Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/40

 about the year 1117, and first committed to writing the Icelandic compositions, and of Sæmund, who flourished about the year 1083, and had studied at universities in Germany and France, and of Oddo the Monk, who flourished in the 12th century, are almost entirely lost. Kolskegg, a contemporary of Are, and, like him, distinguished by the surname of Frode—the wise, or the much knowing,—Brandus, who lived about the year 1163, Eiric, the son of Oddo, and his contemporary Karl, abbot of the monastery of Thringö, in the north of Iceland, and several others, appear to have been collectors, transcribers, and partly continuators of preceding chronicles; and all these flourished between the time of Bede in the end of the 7th and beginning of the 8th century, when the devastations of these piratical Vikings were at the worst, and the time of Snorro Sturleson in the middle of the 13th century, when the Viking life was given up, invasions of Northmen even under their kings had ceased, and the influence of Christianity and its establishments was diffused.

Now we have here a vast body of literature, chiefly historical, or intended to be so, and all in the vernacular tongue of the Northmen. It is for our Anglo-Saxon scholars and antiquaries to say, whether in the Anglo-Saxon tongue, or in the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin together, such a body of national literature was produced,—whether such intellectual activity existed between the days of the Venerable Bede, our earliest historian, in the beginning of the 8th century, and the days of Matthew Paris, the contemporary of Snorro Sturleson, in the first half of the 13th? And these were Pagans, these Northmen, whether in Denmark, Norway, or Iceland, for more than half of these five centuries! This body of literature may surely be called a national literature; for on looking over the subjects it treats of, it will be found to con-