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cowardly subterfuge of every kind was rigidly forbidden. 
Again, the Edda several times asserts that a refusal to give 
indemnity for the slain, or to pay the blood-fine, was an act 
of meanness that brought down the ire of Odin on the delin- 
quents. 
13. But the young warriors rarely were whiling to remain at 
home to amuse themselves with merely local broils. Every 
year the fjords of Iceland and Norway sent forth some young 
Ulysses, bound for more perilous voyages than the Greek sailor 
dreamed of, and destined to scarcely less picturesque adventures. 
The passion of going a-viking, of being a vikingr, was inherent 
in the Scandinavian race. The Swedish writer, Professor 
Geijer, in his well-known poem Vikingen , gives a wonderfully 
dramatic study of this passion of the sea-rover. To a young 
Northman it became impossible to remain at home ; he would 
wander along the shore, sick at heart with longing, till at last 
a chance came of sailing out into the wild open sea, and finding 
new lands and new men to rule and conquer. This universal 
custom of sea-roving was, doubtless, the cause of the extraordi- 
nary precocity of culture that surprises one so much in the 
history of Norway. The young vikingar penetrated through 
the Mediterranean to the Black Sea itself ; harried the coasts 
of France and Britain, and carried home again not only wealth 
and experience, but some echo, at least, of the faded civilization 
of classic times. Not intimately enough connected with the 
inhabitants of Southern Europe to be deeply influenced by 
them, still less to be warped by the blindness and littleness of 
the forms of culture prevalent in the early Middle Ages, the 
vigorous and observant young Northmen would rather be ex- 
cited into the expression of their own individuality, and into 
the formation of a moral and ethical code intimately expressive 
of their own pure though violent modes of life. The art of 
poetry flourished in Iceland when it was dumb elsewhere in 
Europe, and the luxurious products of the South, introduced by 
the vikingar, gradually led to the adoption of such a highly- 
cultivated life among the pagan Norsemen, that it was possible 
for Iceland to produce during the darkest midnight of the 
Middle Ages a brilliant school of poets, historians, and critics. 
The revival of learning and literature in Europe was almost 
cotemporaneous with the final decadence of those arts in Ice- 
land. The death of Snorre Sturlesen preceded the birth of 
Dante by about twenty years, and iu Snorre the literature of 
Iceland found its most splendid and almost its last exponent. 
The life of this truly wonderful writer, with all its magnificence, 
