290 A^oriuay and the ATorwegians 



fell because they knew that the business of leaders is 

 to lead ; because they were ready to say, like King- 

 Magnus, 'noblemen were meant for honour but not 

 for long life.' The result is that the house of Sverri 

 steps ujDon the scene much as the house of Tudor does 

 in English history, founding an almost autocratic 

 power through a well-ordered bureaucracy on the ruins 

 of the aristocracy and of the Church. Sars, a living 

 Norwegian historian, compares Hakon Hakonsson to 

 Louis XIV. of France. This reign was a period of 

 restoration for Norway. Hakon used his triumph 

 with the greatest moderation, and the passions of fac- 

 tion, fanned by a century of civil war, did at last die 

 down. It is not an eventful reign ; rather one of 

 those long periods of rest when a nation is happy in 

 having no history. 



Outside the sphere of home politics Hakon accom- 

 plished one thing of importance, and made a conspicuous 

 failure in another, which as a failure was of even more 

 significance and importance. 



During these years of civil war in Norway, Iceland 

 had imitated the mother state by embarking upon a 

 period of civil war at home. This is not the place to 

 speak of those internecine quarrels by which the old 

 aristocracy of landowners in the Icelandic Eepublic 

 brought about its own ruin. To a very large extent 

 the rivalries in Iceland followed the rivalries of parties 

 in Norway. The history is interesting enough, and it is 

 interestingly told. It is bound up closely with the 

 literary history of Iceland and Norway, for the family 

 which was most largelv concerned in these feuds was 

 that of the famous Sturlungs, whose most illustrious 



