Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/70

 in the social arrangements of the time and people, and, together with their literature or traditional songs and stories, were intimately connected with the material interests of all, and especially of those who had property and power. They were not merely a class of wandering poets, troubadours, or story-tellers, living by the amusement they afforded to a people in a state too rude to support any class for their intellectual amusement only. The scalds, who appear to have been divided into two classes,—poets, who composed or remembered verses in which events were related, or chiefs and their deeds commemorated; and saga-men, who related historical accounts of transactions past or present,—were usually, it maybe said exclusively, of Iceland.

It is usually considered a wonderful and unaccountable phenomenon in the history of the middle ages, that an island like Iceland, producing neither corn nor wood, situated in the far north, ice-bound in part even in summer, surrounded by a wild ocean, and shaken and laid waste by volcanic fire, should, instead of being an uninhabited land, or inhabited only by rude and ignorant fishermen, have been the centre of intelligence in the north, and of an extensive literature. It is wonderful; but, if we consider the causes, the phenomenon is naturally and soberly accounted for. Iceland was originally colonised by the most cultivated and peaceful of the mother country; the nobility and people of the highest civilisation then in the north flying, in the 9th century, and especially after the battle of Hafursfiord, from what they considered the tyranny of Harald Haarfager, and the oppression of the feudal system which he was attempting to establish in Norway. It was an emigration from principle. The very poor and ignorant, and those who merely sought gain without any higher motive for their emigration, could not go to Iceland; because a suitable