chief man of their country-side, then by an assembly of the whole island and the introduction of law. The paradoxes of the Icelandic constitution have been explained by Mr. Bryce in one of his lectures; they might be summed up very roughly, as 'all law and no government.' Apud illos num est rex nisi tantum lex.[1] Their very careful law took them a long way from pure anarchy; but there never was any political power to enforce the law. The local courts and the national assembly determined what was right, but there was no compulsion in the country, except public opinion and private revenge.
This commonwealth, founded in the days of Harald Fairhair and of Alfred the Great, is a kind of embodiment of the Germania of Tacitus, with the Germanic essence, so to speak, still further refined; the independence, the spirit of honour, the positive, worldly, unmystical character, which seems to be capable of all heroism, except that of the visionary martyr.
When the Cardinal William came to Norway in the reign of King Hacon and got to know about the Icelanders, he was scandalized at their freedom, and sent a message to them to ask why they could not come in and be governed by a king, like the rest of the world. It is true enough that their ideas and ways were not those of the thirteenth century, and that they have the example of all Christendom against them.
Nevertheless, the Icelandic State in its pride, its seclusion, its opposition to the common way of the world, is a creation as miraculous as the contemporary achievements of the Northern race at the other end of the scale—I mean the political work of the Normans in the new-fashioned kingdom of England.
- ↑ Quoted by Maurer, Island, from a gloss in Adam of Bremen.
