Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/210

 assassinated him, and from whom alone any account of his life proceeds, were avowedly the parties who brought it about. But it cannot be denied that their accounts, and even their enmity, prove that Snorro has been a man unjust to and hated by his family,— selfish, rapacious, and without restraint from principle or natural affection.

The judgment for posterity to come to probably is, that Snorro Sturleson, and even his relations who murdered him, were rather a type of the age in which they lived, than individuals particularly prominent for wickedness in that age. The moral influences of Christianity had not yet taken root among the Northmen, while the rude virtues of their barbarous pagan forefathers were extinct. The island of Iceland had never contained above sixty-three or sixty-four thousand inhabitants—the population of an ordinary town. The providing of food, fuel, and of winter provender for their cattle, and such employments, have necessarily at all times occupied a much greater proportion of the population than in more favoured climes. The enterprising, energetic, and restless spirits found occupation abroad in the roving viking expeditions of the Norwegians, for the Icelanders themselves fitted out no viking expeditions; while the equally ambitious, but more peaceful and cultivated, appear to have acquired property and honour, as scalds, in no inconsiderable number. But the rise of the Hanseatic League, and the advance of the south and west of Europe in civilisation, trade, and naval power, had extinguished the vikings on the sea. They were no longer, in public estimation, exercising an allowable or honourable profession 5 but were treated as common robbers, and punished. The diffusion of Christianity, and of a lettered clergy over the Scandinavian peninsula, had in the same age superseded the scalds, even as recorders of law or history. The scald, with his