Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/145

 wanting among them. From the pagan times nothing in stone and lime exists of any importance or merit as a building; and the principal structure of an early age connected with Christianity, the cathedral of Drontheim, erected in the last half of the 12th century, cannot certainly be considered equal to the great ecclesiastical structures of Durham, York, or other English cathedrals, scarcely even to that of the same period erected in Orkney—the cathedral of Saint Magnus. We have, however, a less equivocal test of the progress and diffusion of the useful arts among the Northmen than the church-building of their Saxon contemporaries, for which they wanted the material. When we read of bands of ferocious, ignorant, pagan barbarians, landing on the coasts of England or France, let us apply a little consideration to the accounts of them, and endeavour to recollect how many of the useful arts must be in operation, and in a very advanced state too, and very generally diffused in a country, in order to fit out even a single vessel to cross the high seas, much more numerous squadrons filled with bands of fighting men. Legs, arms, and courage, the soldier and his sword, can do nothing here. We can understand multitudes of ignorant, ferocious barbarians, pressing in by land upon the Roman empire, overwhelming countries like a cloud of locusts, subsisting, as they march along, upon the grain and cattle of the inhabitants they exterminate, and settling, with their wives and children, in new homes; but the moment we come to the sea we come to a check. Ferocity, ignorance, and courage, will not bring men across the ocean. Food, water, fuel, clothes, arms, as well as men, have to be provided, collected, transported; and be the ships ever so rude, wood-work, iron-work, rope-work, cloth-work, cooperwork, in short almost all the useful arts, must be in full operation among a people, before even a hundred