylfi) and Bragarædur (Bragi's Tales), which gave larger and smaller sketches of the old mythology; then came a third section called Skáldskaparmál (the Ars Poetica), which described the conventional circumlocutions and the other devices of the skalds, or Northern poets; the fourth |