the local business of the local things was carried out by the (hreppstjori) bailiff, a subordinate of the sheriff; and the goðorð, things, quarter-courts, trial by jury, &c. , were all completely swept away by these innovations, which have continued with mere changes of detail till the present century. The power of the crown was increased by the confiscation of the great Sturlung estates, which were under-leased to farmers, while the early falling off of the Norse trade threatened to deprive the island of the means of existence; for the great epidemics and eruptions of the 14th century had gravely attacked its pastoral wealth and ruined much of its pasture and fishery, for the time at least. The union of the Three Crowns transferred the practical rule of Iceland to Denmark in 1280, and the old Treaty of Union, by which the island had reserved its essential rights, was disregarded by the absolute Danish monarchs; but, though new taxation was imposed, it was rather their careless neglect than their too active interference that damaged Iceland's interests. But for an English trade, which sprung up out of the half-smuggling, half-buccaneering enterprise of the Bristol merchants, the island would have fared badly indeed, for during the whole 15th century their trade with England, exporting sulphur, eider down (which the English taught them the value of), wool, and salt stock-fish, and importing as before wood, iron, honey, wine, grain, and flax goods, was their only link with the outer world. This period of Iceland's existence is torpid and eventless: she had got peace but with few of its blessings; all spirit seemed to have died with the commonwealth; even shepherding and such agriculture as there had been sank to a lower stage; waggons, ploughs, and carts went out of use and knowledge; architecture in timber became a lost art, and the fine carved and painted halls of the heathen days were replaced by turf-walled barns half sunk in the earth, and lasting at best a generation; the large decked luggers of the old days gave way to small undecked fishing-boats; it is needless to add that letters were neglected, and that all remembrance of the commonwealth perished utterly.
The Reformation. The Reformation here as elsewhere had a one-sided effect: it wakened men's minds, opening new vistas of hope and new fields of thought, but it left their bodies and circumstances little changed, or, if at all, for the worse. Its necessary complement, a social and political revolution, never came to Iceland. The Hanse trade replaced the English for the worse; and the wretched Danish monopoly which succeeded it when the Danish kings began to act again with vigour, under the stimulus of European changes, was still less profitable. The glebes and hospital lands were a fresh power in the hands of the crown, and the subservient Lutheran clergy became the most powerful class in the island, while the bad system of under-leasing at rack rent and short lease with unsecured tenant right extended in this way over a great part, at least a quarter, of the better land, stopping any possible progress. The details of the religious change are uninteresting: nearly all who took active part in it on either side were men of low type, moved by personal motives rather than religious zeal; and, though it should be noticed that the fires of martyrdom were never lighted in Iceland, the story of the easily accepted Reformation is not altogether a pleasant one. When it was once accomplished, the little knot of able men who came to the front for two or three generations, stirred by the new life that had been breathed into the age, did nobly in preserving the records of the past for a later time to value and appreciate, while Odd and Hallgrim exhibit the noblest impulses of their time.
Decadence.
A new plague, that of the English, Gascon, and Algerine pirates, marked the close of the 16th century and opening of the 17th, causing widespread panic and some devastation in 1579, 1613-16, and 16 27. Nothing points more to the helplessness of the natives condition than their powerlessness against these tiresome foes. But the 18th century is the most gloomy in Iceland s annals. Small-pox, famine, sheep disease, and the awful eruptions of 1765 and 1783 follow each other in terrible succession. Against such fearful visitations, which reduced the population by about a fourth, little could be done, and when the only man who might have roused the Icelanders from their misery, distress, and impoverishment, thenoble and patriotic Eggert Olafsson, a hero of the old type, was drowned in full career in 1768, it is hardly to be wondered at that tilings grew from bad to worse, and that a listlessness and torpidity crept over the national character, the effects of which it is only beginning to shake off. The few literary men, whose work was done and whose books were published abroad, were only concerned with the past, and Jon Widalin is the one man of mark, beside Eggert Olafsson, who worked and wrote for his own generation.[1]
Modern times.
Gradually the ideas which were agitating Europe crept through Scandinavia into Iceland, and, now that scholars and travellers of mark and influence had drawn attention to the island, its claims were more respectfully listened to. The Continental system, which, by its leading to the blockade of Denmark, threatened to starve Iceland, was neutralized by special action of the British Government. Trade and fishery grew a little brisker, and at length the turn came.
