Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/27

 were composed and of which they treat;—composed not for the people, and as part of the literature of the country, but for a tribe of cloistered scholars spread over the country, yet cut off by their profession from all community of interests, feelings, or views, with the rest of the nation; a class centralised in Rome, and at home only in her church establishment. It was their literature, not the literature of the nation around them, that these writers composed; and its influence, and even all knowledge of its existence, was confined to their own class. It was not until the 13th century that Ville Hardouin composed his Memoirs in the vernacular tongue of his countrymen; and he and Joinville, who wrote about the end of the 13th century, are considered the earliest historical writers who emancipated history from the Latinity and dulness of the monkish chroniclers.

When we turn from the heavy Latin records of the Anglo-Saxon monks to the accounts given of themselves in their own language, during the very same ages, by the Northmen, we are startled to find that these wild bloody sea-kings, worshippers of Thor, Odin, and Frigga, and known to us only from the Anglo-Saxon monks as ferocious pagans, overthrowing kings, destroying churches and monasteries, ravaging countries with fire and sword, and dragging the wretched inhabitants whom they did not murder into slavery, surpassed the cognate Saxon people they were plundering and subduing, in literature as much as in arms—that poetry, history, laws, social institutions and usages, many of the useful arts, and all the elements of civilisation, and freedom, were existing among them in those ages in much greater vigour than among the Anglo-Saxons themselves. We cling, to the early impression given us by Hume, and all our best historians, upon the authority of our monkish chroniclers, that these pagan Danes or Northmen were