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the common class of men, a son remembers his father, knows something of his grandfather, but never bestows a thought on his more remote progenitors? With regard to inscriptions, we have already seen what assistance they were likely to afford: we may add that there are very few of them, which were written before the introduction of christianity into the North; and, indeed, as we shall prove in the sequel, before that time very little use was made of letters. Lastly, as for the verses or songs which were learnt by rote, it cannot be denied, but the Icelandic historians might receive great information from them, concerning times not very remote from their own. But was a rough and illiterate people likely to bestow much care in preserving a great number of poems, through a succession of eight or nine centuries? Or can one expect to find in such compositions much clearness and precision? Did the poets of those rude ages observe that exactness and methodical order, which history demands? In the third place, if the Icelandic annalists could not know with certainty, what passed a long time before them in Iceland and Norway, must not their authority be still weaker in what relates to a distant state like that of Denmark; which doubtless in those times had not such intimate
