The Danes in England do not appear to have occupied themselves with any compositions that can be properly called historical; at all events all remains of such composition have disappeared. It is related of the contemporary Normans in France, that, down to the days of William the Conqueror, they devoted themselves more to war than to reading and writing. This, however, is not surprising, since even the Anglo-Saxon clergy in Alfred the Great’s time, according to that monarch’s own statement, were so ignorant and so unaccustomed to literary occupations, that exceedingly few of them could read the daily prayers in English, much less translate a Latin letter. Even if we should admit that the Danes in England, by reason of their earlier and more extended settlements there, had somewhat better opportunities for study than the Normans in Normandy, still there is not sufficient ground to suppose that they wrote any other chronicles than such dry annals as some few monks, and other learned men of that time, composed. The reason of this seems partly to have been because they preferred preserving the remembrance of important events in historical lays; and partly, because neither their national nor political development could proceed in a foreign land with such freedom from all admixture, and in such tranquillity, as to allow of more important historical works, and especially in their mother tongue, being produced among them. In Iceland, on the contrary, where a great number of the most powerful and shrewdest of the heathens of Norway sought, after the year 870, a refuge against spiritual and political oppression, and where they founded a republic which retained its independence for centuries, the Scandinavian spirit obtained a free field. Not only did the old bardic lays, and the remembrance of the deeds of former times, continue to live among the Icelandic people, but new bards arose in numbers, who, spreading themselves over the whole north of Europe, returned “with their breasts full of Sagas.” There also speedily arose in Iceland, immediately after the Viking expeditions, and altogether independently of any external influence, an historical Saga literature in the old Scandinavian tongue, which, viewed by itself, is, from its simplicity and elevation, extremely remarkable, but which, when compared with the contemporary dry Latin monkish chronicles and annals in the rest of Europe, is truly astonishing. The Edda songs, the purely historical Sagas, the historical novels, and other peculiarly bold and original productions of the Icelandic literature, in an age when the European mind was singularly contracted, form, in the intellectual world, manifestations of the same thorough individual freedom, which stamped itself on the arms, endeavours, and whole life of the heathen Northman. ---------- SECTION XII. Ecclesiastical and Secular Aristocracy.