Icelanders

“ The literary history of Iceland, in the early ages of the republic, is of a most interesting character. When we consider the limited population of the country, and the many disadvantages under which they labored, their literature is the most remarkable on record. The old Icelanders, from the tenth to the sixteenth century, through a period in the history of the world when little intellectual light beamed from the surrounding nations, were as devoted and ardent workers in the fields of history and poetry as any community in the world, under the most favorable circumstances. ”

“ The people who maintain that they have seen these children of nature, assert that they are taller and stronger than other Icelanders; that their horses’ hoofs, instead of being shod earth iron, have shoes of horn; and that they have much money, which they can only have acquired by pillage. When I inquired what respectable inhabitants of Iceland had been robbed by these savages, and when and where, no one could give me an answer. ”

“ Two years later, however, Iceland threw off the heathen yoke, and embraced the Roman Catholic religion. Early in the 11th century, several Icelanders visited Europe to study in its various universities, whilst churches and schools were established in the Island, taught by native bishops and teachers, and with such marvellous rapidity did education spread among the people, that it reached its culminating point in the 13th century, when the literary productions of the Icelanders became renowned through Europe during what was termed the Dark Ages. ”

“ Before quitting Iceland, I must relate a tradition told me by many Icelanders, not only by peasants, but also by people of the so-called higher classes, and who all implicitly believe it.
It is asserted that the inhospitable interior is likewise populated, but by a peculiar race of men, to whom alone the paths through these deserts are known. These savages have no intercourse with their fellow-countrymen during the whole year, and only come to one of the ports in the beginning of July, for one day at the utmost, to buy several necessaries, for which they pay in money. ”

“ SCOTT. AFTER our sojourn of two days in explorations of Mount Hekla, we took leave of the farmer of Næfrholt and his family, and traveled towards the southwest coast, the Reykir Springs, and the Sulphur Mountains. There are some pleasing and original customs among the Icelanders; and with these are their ways of saluting, at meeting and parting. Young and old, male and female, have the same affectionate greeting and parting compliments. They first shake hands, then embrace with arms about each other’s necks, and then bring their lips in close contact. ”

“ Of course, it is a commonplace that when Iceland was one of the centres of civilization in Europe, the Icelanders budded off a colony upon Greenland, which throve and flourished, and produced sagas of its own, and waged war upon the Skraelings or Esquimaux, and generally sang and fought and drank in the bad old, full-blooded fashion. ”

“ No better pictures of a law-abiding, rural, and yet valiant race have ever been made than in the tales which the Icelanders had the skill to weave about their heroes, those men who, at home in their island, or so far abroad as Constantinople, made the name of Icelander respected.
We read of these men and this people in stories which, somewhat too "old" for boys and girls, reveal the laws, customs, habits of a thousand years ago. The Njal's Saga, the Grettir's Saga, the Ere-Dwellers' Saga, and the Gisli's Saga are perhaps the greatest of those which have been translated. ”

“ The hundred different kinds of verse now existing in many volumes of Iceland poetry, the sagas, and other literary productions of the Icelanders, have not been read and re-read, translated and re-translated, like the works of Herodotus, Xenophon, Tacitus, and Cicero, and for very good reasons. The country is not one of such antiquity; it is not a country renowned for arts and arms, and overflowing with a numerous population. As a state, it is nearly destitute of works of art, and its scanty population can only procure the bare necessaries of life. ”

“ Thus, as a mass, the Icelanders are without doubt the best educated people in the world.
For six centuries the Icelanders have evidenced their love of literature by writing and preserving old Sagas and Eddas;—by producing original works on mythology, law, topography, archaeology, &c.—several of these at once the earliest and best of their kind in Europe ”

“ Among the mediaeval literatures of Europe, that of Iceland is unrivalled in the profusion of detail with which the facts of ordinary life are recorded, and the clearness with which the individual character of numberless real persons stands out from the historic background.... The Icelanders of the Saga-age were not a secluded self-centred race ”

