3o LETTERS FROM HIGH LATITUDES. [VI. 



political influence, to meet his murderers at Reikholt. And 

 mingling with his memory would rise the pale face of Thora, 

 — not the little lady of the coffee and buscuits we had just 

 left, but that other Thora, so tender and true, who turned 

 back King Olaf's hell-hounds from the hiding-place of the 

 great Jarl of Lade. 



In order that you may understand why the forlorn bar- 

 rack we had just left, and its solitary inmates, should have 

 set me thinking of the men and women " of a thousand 

 summers back," it is necessary I should tell you a little 

 about this same Snorro Sturleson, whose memory so 

 haunted me. 



' Colonized as Iceland had been, — not, as is generally the 

 case, when a new land is brought into occupation, by the 

 poverty-stricken dregs of a redundant population, nor by a 

 gang of outcasts and ruffians, expelled from the bosom of a 

 society which they contaminated, — but by men who in their 

 own land had been both rich and noble, — with possessions 

 to be taxed, and a spirit too haughty to endure taxation, — 

 already acquainted with whatever of refinement and learning 

 the age they lived in was capable of supplying, — it is not 

 surprising that we should find its inhabitants, even from the 

 first infancy of the republic, endowed with an amount of 

 intellectual energy hardly to be expected in so secluded a 

 community. 



Perhaps it was this very seclusion which stimulated into 

 almost miraculous exuberance the mental powers already 

 innate in the people. Undistracted during several successive 

 centuries by the bloody wars, and still more bloody political 

 convulsions, which for too long a period rendered the sword 

 of the warrior so much more important to European society 

 than the pen of the scholar, the Icelandic settlers, devoting 

 the long leisure of their winter nights to intellectual occupa- 

 tions, became the first of any European nation to create for 

 themselves a native literature. Indeed, so much more ac- 

 customed did they get to use their heads than their hands, 

 than if an Icelander were injured he often avenged himself, 



