4 G. Stephens, 



and ecouomical tracts, and Customs' documents and folk-books and state- 

 papers and so on. We find interesting things of this sort even in 

 writings pubhsht by scholarly authors, such as OLius Petri, Laurentius 

 Upsalensis, Petrus Johannis Gothus, Petrus lonœ, N. Balck, Petrus Erici, 

 Andreas Laurentii, A. J. Tiderus and a host of others. All this is prac- 

 tical work, very different from the endless theories and hair-splittings 

 now so fashionable. But it is hard work, and needs vtany workers. The 

 fact is, men from all parts of Sweden served the State or the Church, 

 or were privatel}^ active, using the press, and hence in spite of their 

 »education» give us in some degree their local mother-speech, which we 

 can sometimes identify by the still living dialects. 



But in this way our older Swedish »Grammar», as well as »Dic- 

 tionary», will be largely modified and enricht, and we shall see that the 

 whole »iron law» system is unnatural and untrue. All speech is always 

 in a flux. Every book-tung is only a barbarization of what has gone 

 before, and abounds in exceptional archaisms and exceptional neologisms, 

 and gradually slides over into new forms, while old words fall away 

 and new ones come in. The oldest and most »orthodox» Sanscrit or 

 Mœso-Gothic or Greek or Latin or Icelandic are only corruptions of 

 previous folk-talks, surrounded by dialects ever ready to mix with them 

 or take their place. In England with its rich succession of Runic and 

 Roman monuments and documents from the 5"" century downwards, we 

 can follow all this plainly, and study and group the English Northern, 

 Midland and Southern dialects, which diff"er so largely from each other 

 at the same nominal date, some being young in development while old 

 in years, others conservative and antique in form while young in age, 

 but all endlessly running into each other. In Scandinavia all parchment 

 remains of real antiquity have perisht. We have nothing left but what 

 is comjjaratively modern, NOT Old-Scandinavian or even Early-Scandina- 

 vian, but Middle- Scandinavian from the very earliest vellums (in Iceland) 

 of about the year 1200 to the 15"' century. Hence to parallel the oldest 

 Old-English we must fly to the only Old-Scandinavian known to us, the 

 ristings with Old-Northern runes in the Scandian lands; as parallel to 

 Early-English, something more primitive than the skinbooks, we must 

 read what is cut in Early-Scandinavian in the later or Scandian runes. 

 Then we may take up Middle-English, comparing it with the Middle- 

 Scandinavian of the parchments left in Scandinavia. Now we know 

 that the Old-Northern runic inscriptions in Scandinavia as well as the 

 oldest Scandian are few and short, and have been redd differently by 