“ MATTERS PERSONAL, LITERARY, AND GENERAL. THE Icelanders, as I have pictured them, are intellectual in their tastes; and in domestic life they are highly social. Their amusements are few, their enjoyments being principally in the family, at their labor, and attending public worship. Throughout the country, they gather from a circuit of many miles, to hear their ministers proclaim “glad tidings,” and tell them of the reward that awaits a well-spent life. ”

“ The principal northern authorities quoted are Hjaltalín, Jón Finsen, Krabbe, Thorarensen, and Skaptason.
SECTION VI.
EDUCATION AND PROFESSIONS. § 1. Education.
All Icelanders can read and write more or less, they learn the three R’s to say nothing of the fourth R (evolution) ; but this alphabetic state of society may consist, as in the Paraguayan Republic under Dr Francia and the two Presidents Lopez, with a profound state of barbarism. In Iceland, however, the press is not trammeled; and the newspaper, as will appear, holds its own. During the last generation it was otherwise. ”

“ Now will all the Icelanders who are here suffer themselves to be baptized, & we can well devise a means whereby Christianity may gain an entrance into Iceland. The sons of many mighty men of Iceland are here present, & their fathers will, we trow, lend their aid in this matter. ”

“ The Icelanders are not rich, though many of them are quite comfortably situated, as is the farmer at Hruni. Still, it is not right to take of their substance simply because they feel it in their hearts to give it. ”

“ We are not informed, however, that the modern Icelanders indulge in these luxuries. Their trade is gone, and they are now a simple, pastoral people. In complexion the Icelanders resemble the Anglo-Saxon race, often having florid and handsome countenances. ”

“ The climate of Iceland appears to have been less inclement than is now the case; corn is said to have grown, and trees and shrubs were larger and thicker than we find them at present. The population of Iceland was also much more numerous than it is now, although there were neither towns nor villages. The people lived scattered throughout the island; and the General Assembly was held at Thingvalla, in the open air.
Fishing constituted the chief employment of the Icelanders. Their clothing was woven from the wool of their sheep. ”

“ The Icelanders were famous travellers, and the names of Icelandic students are found not only in the chief cities of Europe, but in the holy places of the East. At the beginning of the twelfth century Iceland counted 50,000 inhabitants. ”

“ The Icelanders are a wonderfully well-educated people. Our new friend told us he did not believe there was a man or woman in the Island who could not read and write, and certainly on our visits to the various farm-houses, we never failed to notice a Lutheran Bible, and many of the old 'Sagas,' by native poets, beside translations of such works as Shakespear, Göethe, John Stuart Mill's 'Political Economy,' and other well-known writings. ”

“ If the demand be rejected, the persuasion that Iceland has never thriven since Icelanders lost their privilege of self-rule will steadily increase, and probably attain abnormal dimensions. A school of politics has now been opened to the people, and the new study will produce special students. ”

“ At home he can command no serious education, nor can he escape from the indolent and phlegmatic, the dawdling and absolutely unconditioned slowness of the country, where time is a positive nuisance, to be killed as it best can. In Iceland the author met several Danes, but only two Icelanders, who spoke good English, French, or German; it is far otherwise in Europe, and especially, we need not say, in England.
As the notices of emigration will show, Iceland, like Ireland, is instinctively seeking her blessing and salvation, the “racial baptism.” ”

“ Icelanders. Inhabitants of Iceland, originally Norwegians, who settled there about the end of the ninth century. A typical tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed Scandinavian race. The Icelandic Sagas form the chief part of ancient Scandinavian literature.
Idumæans or Edomites. A warlike Semitic race of Canaanite stock, thought to be descended from Esau, who were conquered by the Israelites under Saul and David, and again by Judas Maccabæus in 165 B.C., after which they disappear from history. ”

