presence of the king. For instance, if the king is sitting at table when you are admitted, you must stand at the proper distance and leave room for the waiters. You should hold your left wrist in your right hand, and be careful to listen to what the king says. If it happens that you don't catch his words exactly, you must not say 'Ha!' or 'What!' but 'Sir!' or, if you wish to put it more fully: 'Let it not be displeasing, Sir, if I ask what you spoke to me, for I understood not clearly'.
The difference between the Icelandic biography and the more abstract Norwegian works is, in a way, characteristic of the two countries, though we need not make too much of it.
Sturla's Life of Hacon will bear comparison with other historians of the time—with Matthew Paris, for example, who was a friend of King Hacon. It has been blamed as too courtly, but other witnesses (Matthew Paris among them) take a similar view of the king; Hacon's energy and success can be proved independently of the Icelandic historian. Naturally, the book is not as lively as the family memoirs of Sturla; he had not lived through it in the same way. But he had plenty of information from old Birkibein traditions, and he was a practised sifter of evidence. There is not the same room for comedy as in the Icelandic books, but there are 'humours and observations'—e. g. in the account of the coronation ceremony and the emotion of the Scottish knight, Mitchell, who was so overcome by the splendour that he sobbed aloud—or, again, in the notes of Cardinal William's journey in 1247, and his uncertainty whether there would be anything in Norway fit for a gentleman to drink. It is pleasant to compare this with Matthew Paris on the same subject. He had made a special study of Papal legates and their ways, and describes
