OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 237 



pern/anent results yielded to the physical contemplation of 

 the universe by the rediscovery of the same continent by Co- 

 lumbus at the close of the fifteenth century, was the necessary 

 consequence of the uncivilized condition of the people, and the 

 nature of the countries to which the early discoveries were 

 limited. The Scandinavians were wholly unprepared, by pre- 

 vious scientific knowledge, for exploring the countries in which 

 they settled, beyond what was absolutely necessary for the sat- 

 isfaction of their immediate wants. Greenland and Iceland, 

 which must be regarded as the actual mother countries of the 

 new colonies, were regions in which man had to contend with 

 all the hardships of an inhospitable climate. The wonderful- 

 ly organized free state of Iceland, nevertheless, maintained its 

 independence for three centuries and a half, until civil free- 

 dom was annihilated, and the country became subject to Hako 

 VI., king of Norway. The flower of Icelandic hterature, its 

 historical records, and the collection of the Sagas and Eddas, 

 appertain to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 



It is a remarkable phenomenon in the history of the culti- 

 vation of nations, that when the safety of the national treas- 

 ures of the most ancient records of Northern Europe was en- 

 dangered at home by domestic disturbances, they should have 

 been transported to Iceland, and have been there carefully 

 preserved, and thus rescued for posterity. This rescue, the 

 remote consequence of Ingolf 's first colonization in Iceland, in 

 the year 875, has proved, amid the vague and misty forms of 

 Scandinavian myths and symbolical cosmogonies, an event of 

 great importance in its influence on the poetic fancy of man- 

 kind. It was natural knowledge alone that acquired no en- 

 largement. Icelandic travelers certainly occasionally visited 

 the universities of Germany and Italy, but the discoveries of 

 the Greenlanders in the south, and the inconsiderable inter- 

 course maintained with Vinland, whose vegetation presented 

 no remarkable physiognomical character, withdrew colonists 

 and mariners so little from their European interests, that no 

 knowledge of these newly-colonized countries seems to have 

 been diffused among the cultivated nations of Southern Eu- 

 rope. It would even appear that no tidings of these regions 

 reached the great Genoese navigator in Iceland. Iceland and 

 Greenland had then been separated upward of two hundred 

 years, since 1261, when the latter country had lost its repub- 

 lican form of government, and when, on its becoming a fief 

 of the crown of Norway, all intercourse with foreigners and 

 even with Iceland was interdicted to it, Christopher Colnm- 



