Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/47

 perhaps contemporary with, these writers, and composed a life of King Olaf Tryggvesson, containing circumstances not found in other accounts of that reign; from which it is supposed that he had access to sagas not now extant.

These are the principal historical writers who compiled or composed from the ancient unwritten sagas, between the days of Are hinn Frode in 1117, and the days of Snorro Sturleson in the beginning of the following century. In these hundred or hundred and twenty years between Are and Snorro, the great mass of literature in the vernacular tongue committed to parchment proves a state of great intellectual activity among these Northmen. It is not the literary or historical value, or the true dates or facts of these traditionary pieces called sagas, written down for the first time within those hundred and twenty years, that is the important consideration to the philosophical reader of history; but the extraordinary fact, that before the Norman conquest of England here was a people but just Christianised, whose fathers were pagans, and who were still called barbarians by the Anglo-Saxons, yet with a literature in their own language diffused through the whole social body, and living in the common tongue and mind of the people. The reader would almost ask if the Anglo-Saxons were not the barbarians of the two,— a people, to judge from their history, without national feeling, interests, or spirit, sunk in abject superstition, and with no literature among them but what belonged to a class of men bred in the cloister, using only the Latin language, and communicating only with each other, or with Rome. In the same period in which the intellectual powers of the pagan or newly Christianised Northmen were at work in the national tongue upon subjects of popular interest, what was the amount of literary production among the Anglo-Saxons? Gildas,