Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/124

 a few weeks. They are little aware that they are perhaps passing by the very estates which their own ancestors once ploughed,—sleeping on the same spot of this earth on which their forefathers, a thousand years ago, slept, and were at home; men, too, as proud then of their high birth, of their descent, through some seven-and-twenty generations, from Odin, or his followers the Godar, as their posterity are now of having "come in with or before the Conqueror." The common traveller visiting this land destitute of architectural remains of former magnificence, without the temples and classical ruins of Italy, or the cathedrals and giant castles of Germany, will yet feel here that the memorials of former generations may be materially insignificant, yet morally grand. These little farms and houses, as they stand at this day, were the homes of men whose rude, but just and firm sense of their civil and political rights in society, is, in the present times, radiating from the spark of it they kindled in England, and working out in every country the emancipation of mankind from the thraldom of the institutions which grew up under the Roman empire, and still cover Italy and Germany, along with the decaying ruins of the splendour, taste, magnificence, power, and oppression of their rulers. Europe holds no memorials of ancient historical events which have been attended by such great results in our times, as some rude excavations in the shore-banks of the island of Vigr, in Möre,—which are pointed out by the finger of tradition as the dry docks in which the vessels of Rolf Ganger, from whom the fifth in descent was our William the Conqueror, were drawn up in winter, and from whence he launched them, and set out from Norway on the expedition in which he conquered Normandy. The philosopher might seat himself be-