Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/72

 on all sides, in a severer climate; and under the local disadvantage, from the shape of the country, that the Fielde or mountain ridges in Norway approach much closer to the shore, and leave much less flat level pasture land between them and the sea than the mountains of Iceland. The cultivation of corn is as much out of the question in a great proportion of Norway as in Iceland. The people in the upland districts of every province of Norway, and almost all the population north of the Namsen river, draw the main part of their subsistence at present from the natural products of the land and water,—the pasture for their cattle, and the fishing in the rivers, the lakes, and the sea. These natural products are as abundant in Iceland as in Norway; and the butter, cheese, wool, dried meat, fish, oil, feathers, skins, the wadmal or coarse woollen cloth, and the coarse linen spun and woven in their households, would be more in demand, more readily exchangeable, and of higher comparative value in former times, than such Icelandic products are now. With the surplus of such articles beyond their own consumpt the Icelanders could supply their own most pressing wants. These were for corn and wood—articles of first necessity, which did not admit of the population sinking into indolence and apathy in providing them. An intercourse and regular trade with England and Denmark for meal and malt, and with Norway for wood, tools of metal, and other necessaries of life, must have existed from the first years of the colonisation of Iceland. The Icelanders had consequently from the first more easy and regular opportunities of visiting foreign countries, and returning again to their own, than the natives of any other country in the north in those ages. They appear also to have traded without molestation, and never to have molested others. No Icelandic viking is mentioned in the sagas, even in the ages when a viking cruise was