Mímir. Icelandic institutions with adresses - 15.12.1903, Side 81

NOTES ON ICELANDIC MATTERS 71
lingered, at last, the faint echoes of the songs of the heroes
who battled, and battling, chanted, in the twilight of our race.
The sturdy republic which the offspring of kings and vikings
had built up amid the snow of glaciers and the fire of vol-
canoes, continued to be governed by the archaic codes established
by the Moses and Solons of the old Teutonic times. To these
insular Northmen, too, were alone known the stories of the
years when their ships sailed over the northern waters of the
Atlantic to another world in the west — centuries before the keel
of the Italian Columbus ploughed a way through its southern
waters. The empires of the south could see the setting sun
in all its glory, but only Iceland knew of the lands of the
Hesperides beyond, or could guess what that sunset glory
foretold. They felt, too, the burden of the past, and the honours
and duties of long descent, for, in tradition at first, in inscribed
tables afterwards, they could trace backward from son to sire,
from sire to grandsire, and from grandsire to the remotest
progenitor, the story of each household. These genealogies
went backward to a past beyond the Iceland-ward wanderings
°f their people, while the narratives of the wanderings them-
selves had been transmitted with the detail of a diarist. The
families that migrated, in the 5th and 6th centuries, from the
southern borders of the North Sea, to the coast of Kent, like
those that in the 17th century, crossed the broader seas that
separated Old England from New England, took little or no
pains to hand down to posterity the annals of their progress;
but the Icelanders, whenever they chose, could walk again in
the recorded footsteps of their fathers, who, in the 9th and
10th centuries, had left the fjords of Norway and the islands
of Scotland to take possession of the green valleys that open
to the ocean along the shores of their far-northern home. And
as each of those valleys began to make its history, every
incident and accident, every gest and scene, were remembered
and transmitted and described again to the descendants of the