Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/121

 spirit, and forms of legislation through which they work in our social union, are the legitimate offspring of the Things of the Northmen, not of the Wittenagemoth of the Anglo-Saxons—of the independent Norse viking, not of the abject Saxon monk.

It would be a curious inquiry for the political philosopher to examine the causes which produced, in the 10th century, such a difference in the social condition of the Northmen, and of the cognate Anglo-Saxon branch in England and Germany. Physical causes connected with the nature of the country and climate, as well as the conventional causes of udal right, and the exclusion of inheritance by primogeniture, prevented the accumulation of land into large estates, and the rise of a feudal nobility like that of Germany. The following physical causes appear not only to have operated directly in preventing the growth of the feudal system in the country of the Northmen, but to have produced some of the conventional causes also which concurred to prevent it.

The Scandinavian peninsula consists of a vast table of mountain land, too elevated in general for cultivation, or even for the pasturage of large herds or flocks together in any one locality; and although sloping gently towards the Baltic or the Sound on the Swedish side, and there susceptible of the same inhabitation and husbandry as other countries, in as far as clime and soil will allow, on the other side,—the proper country of the Northmen,—throwing out towards the sea all round huge prongs of rocky and lofty ridges, either totally bare of soil, or covered with pine forests, growing apparently out of the very rock, and with no useful soil beneath them. The valleys and deep glens between these ridges, which shoot up into lofty pinnacles, precipices, and mountains, are filled at the lower end by the ocean, forming fiords, as these inlets of the sea are called, which run far up into the land, in some