THE NORTHMEN AND OTHER INVADERS 223 niddle of the ninth century, and again under Alfred. After lis death it was continued at different places and kept up to [late in its entries until long after the Norman conquest. |Ve still possess to-day manuscripts of the tenth and elev- enth centuries, written in England in Latin and in Anglo- >axon, which show that Alfred's efforts to stimulate learn- ing and literature were not without results. From no other iountry in western Europe have we before the twelfth
- entury so many manuscripts dealing with medieval natural
- cience and medicine. But from the constructive govern-
ment of Alfred and his successors and from the culture of ater Saxon England we must turn back again to the wild Invaders. If we would appreciate thoroughly the tremendous vigor .nd power of expansion, the adventurous spirit and the fear- ?ss enterprise of the Norse vikings, and their Iceland .bility to cover vast distances by land or sea, Greenland, ^e must follow them, not only along the coasts j»f Gaul and of both Christian and Mohammedan Spain and 10 the Irish Channel or the Mediterranean, but yet farther ifield and afloat. Before the ninth century was over they liad sailed around the North Cape of Europe and along the jhores of Lapland to the White Sea, they had colonized Ice- land, and had sighted Greenland, which was at first more jippropriately called "White Shirt" from its robe of snow. |.n the tenth century they made settlements in Greenland, md about 1000 visited the coasts of what they called 'Vinland," which seems to have been either Labrador or Newfoundland or Nova Scotia or New England. Thus they )ecame deep-sea sailors before the invention of the mari- ner's compass and discovered America five centuries before lolumbus. The world, however, was not yet ready to )rofit by this discovery, and the Northmen themselves ieldom visited Vinland and founded no lasting settlements 'here. While Norwegians thus pushed on farther and farther into inknown seas, Swedes were crossing and recrossing the great Expanse of Russia. Here too they first appeared as small
