The story of Karl and his wife is given in other versions, but they do not give the appeal of Redeless to Earl Hacon. It was well known that Hacon had helped King Svein to escape, but it is this one version, taken from Hacon's Saga by Snorri, which gives the truth, as we may suppose-certainly something like the truth-in characteristic Icelandic form.

This informal discourse may give some notion of the way in which the traditional book of the Kings of Norway was put together. Where so much is mysterious it is proved that the kings were fond of talking about themselves, that very early there were people engaged in taking notes, and others in testing them and proving the dates; that before the end of the thirteenth century there was a rich Icelandic prose literature, in which different forms of the Norwegian historical matter were presented, some tending outwards and making large circuits and sweeping in all sorts of reminiscences and tales (like Morkinskinna), others (like Fagrskinna) making an attempt to restrict and select and give form to the material of tradition. One result of all this is a certain discontent with Heimskringla. That elegant work does not make the older versions superannuated or useless; it leaves out some of the best things, e.g. the proverbs of Sveinke (ancestor of Sam Weller) :

No need of rollers, as the fox said, when he drew the harp over the ice"; and "It's sniffing of snow, said the Finns, when they had snow-shoes to sell." Which are illustrations of a political argument, as well as of characters and manners.

Another great omission is the story of Sigurn Hranason's law-suit, in which he was helped with legal skill by King Eystein against Sigurd the Crusader 1

Cf. G. Storm, Sigurd Raneson's Process.

Worst of all is that which has been mentioned already, which is taken by Gudbrand Vigfusson as the chief ground of his depreciation of Heimskringla, as the refusal to admit, as part of the history of Olaf Tryggvason, the mortal sorrow of his queen and his hound Vigi, and the fulfilment of the blind yeoman's prophecy as to the loss of the four jewels of Norway. What are the canons of historical criticism that rejected this? Did the author of Heimskringla not believe the story? But he tells about the wizard who took the form of a whale, and was sent by King Harald of Denmark to survey the Iceland coasts. This is a good story, but the author who repeats it cannot afford to be scrupulous. He cannot give himself out, or be accepted as a true, sound rationalist historian. Why did he swallow the whale ?

XXIX

GUDMUND ARASON

THIS lecture was to have been given in February; when the Committee altered the date to the 16th of March, I wonder whether they meant to give Bishop Gudmund the honour due to his day. For this 16th of March is his anniversary; this is "Gvendar dagr” (Gvend's or Gudmund's day), as it is familiarly called, with the homely, shortened form of the name "Guðmundr." If they did not intend this, it is something like a miracle; which reminds me of a story belonging to the times and records of Gudmund himself, a very characteristic piece of Icelandic scepticism, rationalism and clearness of speech. A conversation is reported between two great chiefs in the year 1220, after a fight against the Bishop and his men :

Arnor said to Sighvat, “It has been a hard bout, kinsman !"

"Aye, hard indeed!

says he.

Arnor said: "I have been poorly all the summer; but when word came to me from Reekdale that they wanted help, all my aches left me, so that now I am as fresh as ever I was in my life."

"That is what you might call a miracle," said Sighvat. Arnor answers: 'It is what I would call an occurrence and not a miracle." 1

1 "Slíkt kalla ek atburð, en eigi jarteign." St. I. p. 242.

And then they went on to business, penning up the bishop's men in the churchyard at Helgastadir.

Perhaps the action of the Committee is only an occurrence and not a miracle; but at any rate it has happened so, and the choice of the day is no bad omen.

The life of Gudmund Arason has some historical importance, if Iceland and Norway are matters of historical concern at all, which we will not doubt in this society. He lived in a time when Iceland was rapidly going to ruin, through the loss of the old healthy balance in society between the well-to-do and the poorer families. The danger had been noted long before this. The older sagas, which are mainly heroic, admit some element of satire into them, and allow one to understand how the great men might sometimes appear to the lower orders: as in that wonderful scene of the death of Kiartan (in Laxdæla Saga), where one gets the view of the churlish common man as spectator: "Let them fight it out; much harm it will do if they kill one another."

Stórbokkar, big bucks," was an affectionate term applied to the great men; and the purport of Bandamanna Saga is to show how vain and pusillanimous some of those big bucks were: how eight of them combined to keep down a rising, self-made man; and how their victim's elderly but ingenious father split up their league and exposed them to general derision. This saga, I have thought, is not unlike the comedy of Le Mariage de Figaro, just before the Revolution, spreading amazement by its satire on the nobles; or like the voice in Andersen's story, Hear what the innocent child says: the Emperor has nothing on ! "

Now, a hundred years or so after the time of Bandamanna Saga, the rich men were growing richer, more

ambitious, more covetous, the poor were more dependent. The smaller gentry were dying out; large estates falling into few hands. "A condition of Iceland question," to adapt Carlyle's phrase, was vividly present to many minds in those days, and illustrated in a flamboyant manner by innumerable slaughters and butcheries. The great men, in some ways better educated than their heathen ancestors, had inherited their lively ways, and used the old methods freely in their game of "beggar my neighbour."

It is this business that is the theme of the Sturlunga Saga, written by a member of one of the ambitious families. For it is remarkable how literature flourished through all the ruin. They were reading men, not a few of the self-willed and luxurious persons who carried on the civil wars. The greatest Icelandic man of letters, Snorri Sturluson, was one of them; one of his nephews, Sturla Thord's son, is the author of the Sturlunga Saga and the Life of King Hacon of Norway, which ought to be reckoned among the first historical books of the Middle Ages. Another nephew, also a Sturla (son of the Sighvat who has already been mentioned), though not himself of the same original talent as his uncle or his cousin, was fond of books and of history. They were like people of the Italian renaissance, making the best of the contemplative not less than the practical life; artists as well as swordsmen.

The history of Norway, as told in Sturla's life of King Hacon († 1263), is a counterpart to that of Iceland, as told in Sturlunga Saga. The two countries were going through the same process, the same trial, with different conditions and very different chances of success. A comparison of the two gives some measure of the value of a king in the twelfth and the thirteenth