Mímir. Icelandic institutions with adresses - 15.12.1903, Blaðsíða 82

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NOTES ON ICELANDIC MATTERS
settlers unto the latest generation. But all this was not true
of the homeland merely. Icelandic bards and story-tellers,
champions and ramblers, brought back from foreign courts
and camps accounts of the life of the outer world — the doings
of kings and warriors, of courtiers and prelates, of soldiers and
peasants — and told them afresh to their children and their
children’s children. Then it also happened, in the course of
time, as was natural, that Iceland not only kept the old tongue,
but learned to wield the new pen as well — the new pen that
Christianity brought with it into the north. In the houses of
her chiefs, in the cabins of her yeomen, in the cloisters of
her priests, hundreds of scribes, through many lifetimes, wrote
down the sound and the sense of the words that were vanishing,
and the tales of the deeds that were 'fading. But for their zeal
— writing mostly under the cold skies and during the brief sun-
shine of winter — the most powerful peoples of the present
world would long ago have lost, past recall, the knowledge
of what their far-away forefathers thought and wrought; of how
they lived and laboured; of whom they prayed to, and of what
they fought for. Thus in the northern isle each great man’s
house, in the lapse of years — for there were seekers of rarities
in those days, too — became a library rich in lettered wealth
elsewhere unattainable — in the varied learning of the North-
Teutonic bard and pilgrim and chronicler and rhymer and
romancer. There could be read such legends of Germanic
heroes as were not to be found in other Germanic lands; such
narratives of the Scandinavian kings as no other Scandinavian
region possessed; such lives of English saints and Scottish
island-jarls as Britain knew not of. But in the end the lore-
loving little land was fated to lose much of this well-earned
wealth and glory. The manuscripts on vellum and paper —
so many that the number of them still extant seems incredible
— were carried away — as Rome despoiled Greece of her marbles,
as Napoleon despoiled Italy of her canvasses — to enrich and