Nevertheless we should be grievously mistaken if we imagined that the Scandinavian people was at that time entirely unfitted for the ennobling occupations of art and literature. It has been before stated that the Northmen early distinguished themselves not only by an extraordinary skill, for those times, in the art of ship-building, but that they had also developed, previously to the conquest of England, a taste, in some respects peculiar, in the manufacture of their ornaments, domestic utensils, and weapons, and which had principally sprung from characteristic imitations of the Roman and Arabian articles of commerce brought into the North. The Scandinavian antiquities that are dug up, belonging to the older period, or what is called “the age of bronze,” as well as those of the latest times of heathenism, or “the iron age,” may on the whole, with regard to form and workmanship, be even ranked with contemporary objects of a similar kind manufactured in England, France, or Germany. The Sagas, moreover, state that the carving of images was sometimes very skilfully practised in the North; and the English chronicles, which depict in such glowing colours the splendidly-carved figures on the prows of the Danish or Scandinavian vessels, confirm the truth of these statements. In Olaf Paas’ Hall, at Hjarderholdt, in Iceland, the walls were even adorned with whole rows of carvings, representing the ancient gods, and their exploits. On the other hand there could naturally as yet be no possibility of erecting such buildings in the North as those which the spirit of Christianity had already produced in other countries. But no sooner were the Normans from Denmark and Norway settled in Normandy, and converted to Christianity, than they began to manifest a lively desire to erect splendid buildings, and particularly churches and monasteries. Scarcely had the first violent revolutions in that country been brought to a close when there sprang up such a number of great architectural works among the Normans, that Normandy can still show more such monuments of art, of the eleventh century, than any other district of France. After William’s conquest of England, the Normans also founded there a somewhat peculiar style of building, which, though only a branch of the Byzantine-Gothic, or a further development of the older Saxon, constantly bears in England the name of “Norman.”