THE NORTHMEN AND OTHER INVADERS 217 - things often frightened them, but they had, or pretended to have, a fierce contempt for mere death or physical pain. At bottom the heroes of the sagas were usually either sol- diers of fortune who hired themselves out to the highest bidder, or shrewd traders who drove sharp bargains and 'seldom let mere love of adventure outweigh the prospect of j substantial gain, just as the mere prospect of personal danger could not hold them back from profitable plunder- ing or trading ventures. Such was the Norse character as
- reflected in literature not written down until after the period
|of which we treat in this chapter. The Northmen were the Teutonic ancestors of the modern j Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians, and inhabited the Scandi- navian peninsula, where there was good hunting Influence land fishing, but a rather barren soil. They had, dinavian i however, by this time developed a settled agri- geography I cultural society. But the nature of their peninsula and its j coast-line indented by deep fjords , tempted them, like the I ancient Greeks, to a life on the sea of trading ventures and j piracy. Rugged rocks, too, like the mountains of Greece, combined with the arms of the sea to isolate the small ! fertile areas and pasture lands from one another, to hinder I the rise of large states and encourage the growth of personal
- freedom. Unlike the marbles of Greece, however, these
I rugged rocks were too hard to quarry easily, so that even 1 forts had to be built of wood. There seem to have been two chief social classes, a large number of free small landowners who formed the citizen body, and their personal dependents or servile agricultural laborers. In the main the institutions of the Northmen were not unlike those of their kinsmen, the earlier German invaders, which have been described in a previous chapter, where too we have seen that what we know of the religion and mythology of the heathen Germans is gleaned chiefly from the Eddas of Iceland. By the time of Charlemagne the population had so in- creased in the Scandinavian peninsula that existence be- came difficult, and chieftains warred upon one another in the hope of winning more land for their followers. Those
