ICELAND: ITS HISTORY AND INHABITANTS. 285 



aiul happy on £30 a year, the average stipend in the Icelandic church. 

 The sheep 3dekl food and clothing. Their wool is pulled ott' in 

 spring, carded, spun, woven in hand looms, and worn undj'ed. You 

 make shoes of their skin and spoons of the horns. Every opportunity 

 is seized for the telling of stories and reciting of poems. Onh^ the 

 milk ewes are kept at home in summer to be milked, the rest of the 

 sheep are gathered in from the mountains in autumn, notice being 

 given at church from the pulpit. These autumn gatherings, Avith 

 jjeople sitting on the Avails of the stone inclosure telling stories, are 

 quite Plomeric. The Avinter evenings Avith each member of the family 

 Ijusy at Avork in the same room ; the men shaAdng the avooI olf sheep- 

 skins on their knees, making ropes and nets of hair, the women using 

 spindle and distaff, embroidering, etc., afford a still better opportunity 

 for ;;tories and poems. 



There are even Avandering minstrels Avho gain their livelihood by 

 reciting prose or poetry, Avhich they knoAv by heart, at A'arious farm- 

 houses till they exhaust their stock. 



To conclude with a fcAv statistics, the annual trade of Iceland is 

 Avorth close on £1,000,000, export and import together. The principal 

 articles of export are salted codfish, avooI, mutton, and eiderdoAvn. A 

 large and increasing part of the trade is Avith Great Britain. In the 

 fifteenth century all the foreign trade Avas in English hands. Henry 

 VIII negotiated Avith Denmark in 1518 and 1535 for its transfer to 

 England, and its economic and strategic importance to Great Britain 

 has been set forth as late as 1835 in the Quarterly Review by Sir 

 George Mackenzie and Sir William Hooker, Avho held that Iceland 

 ought to be a British possession. It has been declared by experts 

 that the fishing grounds of Iceland are richer than those of NeAv- 

 foundland, and, though they are much nearer Great Britain, their 

 annual yield is not more than £2,000,000, because they are not Avorked 

 as they ought to be. 



For close on four hundred years Iceland Avas an aristocratic repub- 

 lic, ruled by the great families of the early settlers, among Avhom Avas 

 a Norse queen of Dublin. A fourteen days' open-air Parliament of 

 all Iceland met annually in June at ThingA^ellir, and the speaker of 

 the laAv (log-soguman) used to recite from memory the Avhole of the 

 unAvritten, elaborate code of laws of the country to the assembly. 

 In 1262-1264 Iceland Avas united to NorAvay, and in 1380 Avith 

 Norway to Denmark. The Danish rule ruined the island, economic- 

 ally, but since the granting of self-goA^ernment and the reestablish- 

 ment of the old Parliament in 1874, at Reykjavik, great progress has 

 been made. The revenue of Iceland is now six times as large as 

 tAventy-eight years ago, and it is probably the only country with no 

 debt, but with 1,000,000 crowns of savings in its exchequer. Yet 



