THE UNIVERSE. OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 239 



and the subjection of the country to the Norwegian king, 

 Haco VI. The flower of the Icelandic literature, the 

 historical writings, the collection of Sagas and of the songs 

 of the Edda, belong to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 

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

 lectual cultivation of nations, that when the national treasures 

 of the oldest documents belonging to the North of Europe 

 were placed in jeopardy by the unquiet state of their own 

 country, they should have been conveyed to Iceland and there 

 carefully preserved, and thus rescued for posterity. This 

 rescue, the remote consequence of Ingolfs first settlement 

 in Iceland in 875, became, amidst the undefined and 

 misty forms of the Scandinavian world of myths and of 

 figurative cosmogonies, an event of much importance in 

 respect to the fruits of the poetical and imaginative faculties 

 of men: it was only natural knowledge which gained no 

 enlargement. Travellers from Iceland visited the learned 

 institutions of Germany and Italy ; but the discoveries made 

 from Greenland towards the south, and the inconsiderable 

 intercourse maintained with Vinland, the vegetation of 

 which did not present any striking peculiarity of cha- 

 racter, had so little power to divert settlers and mariners 

 from their wholly European interest, that no tidings of these 

 newly settled countries spread among the cultivated nations 

 of Southern Europe. Even in Iceland itself no notice 

 respecting them appears to have reached the ears of the 

 great Genoese navigator. Iceland and Greenland had then 

 been already separated from each other for more than two 

 centuries, as in 1261 Greenland had lost its republican 

 constitution, and as a possession of the crown of Norway 

 bad been formally interdicted from all intercourse with 



