Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/25

 it with their spark of a free social existence, in which all men had property or interests, and a right to a voice in the affairs of their government and in the enactment of their laws. It must he admitted, whatever we think of the alleged superiority of the Teutonic race over the Celtic or Slavonic, that this Northern branch has been more influential than the older Anglo-Saxon branch of their common race on the state of modern society in Europe. We have only to compare England and the United States of America with Saxony, Prussia, Hanover, or any country calling itself of ancient Germanic or Teutonic descent, to be satisfied that from whatever quarter civil, religious, and political liberty, independence of mind, and freedom in social existence may have come, it was not from the banks of the Rhine, or the forests of Germany.

The social condition, institutions, laws, and literature of this vigorous, influential branch of the race, have been too much overlooked by our historians and political philosophers; and this work of Snorro Sturleson gives us very different impressions of this branch, in its pagan and barbarous state, from the impressions which the contemporary Anglo-Saxon writers, and all our historians on their authority, afford us. Let us first look at their literature, and compare it with that of the Anglo-Saxon of the same ages.

Our early historians, from the Venerable Bede downwards, however accurate in the events and dates they record, and however valuable for this accuracy, are undeniably the dullest of chroniclers. They were monks, ignorant of the world beyond their convent walls, recording the deaths of their abbots, the legends of their founders, and the miracles of their sainted brethren, as the most important events in history; the facts being stated without exercise of judgment, or inquiry after truth, the fictions with a dull credulity unenlivened by a single gleam of genius. The