Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/114

96 sole representatives of culture, still continued to form a caste separate and distinct from all other social orders, with which they were frequently engaged in violent and bitter controversy, as, indeed, was also the case in the countries from which Christianity had been brought. The inevitable result of this state of things was that the clergy not only lacked sympathy with, but also the requisite knowledge of the ancient records, the preservation of which was indispensable for the production of a national and popular literature. As a matter of course, the language of the Roman church, the Latin, became the learned clergy's sole medium of communication, but it was also employed in matters of general and national interest, and thus it absolutely obstructed the road to any free and natural intellectual development. In other words, while in the Icelandic literature, the popular element had vindicated its own rights, the conditions in the rest of the North were of such a kind that they could give birth only to a learned literature, a literature created by and for the use of scholars, and thus the influences which had their origin in the people, and which had been transmitted from the heathen time, were completely interrupted by Christianity, and could only at a much later period find their way back into the literature.

The, and that means, then, the intellectual culture of Denmark, in general, throughout the entire middle age had not only been originally introduced from abroad, but it continued to be closely connected with the centres of learning in foreign countries. All clergymen who desired to acquire a higher culture at first visited the German universities of Cologne and Heidelberg, and later the renowned universities of Paris, Bologna, Padua, etc., until the close of the middle age, when spiritual interests had considerably declined, and men again contented themselves with visiting the neighboring German universities. During the golden period of Denmark, the age of the Waldemars, from the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the thirteenth century, the country enjoyed a high degree of power,