“ The Saga literature, which was cultivated to so great an extent in that distant and isolated spot, while all Europe was in a state of darkness, had a great influence in civilizing and promoting the cultivation of letters throughout the north of Europe. The Icelanders were a maritime people, inheriting their love of commerce and adventure from the hardy Scandinavians who planted their colony. Their continued intercourse with the coast of Norway led them to seek adventures elsewhere. ”

“ They possess a greater spirit of historical research and literary inquiry, have more scholars, poets, and learned men, than can be found among an equal population on the face of the globe. Some of their linguists speak and write a greater number of languages than those that I have ever met in any other country. Iceland has given birth to a Thorwaldsen, a sculptor whose name will descend to the latest posterity. His parents were Icelanders, but he was a child of the sea, born on the ocean, between Iceland and Denmark. ”

“ The Icelanders, like all other ancient people, are extremely attached to their own customs, and averse to innovation. I noticed one thing here, that—though, as Captain Cuttle would say, there was not much wisdom in it—is characteristic of every people under the sun. ”

“ In exchange for these commodities the Icelanders give raw wool, knitted stockings, mittens, cured cod, fish-oil, whale-blubber, fox-skins, eider-down, feathers, and Iceland moss. The exports of the island in wool amount to upwards of 1,200,000 lbs. of wool yearly, and 500,000 pairs of stockings and mittens.
ICELANDERS FISHING FOR NARWHAL.
Iceland offers abundant sport to the enthusiast in fishing. ”

“ When we read in the history of that country that the first inhabitants had emigrated thither from civilised states; that they had brought knowledge and religion with them; when we hear of the simple good-hearted people, and their patriarchal mode of life in the accounts of former travellers, and which we know that nearly every peasant in Iceland can read and write, and that at least a Bible, but generally other religions books also, are found in every cot,—one feels inclined to consider this nation the best and most civilised in Europe. ”

“ Now, here and there in this vast region there are certain sheltered spots where some grass grows, valleys that have escaped the overflow of the molten rock, or the thrust of the glacier; and during the ninety years that Iceland had been inhabited, every now and then a churl who got tired of service, or a murderer afraid of his life, ran away into the centre of the island, and lived a precarious existence on the wild birds, their eggs, and on the fish that abounded in the countless lakes. ”

“ It will be best to take as the type the smaller Icelandic Saga, from which indeed all the later forms of composition have sprung. This is, in its orginal form, the story of the life of an Icelandic gentleman, living some time in the tenth or eleventh centuries. It will tell first of his kin, going back to the settler from whom he sprung, then of his youth and early promise before he left his father's house to set forth on that foreign career which was the fitting education of the young Northern chief. ”

“ The decline of oral tradition can also be partly accounted for by the fact that the social conditions in Iceland gradually assumed a new character and consequently the saga materials, which were formerly liable to develop anywhere, now gathered around a few centres and no longer awakened the same general interest as before. The original institutions under which the Icelandic freeman considered himself the equal of every other freeman in the land, had gradually developed into the government of a few, inasmuch as a comparatively large power was centred in the hands of a few chiefs ”

“ With its isolated situation, inclement climate, scant natural advantages, and sparse population, Iceland is yet of high interest to the historian, philologist, and litterateur. To the first the excellence and exactitude of its historical records, the curious phases of life to which they bear witness, and the singular circumstances which have determined the existence and life of the Teutonic community for a thousand years apart from the rest of the European family, are all attractive. ”

“ No large town there affords opportunity for pomp or gaiety, or for the commission of smaller or greater sins. Rarely does a foreigner enter the island, whose remoteness, severe climate, inhospitality, and poverty, are uninviting. The grandeur and peculiarity of its natural formation alone makes it interesting, and that does not suffice for the masses.
I therefore expected to find Iceland a real Arcadia in regard to its inhabitants, and rejoiced at the anticipation of seeing such an Idyllic life realised. I felt so happy when I set foot on the island that I could have embraced humanity. ”