4 THE KING'S MIRROR 



Birger, the most eminent statesman of medieval Sweden, 

 Swedish power was steadily extended into Finnish ter- 

 ritory, and the foundations of Sweden as a great Euro- 

 pean power was being laid. 



During the days of Valdemar and the great Birger 

 Norway also reached its greatest territorial extent. After 

 a century of factional warfare, the nation settled down 

 to comparative peace. All the Norwegian colonies except 

 those in Ireland, were definitely made subject to the 

 Norwegian crown : these were the Isle of Man, the Heb- 

 rides, the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Faroes, Iceland, 

 and Greenland. In every field of national life there was 

 vigor and enterprise. And on the throne sat a strong, 

 wise, and learned monarch, Hakon IV, the ruler with 

 the " great king-thought." 



The real greatness of the thirteenth century in the 

 North lies, however, in the literary achievements of the 

 age. It is not known when the Old Norse poets first be- 

 gan to exercise their craft, but the earliest poems that 

 have come down to us date from the ninth century. For 

 two hundred years the literary production was in the 

 form of alliterative verse; but after 1050 there came a 

 time when scaldic poetry did not seem to thrive. This 

 does not mean that the interest in literature died out; 

 it merely took a new form: the age of poetry was fol- 

 lowed by an age of prose. With the Christian faith came 

 the Latin alphabet and writing materials, and there was 

 no longer any need to memorize verse. The new form 

 was the saga, which began to appear in the twelfth 

 century and received many notable additions in the 

 thirteenth. The literary movement on the continent, 



