r every part of the West, and penetrated into hitherto unexplored
seas, collecting in every quarter the facts and fancies of the age. In
the character of wandering Normans they exerted a strong influence in
shaping poetry, and in developing the Crusades. They brought back with
them to their Northern homes the Christian and chivalrous poems of the
South. In many of these the likeness to the Icelanders own Northern
Sagas was remarkable, suggesting some still more remote age when one
heroic conception must have dominated all peoples.

After bringing home these poems of Southern Europe, the Scandinavians
proceeded to adapt them to their own use, giving them a new force and
beauty. The marvellous in Southern poetry became with them something
fraught with deeper meaning; and the Northern version of the
Nibelungen-lied acquired an ascendency in its strength and poetical
beauty, over the German heroic. Hence, during the Middle Ages, the
Scandinavians in general, and Icelanders in particular, came to possess
a peculiar chivalrous poetry of their own. It was, however, destined to
share the same fate as the great poems of the rest of Europe; first to
be reduced to prose romance, and then broken up into ballads. The chief
cause of this breaking up of the old order of poetry was due to the
Reformation. The national poetry was left to be carried on by the
common people alone, and of course in their hands was corrupted and
mutilated. Scott speaks of this in his Lay of the Last Minstrel, where
he describes the old bard, who

"'Tuned to please a peasant's ear
The harp a King had loved to hear."

These Bards, or Scalds, meaning Smoothers of Language, were welcome
guests in the early ages, at the Courts of Kings and Princes. Up to the
twelfth century, when the Monks and the art of writing, put an end to
their profession, these poets continued to come from Iceland and travel
all over the world. In return for their songs they received rings and
jewels of more or less value; but never money. We have a list of 230
Scalds who made a name for themselves from the time of Dagnar Lodbrok
to that of Vladimir II, or from the end of the eighth to the beginning
of the thirteenth century. When Christianity entered Scandinavia the
spirit of the old tradition still remained with the people, and became
their literature under the name of "Folk Sagas," or as we would call
them, fairy tales. These legends are found not only in modern
Scandinavia, but