Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/212

 ning to prevail, and to put down private wars, and the claim of every petty baron to garrison his robber nest and pillage the weak; but this growing security had not advanced so far that trade and manufacture could absorb, and give a living to, the men not wanted in agricultural and thrown out of military employment. It takes a long time, apparently, before those tastes and habits of a nation on which manufactures and commerce are founded, can be raised. Society was in a transition state. The countries which took but little part in the Crusades,—such as Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and this little population of Iceland,—and which had no outlet for the unquiet spirits reared in private wars or piracy, present a deplorable state of society for many generations. A bad, unquiet, cut-throat spirit, was transmitted to succeeding generations, and kept those countries in a half-barbarous state to a much later period than the other countries which had got rid of a prior turbulent generation in the Crusades. The Sturlunga Saga, or account of Snorro and his family, contains little else but a recital of private feuds in Iceland,—of murders, burning of houses, treachery, and a social disorganisation among this handful of people, which might well excuse Snorro Sturleson if he had wished and attempted to obtain the common benefit of all social union—the security of life and property—by the surrender of a nominal independence, but a real anarchy, into the hands of a government strong enough to make laws respected.

Snorro Sturleson must be measured, not by our scale of moral and social worth, but by the scale of his own times. Measured by that scale, he will be judged to have been a man of great but rough energy of mind,—of strong selfishness, rapacity, and passions unrestrained by any moral, religious, or social consideration,—a bold, bad, unprincipled man, of intel-