07 
met by their entire clan, into which the new wife was formally 
received, and she became at once the partner of her husband’s 
honours, and manager of the household affairs. It is interesting 
in the light of recent efforts in legislation to know that the per- 
sonal property of a Scandinavian woman was out of her hus- 
band’s reach, unless special provision to the contrary had been 
made at the time of the marriage. For the rest, the man’s 
power over his wife was almost unbounded ; but against its 
misuse, she could always oppose her right to demand a divorce. 
This menace appears, however, to have been of little avail in the 
more barbarous settlements. Practically, the husband could 
chastise, sell, and even, if she were untrue to him or sought his 
life, kill his partner. The Njdlsaya bears evidence that even 
very noble women took blows from their husbands without 
reproach. The man’s right to sell his wife demands explana- 
tion ; we have already said that he was understood to buy her, 
and it is to be hoped that the one custom was practised as little 
as the other. In passing, it is vastly amusing to note that 
Professor Petersen, with true continental complacency, points 
out the “ still prevailing ” parallel custom in England of men 
selling their wives at a market ! 
18. In spite, however, of all excesses that local barbarity may 
have fallen into, without question the position of a Scandinavian 
woman was more honourable than that of any of her sex in 
other parts of Europe in that age. She was in no wise a slave 
or a dependent : on the contrary, the history and the poetry of 
the North abound with examples of heroic women whose gravity 
and grace made their households admirable, while their judg- 
ment and sense rendered them the constant counsellors and 
companions of their husbands. Domestic love, of the sober, 
steady, reticent kind, that we are apt to think rather a modern 
growth of the races kindred to ourselves, evidently was an 
everyday matter among the early Norsemen, a quality that only 
needed the illumination of pure religion to make it the shining 
and beautiful thing it has now been for centuries. The Ice- 
landic laws concerning separation and divorce were very elabo- 
rate and strangely consistent with the general views of modern 
thought on the same question. If the wife, accused of a crime 
deserving divorce, chose to defend her innocence, it was usual 
to appeal to one of those physical tests so constant in the early 
history of nations, such as running barefoot over burning coals, 
or plunging the naked arm into boiling water. These pic- 
turesque features are preserved in several of the oldest Sagas, 
as in the Gudrunarkvida in the Edda, where Gudrun answers 
VOL. IX. * II 
