The Western Scandinavians of late Viking times spread across the northern seas to Iceland, Greenland, and 'Wineland', which has been identified with the New England coast of North America. The connexion with America was lost, and that with Greenland almost, if not quite, lost as well, probably in the severities of climate of the fourteenth century, but that with the Faroes and Iceland persisted. In this way Iceland has become in some sort a repository of the Scandinavian past, and thence has spread in modern times a knowledge and appreciation of the ancient sagas of the Norse rovers, with elements embedded in them that date back far beyond Viking times. Icelandic and the literature embodied in it have thus become an important matter for students of European tradition and literary history, and the influence thence exerted on modern Germany, notably through Wagner, has been far-reaching and many-sided. Sweden's associations are necessarily very different from those {57} of Norway. It is true that the high plateau is fairly sharply marked off from the rest of Sweden, but the steps down are less precipitous than on the Norwegian side, and though Sweden has a Lapp-world as her mystery soil for folk-tale, yet contacts between Swede and Lapp and Finn do take place and influence type. The recent beautiful atlas of photographs of Swedish types illustrates this for that country, but shows that the most characteristic element, as in Norway, is the tall, fair Nordic type. It is apparently chiefly since the recovery of the north from the severities of the fourteenth-century climate that Sweden as a unit people has shown the most marked activity. A factor in this was undoubtedly the weakening effect of the great religious schism in Germany with the opportunities this gave to the France of the Counter-Reformation and the Bourbons.