Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/26

Historia Ecclesiastica venerabilis Bedæ, and Asser's Life of Alfred, embrace the earlier portion of the same period, viz. the latter half of the 8th century, of which the first Sagas of the Heimskringla of Snorro Sturleson treat. The Saxon Chronicle is a dry record of facts and dates, ending about 1155, or about the same period (within twenty years) at which the Heimskringla ends. Matthew Paris begins his history about 1057, and carries it down to about 1250, which is supposed to be about the period of his own death. He was a contemporary of Snorro, who was born in 1178, and murdered in Iceland in 1241. Matthew Paris was no unlettered, obscure monk. He was expressly selected by the Pope, in 1248, for a mission to Norway to settle some disputes among the monks of the order of Saint Benedict, in the monastery of Nidarholm, or Monkholm, in the diocese of Dronthiem; and after accomplishing the object of his mission he returned to his monastery at St. Albans. It is not to be denied that all this connected series of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman history, from the dissolution of the Roman empire in Britain in the middle of the 5th century down to the middle of the 13th century, although composed by such writers of the Anglo-Saxon population as Bede and Matthew Paris, men the most eminent of their times for learning and literary attainments among the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants, is of the most unmitigated dulness, considered as literary or intellectual production; and that all the historical compositions of the old Anglo-Saxon branch during those eight centuries, either in England or in Germany, are, with few if any exceptions, of the same leaden character. They are also, with the exception of the Saxon Chronicle, and of the translation into Anglo-Saxon of Bede by the great King Alfred, all, or almost all, composed in the Latin tongue, not in the native national tongue of the country in which they