The rationalistic movement, an unlovely attempt at reform, headed by Magnus Stephenson, a patriotic, narrow-minded lawyer, did little good as far as church reform went, but was accompanied by a more successful effort to educate the people by means of bringing within their reach the practical knowledge of the day. A Useful Knowledge Society, such as Brougham delighted in, was formed and did some honest work. Newspapers and periodicals were published, and the very stir which the ecclesiastical disputes encouraged did good. When free trade came, and when the free constitution of Denmark had produced its legitimate effects, the intelligent and able endeavours of a few patriots such as Jon Sigurdsson were able to push on the next generation a step further, in spite of such physical obstacles as the sheep disease. Questions of a modern political complexion arose; the cattle export controversy and the great home rule struggle began. The intelligence of a people whose love for knowledge and mental attainments have always been high seconded its leaders well, and after thirty years agitation home rule was conceded in 1874. The absolute syslumadr and hirdstjori became popular officials assisted by elected boards. The Al-thing, a mere council of powerless delegates, was replaced by a representative assembly of two chambers (composed of thirty members chosen by a a popular and wide suffrage, and six crown nominees) with legislative powers, and other reforms were comprised in this grant. Further political changes, such as the introduction of a jury system to replace the Danish umpire-and-assessor procedure, are now being considered by the liberal party. There are many peculiar circumstances present in the condition of Iceland, the absence of towns, equality of society in a sense which exists in no other European community, difficulty of communication, and the intense conservatism and dislike of activity or change which must necessarily characterize a community so long isolated and “forced into lazy habits for lack of opportunity.” But that emigration should have begun, and families left the old home for Canada and the United States to seek a better climate, a richer soil, and the hopes of progress which are so distant at home, is certainly remarkable; and, if the difficulties which must surround emigrants who have never seen a road, a tree, or a plough, on their first taking up an agricultural life, are overcome, the results may be very important to the mother country.
Literature.
Poetry.
Poetry.—Iceland has always borne a high renown for song, but has never produced a poet of the highest order, a fact for which one can only account by noticing that the qualities which in other lands were most sought for and admired in poetry were in Iceland lavished on the saga, a prose epic, and that Icelandic poetry is to be rated very high for the one quality which its authors have ever aimed at—melody of sound. To these generalizations there are but few exceptions, albeit, in considering the history of this branch of Icelandic literature, we are at once met by an apparent contradiction to them, a group of poems which possess the very qualities of high imagination, deep pathos, fresh love of nature, passionate dramatic power, and noble simplicity of language which Icelandic poetry lacks. The solution is that these poems do not belong to Iceland at all. They are the poetry of the “Western Islands.”
Poetry of the Western Islands.
It was among the Scandinavian colonists of the British coasts that in the first generations after the colonization of Iceland therefrom a magnificent school of poetry arose, to which we owe works that for power and beauty can be paralleled in no Teutonic language till centuries after their date. To this school, which is totally distinct from the Icelandic, ran its own course apart, and perished before the 13th century, the following works belong (of their authors we have scarcely a name or two; their dates can be rarely exactly fixed; but they lie between the beginning of the 9th and the end of the 10th centuries), classified into groups:
a. The Helgi trilogy (last third lost save a few verses, but preserved in prose in Hromund Gripsson's Saga), the Raising of Anganty and Death of Hialmar (in Hervarar Saga), the fragments of a Wolsung Lay (part interpolated in earlier poems, part underlying the prose in Volsunga Saga), all by one poet, to whom Dr Vigfusson would also ascribe Völuspá, Vegtamskviða, Thrymskviða, Grötta Song, and Volundar-kviða.
b. The Dramatic Poems:—Flyting of Loki, the Lay of Skirni, the Lay of Harbard, and several fragments, all one man's work, to whose school belong, probably, the Lay underlying the story of Ivar's death in Skioldunga Saga.
c. The Didactic Poetry:—Grimnismal, Vafthrudnismal, Alvismal, &c.
d. The Genealogical and Mythological Poems:—Hyndla-Lioð, written for one of the Haurda-Kari family, so famous in the Orkneys; Ynglinga-tal and Haust-löng, by Thiodulf of Hvin; Rig's Thul, &c.
e. The Dirges and Battle Songs,—such as that on Hafur-firth Battle, by Thiodulf of Hvin or Hornklofi, shortly after 870; Eirik's Dirge, between 950 and 969; the Dart-Lay on Clontarf Battle, 1014; Biarka-mal (fragments of which we have, and paraphrase of more is found in Hrolf Kraki's Saga and in Saxo).
There are also fragments of poems in Half's Saga, Asmund Kappa-Bana's Saga, in the Latin verses of Saxo, and the Shield Lays by
- ↑ For the periods succeeding the union, Danish state papers and the History of Finn Jonsson are the best authority.
