Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/333



HE oldest linguistic monuments, excepting the runic inscriptions, are in Sweden as in Denmark the provincial laws, which date from the latter half of the thirteenth century. In them we already begin to discern clearly a divergence from the common original northern tongue, which in its purity is only to be found in the oldest of the numerous runic inscriptions. In this divergence the Danish and Swedish form a rather decided contrast to the Norwegian and the Icelandic, while the difference between Swedish and Danish was not very marked at the outset. In the period before the Reformation the Swedish language had not yet begun to develop independently. The increasing intercourse with the Hanseatic cities left numerous traces of the Low German, and the intimate relations between Sweden and Denmark also contributed much to prevent an independent linguistic development, so that the language, as we find it in the literature from the close of the period of the union (about 1520), is in reality far more Danish or Danish-German than Swedish. But after Sweden had severed her connection with Denmark and Norway, and when the Reformation had stimulated the people to secure a greater intellectual independence, then an appreciation of the peculiar claims of the language to be set free from the foreign yoke also grew stronger, and in spite of the influences which the literature was subject