Greinar (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.01.1943, Page 151

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to sign the oath of allegiance to the Danish king in Kópa-
vogur.
Times were bad during the first part of the century
and continued to be so intermittently throughout. But the
trade monopoly harassed the nation more than anything
else with its ever tightening grip on individual and na-
tion alike. If the balance sheet of the nation at the junc-
ture of the sixteenth and seventeenth and again the seven-
teenth and eightenth centuries, could be worked out, it
would show an enormous economic collapse and lowering
of the national standard of life, although it was to become
still worse later. The picture would be no brighter if the
intellectual life of the nation in the seventeenth century
were submitted to the same test. It is an age of witchcraft
and witch persecutions, an age of terrible punishments
and rudeness of manners, an age of servility and arrogan-
ce. It is a desolate flat, steadily sloping downwards, a flat
where great things are seen only in the distance and small
things are mostly dreary and hideous.
II.
The Reformation has frequently been held responsible
for the change for the worse which occurred in this coun-
try at this time. It is an irrefutable fact that the increas-
ing power of the king, which made its way hither and was
the chief cause of the deterioration, used the Reformation
as its vehicle. It followed in the wake of “the pure faith”,
or rather, came by the same boat.
King Christian
two men-of-war
to Eyjafjordur sent
with religion pure.
These warships, together with the warship which had
brought Hvitfeld a decade before, came to rid Iceland of
the strongest opponents of the royal power, the powerful
Catholic bishops. But the trend of the times and single
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