Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/645

] perished at sea when on her way to Scotland. In 1299 Erik died and was succeeded by his brother Hakon, who died in 1319, and whose only daughter carried the Norwegian crown into the Swedish line. During the

reign of Hakon the lendermenn, who had so long been conspicuous in Norse history, finally disappeared. Hakon abolished them by a decree, without apparently even consulting his council, and without encountering the slightest resistance. They do not even reappear in the minority which followed, and which must have afforded them a very favourable opportunity of recovering their power. They occupied, in truth, an anomalous and untenable position. They had long ceased, as we have seen, to be the chiefs and representatives of the free landowners, and they had failed to assert themselves as a separate power by the side of the king. Under Magnus Lagabætr they had acquired the title of barons, but even under long minorities they never got any real hold of power. The king was too strong for them after they had lost their old position, and he preferred ruling through officers of his own who were wholly dependent on him. Neither was there any room for the growth of a nobility of another type. On the one hand the position of the king was too absolute, and on the other hand the people were too firmly rooted in their old traditional independence. The mass of the small landowners, among whom the greater families, by the partition of their domains, gradually sank back, were ready to obey the king and his officers; but they were not the material on which an intermediate power could be rested. They admitted that the king had an odal right to his kingdom and a definite claim for services and payments, but in the same way they themselves had an immemorial odal right to their lands. The situation of Norway during the Middle Ages might be shortly described as an absolute monarchy resting almost directly on one of the most democratic states of society in Europe. Titles appear, but they represent little or nothing. The ruling officials or deputies of the king are occasionally oppressive, but there is no permanent subjection to them.

From the time of the union with the Swedish crown the history of Norway is bound up with that of the other Scandinavian countries. With Sweden she entered the Calmar union in 1397, but when that union was broken in

the beginning of the 16th century she remained with Denmark, and during the whole time of union can scarcely be said to have had a history of her own. The Danish kings were accepted in Norway with only an occasional show of dissent and resistance. One of her oldest and most famous colonies, the Orkney and Shetland Islands, was in 1468 given in pledge, never to be redeemed, to the Scottish king by Christian I. The commercial towns fell under the iron rule of the Hanseatic League and all the old enterprise seemed to have perished. Intellectual life appeared to fall as low as commercial prosperity. The vigorous Norse-Icelandic literature was supplanted after the time of Hakon Magnusson by versions of foreign legends and history, but even that disappeared, and, as the manuscript copies grew scarcer, it appears as if for a while the Norwegians had ceased to read as well as to write. The Reformation spread more slowly into Norway than into the other Scandinavian countries, and had to be encouraged by the Danish kings by methods not altogether dissimilar to those by which Christianity had at first been introduced. But better times began to dawn during last century. Restrictions were removed from lands and the administration was improved. The material prosperity of the country rapidly increased and a new life began to appear.

By the terms of the peace of Kiel (14th January 1814) Norway was to be transferred from Denmark to Sweden. The Norwegians were at first inclined to resist this, but

their means of resistance were small and the Swedes offered liberal terms. In the same year the constitution was solemnly ratified, and Charles XIII. was taken as king. Since then the country has been peaceful and prosperous. The only serious political troubles have been those arising from the question whether the king has an absolute veto upon alteration of the fundamental law of the kingdom.

The literature of Norway bears something of the same relation to that of Denmark that American literature bears to English. In each case the development and separation of a dependency have produced a desire on the part of persons speaking the mother-tongue for a literature that shall express the local emotions and conditions of the new nation. Two notable events led to the foundation of Norwegian literature: the one was the creation of the university of Christiania in 1811, and the other was the separation of Norway from Denmark in 1814. These events were the signals for intellectual and political independence. Before this time Norwegian writers had been content, as a rule, to publish their works at Copenhagen, which was the metropolis of the realm; they had now a capital of their own in Christiania. The great distinction, however, between Norway and America was that the former was sufficiently ancient and sufficiently neighbouring to contribute to the glory of Denmark a great many young men who quitted the colonial and narrow circle into which they were born, and became to all intents and purposes Danish writers. The first name on the annals of Danish literature, Peder Clausson, is that of a Norwegian; and if all Norse writers were removed from that roll, the list would be poorer by some of its most illustrious names, by Holberg, Tullin, Wessel, Treschow, Steffens, and Hauch.

We must first examine what was done in Norway itself during the colonial period. The first book printed in the country was an almanac, brought out in Christiania in 1643 by a wandering printer named Tyge Nielsen, who brought his types from Copenhagen. But the first press set up definitely in Norway was that of Valentin Kuhn, brought over from Germany in 1650 by the theologian Christian Stephensen Bang (1580-1678) to help in the circulation of his numerous tracts. Bang's Christianiæ Stads Beskrifuelse, 1651, is the first book published in Norway. The name which next detains us is that of Christen Jensen (d. 1653), a priest who collected a small glossary or glosebog of the local dialects, and which was published in 1656. Gerhard Milzow (1629-1688), the author of a Presbyterologia Norwegica, 1679, was also a Norse priest. The earliest Norwegian writer of any original merit was (1634-1716), afterwards the wife of the pastor Ambrosius Hardenbech (see vol. viii. p. 214). She is the author of several volumes of religious poetry, of a very lacrymose and lamentable order, which have enjoyed great popularity down to the present day. The hymn-writer Johan Brunsmann (1637-1707), though a Norseman by birth, belongs by education and temper entirely to Denmark. Not so (1647-1708) (see vol. vi. p. 831), the