of the king, Sturla does not neglect the more showy part of his government—as in the coronation that so impressed the Scottish knight. The correspondence with the Emperor Frederick and King Lewis of France, with King James of Aragon, the Conqueror, and King Alfonso of Castile, the Wise, not to speak of the Sultan of Tunis—all this takes one far from the dales of Iceland. The King of Norway belonged to the great world, and to the new fashions. There was some vanity in his ambition;—in his Icelandic policy, in his annexation of all Greenland, 'North to the loadstar', and in his last enterprise, the voyage to Scotland. But we may still believe that Sturla was right in his view of the king, as a hard-working man and a successful peace-maker.
Far beyond all the separate notable things in the book is the conduct of that story which Ibsen has taken for his drama Kongsemnerne. It is in the relation of Hacon to his father-in-law Duke Skuli that the two different principles—the monarchy and the oligarchy—are dramatized; and Sturla fully understands this, the tragic opposition of two sorts of good intentions; with the pathos, also, brought out in one memorable chapter, of the queen Margaret in her choice between her father, Skuli, and her husband the king. But it is impossible to say more of this here, except that the grace and dignity of it, in Sturla's history, the honours paid to the beaten side, make us understand the character of Sturla himself better than anything else in his writings. He is described by the anonymous first editor of Sturlunga (about the year 1300, probably) as 'a man to our knowledge most wise and fair-minded'. His writings are proof that this friendly opinion is to be trusted; and with that we may leave him.
