barks traversed the eastern Mediterranean[1] long before Norman Roger and Norman Robert conquered Sicily and southern Italy. Such reach of conquest shows them to have been moved by no passion for adventure. Their fierce valour was part of their great capacity for the strategy of war. As pirates, as invaders, as settlers, they dared and fought and fended for a purpose—to get what they wanted, and to hold it fast. When they had mastered the foe and conquered his land, they settled down, in England and Normandy and Sicily.
Such genius for fighting was in accord with shrewdness and industry in peace. The Vikings laboured, whether in Norway or in Iceland. In the Edda the freeman learns to break oxen, till the ground, timber houses, build barns, make carts and ploughs.[2] So a tenth-century Viking king may be found in the field directing the cutting and stacking of his corn and the gathering of it into barns. They were also traders and even money-lenders. The Icelanders, whom we know so intimately from the Sagas, went regularly upon voyages of trade or piracy before settling down to farm and wife. Sharp of speech, efficient in affairs, and often adepts in the law, they eagerly took part in the meetings of the Althing and its settlement of suits. If such settlement was rejected, private war or the holmgang (an appointed single combat on a small island) was the regular recourse. But it was murder to kill in the night or without previous notice. Nothing should be said behind an enemy's back that the speaker would not make good; and every man must keep his plighted word.
Much of the Norse wisdom consists in a shrewd wariness. Contempt for the chattering fool runs through the Edda.[3]
- ↑ It is said that some twenty-five thousand Arabian coins, mostly of the Viking periods, have been found in Sweden.
- ↑ See Vigfusson and Powell, Corpus poeticum Boreale, i. 238.
- ↑ There is much controversy as to the date (the Viking Age?) and place of origin (Norway, the Western Isles, or Iceland?) of the older Eddic poems; also as to the presence of Christian elements. The last are denied by Müllenhoff (Deutsche Altertumskunde, Bd. v., 1891) and others; while Bugge finds them throughout the whole Viking mythology (Home of the Eddic Poems. London, D. Nutt, 1899), and Chr. Bang has endeavoured to prove that the Voluspa, the chief Eddic mythological poem, was an imitation of the Christian Sibyl's oracles (Christiania Videnskabsselskabs Forhanlinger, 1879, No. 9; Müllenhoff, o.c. Bd. v. p. 3 sqq.). Similar views are held in Vigfusson and Powell's Corpus poeticum Boreale (i.
