Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/144

 CHAP. IV. STATE OF THE USEFUL ARTS AMONG THE NORTHMEN.

The architectural remains of public buildings in a country—of churches, monasteries, castles,—as they are the most visible and lasting monuments, are often taken as the only measure of the useful arts in former times. Yet a class of builders, or stone-masons, wandering from country to country, like our civil engineers and rail-road contractors at the present day, may have constructed these edifices; and a people or a nobility sunk in ignorance, superstition, and sloth, may have paid for the construction, without any diffusion of the useful arts, or of combined industry, in the inert mass of population around. Gothic architecture in both its branches, Saxon and Norman, has evidently sprung from a seafaring people. The nave of the Gothic cathedral, with its round or pointed arches, is the inside of a vessel with its timbers, and merely raised upon posts, and reversed. No working model for a Gothic fabric could be given that would not be a ship turned upside down, and raised on pillars. The name of the main body of the Gothic church—the nave, navis, or ship of the building, as it is called in all the northern languages of Gothic root—shows that the wooden structure of the ship-builder has given the idea and principles to the architect, who has only translated the wood work into stone, and reversed it, and raised it to be the roof instead of the bottom of a fabric. The Northmen, however, can lay no claim to any attainment in architecture. The material and skill have been equally