Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/75

Rh highest rank and power belonging to the country were strangers to in those unhappy ages. This advantage was sufficient of itself to make them a useful class in every court. They were not only neutral men in every strife; but, from their travel and experience, men of intelligence, prudence, and safe counsel, compared to men of no intellectual culture at all, and acquainted only with arms and violence. They had also the advantage of speaking in its greatest purity what was the court language in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, England, and at Rouen. The moral influence which the scalds enjoyed, as counsellors and personal friends and advisers of many of the kings, may not be exaggerated in the sagas; for it appears to be that which knowledge and education would naturally obtain amidst ignorance and barbarity. The class of scalds and saga-men, supported by intellectual labour in the north of Europe, may not have been very numerous at any one time; but owing to the favourable circumstances peculiar to the Icelanders, the profession centred in Iceland. We hear of no scalds of any other country, not even of Norway. All the intellectual labour of the kind required in the north of Europe was derived from Iceland. We may surely reckon the population in the north of Europe using a common tongue in those times,—of Scandinavia, Denmark, Jutland, and Schleswig; of the kingdom of Northumberland, East Anglia, and of parts of Mercia; of Normandy, in some proportion of its inhabitants; of the Hebrides and Isle of Man, in some proportion; of the Orkney, Shetland, and Feroe Islands, altogether,—to have