End of the Heroic Age 253 



heathen model, and could not well adapt itself to a 

 change of faith. As one or two in the great group 

 of Catholic states of mediccval Europe, governed 

 by the beliefs, imitating more or less the social life 

 and the policy of these Catholic states, the Scandi- 

 navian countries fall into the background. Their 

 history no longer claims much of our attention. In 

 one of the great-grandsons of Harald Hardradi we see 

 Harald's love of adventure surviving; but now it finds 

 its outlet by the king joining the crusades, and being 

 known to his contemporaries and to all Norse history 

 as Sigurd Jorsalfari, the farer to Jerusalem — Sigurd 

 the Crusader. 



Not, indeed, that the Scandinavian peoples — albeit 

 they had now utterly forgotten their Odin worship — 

 showed any unnatural alacrity to follow the precepts 

 of the Gospel of Peace. Their wars continued to go on : 

 but they became of a more petty character from year 

 to year. Once we were able to look upon the whole 

 mass of the Scandinavian nations as forming, in a 

 certain sense, one people, and although they were con- 

 tinually at war with one another, there was at the same 

 time a sort of unity in their life which kept them 

 together, and which kept them distinct from all the 

 nations of Christian Europe. We saw a group of war- 

 like peoples stretching from the middle of Eussia up to 

 Iceland, and to the most western of the British Islands. 

 Until the death of Harald Hardradi there seems to be 

 very little change in the character of what we have 

 called the ' Greater Scandinavia.' Such change as 

 there was meant but an extension of the Scandinavian 

 influence in Europe. Our own country lay nearest to 



