Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/213

 lectual powers and cultivation far above any of his contemporaries whose literary productions have reached us,—a specimen of the best and worst in the characters of men in that transition-ave from barbarism to civilisation,—a type of the times,—a man rough, wild, vigorous in thought and deed, like the men he describes in his Chronicle.

How, it may fairly be asked, could a work of such literary merit as the translator claims for Snorro Sturleson's Chronicle, have lain hid so long from English readers, and have been valued, even on the Continent, only by a few antiquaries in search of small facts connected with Danish history? The Heimskringla has been hardly used by the learned men of the period in which it was first published. It appeared first in the literary world in 1697, frozen into the Latin of the Swedish antiquary Peringskiold. A Swedish translation, indeed, as well as a Latin, accompanied the Icelandic text; but the Swedish language was then, and is now, scarcely more known than the Icelandic in the fields of European literature. Modern Latin, or Latin applied to subjects beyond its own classical range, is a very imperfect medium for conveying realities to the mind, and, like algebra, presents only equivalents for things or words,—not the living words and impressions themselves. It may be an advantage in science, law, metaphysics, to work with the dead terms of a dead fixed language; but in all that addresses itself to the fancy, taste, or sympathy of men, the dead languages are dead indeed, and do not convey ideas vividly to the mind like the words of a living tongue belonging to existing realities. Conceive Shakspeare translated into Latin, or Schiller, or Sir Walter Scott! Would the scholar the most versed in that language have the slightest idea of those authors, or of their merits? About the time also when Peringskiold published the Heimskringla,