Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/17

 right moment, as most essential parts of it,—Snorro Sturleson stands as far above Ville Hardouin, Joinville, or Froissart, as they stand above the monkish chroniclers who preceded them. His true seat in the Valhalla of European literature is on the same bench —however great the distance between—on the same bench with Shakspeare [sic], Carlysle, and Scott, as a dramatic historian; for his Harald Haarfager, his Olaf Tryggvesson, his Olaf the Saint, are in reality great historical dramas, in which these wild energetic personages, their adherents and their opponents, are presented working, acting, and speaking before you.

This high estimate of the literary merit of Snorro Sturleson's work will scarcely pass unquestioned by English readers,—accustomed indeed to hear of the Anglo-Saxon literature, language, and institutions, as of great importance to the historian and antiquary, and as a study necessary for those who wish to become perfectly acquainted with our own, but who would never discover from the pages of Hume, or of any other of our historical writers, that the northern pagans who, in the ninth and tenth centuries, ravaged the coasts of Europe, sparing neither age, sex, nor condition—respecting neither churches, monasteries, nor their inmates—conquering Normandy, Northumberland (then reckoned, with East-Anglia, equal to one third of all England)—and, under Swein and Canute the Great, conquering and ruling over the whole of England,—were a people possessing any literature at all, or any laws, institutions, arts, or manners connecting them with civilised life. Our historians have confined themselves for information entirely to the records and chronicles of the Anglo-Saxon monks, who, from their convent walls, saw with horror and dismay the bands of these bloodthirsty pagans roving through the country, ravaging, burning, and murdering; and who naturally represent them as the