among themselves, intrigued against one another and played into the hands of the Norwegian kings who were only waiting their opportunity. It came in the days of Hákon the Old. 'Land and thanes' were sworn into subjection to that king at the Althing in 1262, and in 1271 the old Icelandic common law was superseded by a new Norse code. The failure of the Icelandic commonwealth is amply compensated for by the rich intellectual development of Icelandic literature, which owed many of its most characteristic features to the fact that it was written in a land almost completely isolated and detached from the main currents of Western medieval thought and the general trend of European history, but in itself that failure is full of deepest import for a right understanding of the part played by Viking civilisation in Europe. Powerful and highly developed as that civilisation was in many ways, it only reached its highest and best expression when brought into fruitful contact with other and older civilisations. There it found the corrective for certain inherent weaknesses, more especially for certain tendencies of too strongly individualistic character leading to political and intellectual anarchy, while at the same time by its own energy and vigour it quickened the life of the older civilisations where they were tending to become effete or outworn. The Germanic peoples had done much for the development of European civilisation in the time of the wanderings of the nations, but by the end of the 8th century they had lost much of their pristine vigour through contact with the richer and more luxurious civilisation of the Roman world. It was reserved for the North Germanic peoples, or the Northmen as we can more fitly describe them, in the 9th and 10th centuries to give a yet more powerful stimulus to European life, if not to European thought, a stimulus which perhaps found its highest expression in the great creations of the Norman race in the world of politics, the world of commerce, the world of architecture and the world of letters. BIBLIOGRAPHY [The appended bibliography does not attempt to deal with primary authorities, with the large mass of valuable periodical literature which has been published within the last thirty years, or with books only incidentally concerned with the movement. It is much to be regretted that so few of the important Scandinavian books on the subject have been translated into English.] BJÖRKMAN, E. Scandinavian Loan-words in Middle English. Halle. 1906. BUGGE, A. Vikingerne. 2 series. Christiania. 1904-6. (German trans. of 1st series. Leipzig. 1896.) ---- Vesterlandenes Inflydelse paa Nordboernes i Vikingetiden. Christiania. 1905. ---- Norges Historie. Vol. I, Pt. II. Christiania. 1910. COLLINGWOOD, W. G. Scandinavian Britain. London. 1908. CRAIGIE, W. A. The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia. London. 1906.