GENERAL INTRODUCTION
ble northwest corner of Europe, they have rendered the world some services the memory of which will not willingly be allowed to perish. In Iceland they have preserved and still speak one of the oldest of the Teutonic languages, a monument of the Viking age, which still furnishes the means of illustrating many of the social features of those remote times, and is held in deserved veneration by all the great philologists of our day. In the Icelandic tongue we have a group of sagas, a literature which in many respects is unique, and which sheds a flood of light upon the customs and manners of the dark centuries of the middle age. The Icelandic sagas tell us not only of what happened in Scandinavia, but they also describe conditions and events in England, France, Russia and elsewhere. We are indebted to the Scandinavians for the Eddas, for Saxo Grammaticus and for various other sources of information in regard to the grand and beautiful mythology of our ancestors. Our knowledge of the old Teutonic religion would have been very scanty indeed, had not the faithful old Norsemen given us a record of it on parchment. The grand mythological system conceived and developed by the poetic and imaginative childhood of the Scandinavians commands the attention of the scholars of all lands, and as we enter the solemn halls and palaces of the old Norse gods and goddesses, where all is cordiality and purity, we find there perfectly reflected the wild and tumultuous conflict of the robust northern climate and scenery, strong, rustic pictures, full of earnest and deep thought, awe-inspiring and wonderful. We find in the Eddas of Iceland that simple and martial religion which inspired the early Scandinavtans and developed them like a tree full of vigor extending long branches over all Europe. We find that simple and martial religion, which gave the Scandinavians that restless, unconquerable spirit, apt to take fire at the very mention of subjection or restraint, that religion by which instruments were forged to break the fetters forged by the Roman Cæsars, to destroy tyrants and slaves, and to teach the world that nature, having made all men and women free and equal, no other reason but their mutual happiness could be assigned for their government. We will find that
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