Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/80

62 The bloody feuds which were carried on toward the fall of the republic between the mighty men of Iceland, and of which the Sturlunga saga furnishes a most graphic and interesting picture, could not help giving all the conditions of life an entirely new character, and that one which was not favorable to saga-writing. The age of magnificently endowed heroes was past, violence and treachery now determined the course of events; only the few who had power and influence took any interest in public affairs, and the few events of importance could easily be recorded by the annalists. As a matter of course this decline of historical interest in reference to the affairs of Iceland, also greatly diminished the taste for foreign history. In short, when the writing of Icelandic sagas ceased, that magnificent literary industry which the Icelanders had devoted to chronicling the events of Norway also came to a close. It might reasonably be supposed that the union of Iceland with Norway was the very thing needed to bring the sagas of the Norwegian kings to unfold their fairest blossoms, but quite on the contrary, no sooner were the Icelanders united with Norway than this branch of their literary activity ceased entirely. The intercourse between Iceland and Norway was not interrupted, but their mutual relations assumed wholly new forms. The Icelanders no longer visited the Norwegian kings in the capacity of skalds or for the purpose of becoming their courtiers, and thus the conditions for saga writing disappeared and the Norwegians who came to Iceland, being mostly ignorant merchants and seamen, could not take the place of the sagamen. Besides, the island was devastated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by epidemics such as the black plague, by famine, etc.

All these circumstances combined were surely sufficient to explain why the literary productions ceased and why those Icelanders who still had taste for intellectual employment mainly confined themselves to copying and preserving what they had inherited from the past. But in addition to these