Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/21

ish-Norwegian tongue, in such a manner that it is not, in reality, to be regarded as a separate speech; the facts are more adequately expressed when we say that the Danish-Norwegian on the one hand and the Swedish on the other are two important dialects of the same language. A thorough investigation shows that there is less difference between Danish-Norwegian and Swedish, as we find these tongues in literature, than between the different dialects of each of the three languages. Educated Danes and Swedes, for instance, mutually understand each other more easily than they do one of their own countrymen in the narrower sense of the word, who speaks a popular dialect of the same language, and the difficulties that a Dane has to overcome in order to be able to appropriate the treasures of Swedish literature, or the obstacles that stand in the way of the Swede in reference to Danish books, are very slight indeed. With the language spoken in Iceland the case is a very different one. In this distant island the tongue in which the most ancient literary products of the national spirit of the North are preserved, and in which the most vigorous and remarkable literary activity was continued far down into the middle ages, has been preserved almost wholly unchanged, while so decided linguistic changes have been wrought in the other northern lands that the Old Norse and modern Icelandic literature can be read only by those persons on the Scandinavian mainland who have made a special study of the Icelandic language,—a study which not only leads to a keen appreciation of the original kinship, but also enables us to realize more thoroughly the essential unity of the tongues spoken at present in Denmark, Sweden and Norway.