Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/19

 traced to this fresh infusion from the cognate northern people. This subject is very curious and important.

Two nations only have left permanent impressions of their laws, civil polity, social arrangements, spirit, and character, on the civilised communities of modern times—the Romans, and the handful of northern people from the countries beyond the Elbe which had never submitted to the Roman yoke, who, issuing in small piratical bands from the 5th to the 10th century, under the name of Saxons, Danes, Northmen, plundered, conquered, and settled on every European coast from the White Sea to Sicily. Under whatever name, Goths, Visigoths, Franks, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, or Northmen, these tribes appear to have been all of one original stock,—to have been one people in the spirit of their religion, laws, institutions, manners, and languages, only in different stages of civilisation, and the same people whom Tacitus describes. But in Germany the laws and institutions derived from the Roman power, or formed under it after the Roman empire became Christianized, had buried all the original principles of Teutonic arrangements of society as described by Tacitus; and in France the name was almost all that remained of Frank derivation. All the original and peculiar character, spirit, and social institutions of the first inundation of this Germanic population, had become diluted and merged under the church government of Rome,—when a second wave of populations from the same pagan north inundated again, in the 9th and 10th centuries, the shores of Christendom. Wheresoever this people from beyond the pale and influence of the old Roman empire, and of the later church empire of Rome, either settled, mingled, or marauded, they have left permanent traces in society of their laws, institutions, character, and spirit. Pagan and barbarian as they were, they seem to have carried with them something more natural,