Page:An elementary grammar of the old Norse or Icelandic language.djvu/8

Rh ried into that island by emigrants from the Scandinavian peninsula soon after its discovery, and imperishably preserved by them in written documents, are so closely connected with the history of Northern Europe as to render a knowledge of it incomplete without them. Many of the skalds travelled in foreign lands before the twelfth century, and as they were nobles and warriors, they were received by the kings, to whom they were often related, as friends and councillors; thus on their return to their native land they brought with them much historical matter which, since the Roman characters had been introduced with the Christian religion, was committed to writing. The value of some of these documents to English history is considerable, and besides confirming or adding to our stock of facts during its darkest period, they afford us very interesting views of the state of society, and of the manners and mode of living of the age in which they were composed.

After the departure of the Roman legions from this country, the Jutes, Saxons, and Angles, who occupied respectively Jutland in Denmark, the district between the Elbe and the Eyder, and Anglen in the south-east part of the Duchy of Slesvik, successively obtained settlements in Britain. The language which resulted from this blended colonization, marked however by strong dialectic variations, is generally styled Anglo-Saxon, which term was first introduced by Asser, in his Life of Alfred. The resemblance between it and the Old Norse, as is to be expected, is striking, since both are the offspring of that primitive tongue, the Gothic, spoken by the ancestors of all the Teutonic tribes. For instance, the Anglo-Saxon letter th is common to both Icelandic and English, though unknown to most of the allied dialects. The article, noun, adjective and pronoun are alike declinable in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, having different forms for the three genders, for the four cases, and for the