Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/122

cases a hundred miles or more; yet so narrow that the stones, it is said, rolling down from the mountain slope on one side of such a fiord, are often projected from the steep overhanging precipice, in which the slope half-way down ends, across to the opposite shore. These fiords in general, however, are fine expanses or inland lakes of the ocean,—calm, deep, pure blue; and shut in on every side by black precipices and green forests, and with fair wooded islets sleeping on the bosom of the water. These fiords are the peculiar and characteristic feature of Norwegian scenery. Rivers of great volume of water, but generally of short and rapid course, pour into the fiords from the Fielde, or high table-land behind, which forms the body or mass of the country. It is on the flat spots of arable land on the borders of these fiords, rivers, and the lakes into which the rivers expand, that the population lives. In some of these river-valleys and sea-valleys, a single farm of a few acres of land is only found here and there in many miles of country, the bare rock dipping at once into the blue deep water, and leaving no margin for cultivation. In others, narrow slips of inhabitable arable land extend some way, but are hemmed in behind, on the land side, by the rocky ridges which form the valley; and they are seldom broad enough to admit of two rows of little farms, or even of two large fields, in the breadth between the hill-foot and the water; and in the length are often interrupted by some bare prong of rock jutting from the side-ridge into the slip of arable level land, and dividing it from such another slip. All the land capable of cultivation, either with spade or plough, has been cultivated from the most remote times; and there is little room for improvement, because it is the ground-rock destitute of soil, not merely trees or loose rocks encumbering the soil, that opposes human industry. The little estates, not averaging