THE KING'S MIRROR 5 



therefore, had its counterpart in the North; only here 

 the writings took the form of prose, while there liter- 

 ature was chiefly in verse. 



These two currents came into contact in the first 

 half of the thirteenth century, when the men and women 

 of the North began to take an interest in the Arthurian 

 romances and other tales that had found their way 

 into Norway. In this new form of Norwegian literature 

 there could not be much originality; still its appearance 

 testifies to a widening of the intellectual horizon. In ad- 

 dition to sagas and romances the period was also pro- 

 ductive of written laws, homilies, legends, Biblical 

 narratives, histories, and various other forms of litera- 

 ture. It is to be noted that virtually everything was 

 written in the idiom of the common people. Latin was 

 used to some extent in the North in the later middle 

 ages, but it never came into such general use there 

 as in other parts of Europe. In the thirteenth century 

 it had almost passed out of use as a literary language. 



In our interest in tales and romances we must not 

 overlook the fact that the thirteenth century also pro- 

 duced an important literature of the didactic type. For 

 centuries the Christian world had studied the encyclo- 

 pedic works of Capella, Cassiodorus, and Isidore, or had 

 read the writings of Bede and his many followers who 

 had composed treatises " on the nature of things," in 

 which they had striven to set in order the known or 

 supposed facts of the physical world. The thirteenth 

 century had an encyclopedist of its own in Vincent of 

 Beauvais, who produced a vast compendium made up 

 of several Specula, which were supposed to contain all 



