Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/78

 dition of the society. Apply this measure to any town or county in Great Britain of 56,000 inhabitants, and we will find little reason to boast of a more advanced intellectual condition among us than that which the Icelanders appear to retain at this day from bygone times, when an intellectual character was impressed on the public mind in their small community by the scalds; and little reason to believe that the monkish historians of the Anglo-Saxons, in the same ages in which the scalds flourished, have left more deep or influential traces of their literature in the parts of Europe in which they were the only men engaged in those ages in intellectual occupation, than the scalds have done in the narrow circle in which alone they could have influence on posterity.

In these observations on the saga literature, nothing is said of or allowed for the Runic writing inscribed on rocks, monumental stones, wooden staves, drinking cups of horn or metal, arms, or ornaments, for which at one period a high antiquity was claimed. It seems to be now admitted that a Runic character, apparently borrowed from the Gothic and Roman, and adapted to the material on which it was usually cut, viz. hard stone or wood, by converting all the curves of the letters into straight lines for the facility of cutting, has existed from a very early age among the Northmen. It would, indeed, be absurd to suppose that an intelligent people roaming over the world, who had appeared in the Mediterranean in the days of Charlemagne, and had a regular body of troops, the Væringer, in the pay of the Greek Emperors at Constantinople, should not have adopted, or imitated, what would be useful at home, as far as applicable to their means. This appears to have been precisely the extent to which Runic writing was applied. From want of means to write,—that is, the want of the parchment, paper, ink, and writing tools,—the writing in Runic