ITS HISTORY AND INHABITANTS. 177 



old, having managed to live all his days healthy and happy 

 on £80 a year, the average stipend in the Icelandic church. 

 The sheep yield food and clothing. Their wool is pulled off 

 in spring, carded, spun, woven in handlooms and worn 

 undyed. You make shoes of their skin and spoons of the 

 horns. Every opportunity is seized for the telling of stories 

 and reciting of poems. Only the milk ewes are kept at 

 home in summer, to be milked, the rest of the sheep are 

 gathered in from the mountains in autumn, notice being 

 given at church from the pulpit. These autumn gatherings, 

 with people sitting on the walls of the stone enclosure 

 teUing stories, are quite Homeric. The winter evenings with 

 each member of the family busy at work in the same room, 

 the men shaving the avooI off sheepskins on their knees, 

 making ropes and nets of hair, the women using spindle and 

 distaff", embroidering, etc., afford a still better opportunity for 

 stories and poems. 



There are even wandering minstrels, who gain their 

 livelihood by reciting prose or poetry which they know 

 by heart at various farmhouses till they exhaust their stock. 



To conclude with a few statistics, the annual trade of 

 Iceland is worth close on one million pounds, export and 

 import together. The principal articles of export are 

 salted cod-fish, wool, mutton, eiderdown. A large and 

 increasing part of the trade is with Great Britain. In 

 the fifteenth century all the foreign trade of Iceland 

 was in English hands. Henry VIII. negotiated with 

 Denmark, in 1518 and 1535, for its transfer to England^ 

 and its economic and strategic importance to Great Britain 

 has been set forth as late as 1835 in the Quarterly Review, by 

 Sir George Mackenzie and Sir William Hooker, who held 

 that Iceland ought to be a British possession. It has been 

 declared by experts that the fishing grounds of Iceland are 

 richer than those of Newfoundland, and, though they are 

 much nearer Great Britain, their annual yield is not more 

 than £2,000,000, because they are not worked as they ought 

 to be. 



For close on 400 years Iceland was an aristocratic 

 republic, ruled by the great families of the early settlers, 

 among whom was a Norse queen of Dublin. A fourteen 

 days' open-air Parliament of all Iceland met annually in 

 June at Thingvellir and the Speaker of the Law (log-sogu- 

 man) used to recite from memory the whole of the unwritten, 

 elaborate code of laws of the country to the assembly. In 



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