choked the old German-the danger of conformity to a droning school tradition.

The whole of Icelandic history is miraculous. A number of barbarian gentlemen leave Norway because the government there is becoming civilised and interfering; they settle in Iceland because they want to keep what they can of the unreformed past, the old freedom. It looks like anarchy. But immediately they begin to frame a Social Contract and to make laws in the most intelligent manner: a colonial agent is sent back to the Mother Country to study law and present a report. They might have sunk into mere hard work and ignorance, contending with the difficulties of their new country; they might have become boors, without a history, without a ballad. In fact, the Iceland settlers took with them the intellect of Norway; they wrote the history of the kings and the adventures of the gods. The settlement of Iceland looks like a furious plunge of angry and intemperate chiefs, away from order into a grim and reckless land of Cockayne. The truth is that those rebels and their commonwealth were more selfpossessed, more clearly conscious of their own aims, more critical of their own achievements, than any polity on earth since the fall of Athens. Iceland, though the country is large, has always been like a city state in many of its ways; the small population, though widely scattered, was not broken up, and the four quarters of Iceland took as much interest in one another's gossip as the quarters of Florence. In the Sagas, where nothing is of much

importance except individual men, and where all the chief men are known to one another, a journey from Borg to Eyjafirth is no more than going past a few houses. The distant corners of the island are near one another. There is no sense of those impersonal forces, those nameless multitudes, that make history a different thing from biography in other lands. All history in Iceland shaped itself as biography, or as drama, and there was no large crowd at the back of the stage.

Ari the Wise.

Historical writing in Iceland began without any tentative preliminary work; Ari, the first historian (1067-1148), is sure in his methods and positive in his results. He wrote a book about the settlement of Iceland, the foundation of the extant Landnámabók, which describes the first colonists, their families, and their holdings, proceeding regularly round the whole island, and including all the important facts that were kept in remembrance from the beginning of the Commonwealth. He wrote also the lives of the Kings of Norway, now lost, except in so far as they were worked into the ampler history of Snorri Sturluson and others. He wrote also a 66 book of Iceland," Islendingabók, extant only in his shorter revised version, commonly cited as Libellus, a sketch of the constitution.1 Ari's historical research of course made great

1 The Landnámabók has been lately edited in full (all extant versions) by Dr Finnur Jónsson. Libellus has been frequently printed along with Landnámabók: there is a separate edition by Möbius, 1869. The Origines Islandia, Dr Gudbrand Vigfusson's edition of the early historical books, is to be published by the Clarendon Press.

use of family traditions, but he did not attempt to work these out in the full imaginative form of the Sagas. He was a precise and careful historian, who criticised evidence. The Sagas are traditional stories, not limited in the same way; full of life, full of drama and dialogue. Yet these imaginative stories are not only founded on reality but came by their literary form through the example of Ari. The careful and exact historian set the fashion of prose, which was taken up and extended after his day by men with other motives. The imaginative force of Njal and Gisli comes from the same historical interest as led to the Landnámabók; the dry light of Ari's critical judgment went before the richer glow of the Sagas.

Old High German prose has no historical writer like Alfred or Ari, not even so much romance as the High German Anglo-Saxon version of Apollonius. Notker prose-Notker. the German (+1022) is a translator and expositor of books for the schools. One would not expect much literary genius at this time from renderings of Boethius or Martianus Capella in a language where prose was scarcely known. Yet Notker's style is enough to place him among the masters. German critics have compared him with the best in the language, old or new, and have found reasons for their opinion.1

Notker is the culmination of the long studies of St Gall: the nephew of the elder Ekkehard (the poet) and contemporary of the younger (the historian), he inherited the learning and the good sense

1 Koegel, Gesch. der deutschen Litteratur, i. 2, p. 618.

which were traditional in the house. Philology was not divorced from Wit in anything that St Gall produced; and the nuptials of Mercury, the favourite scholastic allegory, were finely illustrated in the work of the translator Notker. In a Latin letter he speaks of various projects of translation, including the Bucolics of Virgil and the Andria; Ekkehard in the account of his death says that he had just finished Job; the extant books are Boethius, the Consolation; Martianus Capella, i. and ii.; the Psalter; and two of the treatises of the Organon.

Prose had been used before in versions from the Latin, but the German Tatian1 has no merit except its "hideous fidelity." Notker broke away, like Alfred and Elfric, from the interlinear method which was good enough for Ulfilas and Wycliffe. He represents the humanities -not the mere pedagogic business, but the sensitive appreciation and transfusion of meaning from one language to another. The German tongue for him was a creature with gifts of its own, and his title of honour is that he thought so much of his native language and spent so much in training it to the service of new ideas. Ælfric had a like respect for idiom, and the Irish scholars no less; but few have attempted, with so little precedent before them, such tasks as Notker. In his invention of a philosophical German language in the tenth century he may have given his pupils more than they wanted. That does not detract from his scholarship or his style. In the lively, idiomatic, imaginative use

1 Ed. Sievers, 1872.

of philosophic terms he is the ancestor, though unacknowledged, of Meister Eckhart and Hegel.1

1 A specimen of his style, where he is going beyond his text and reading mythology in his own way :

Attis pulcher item. "Dû bist ter scôno blûomo. der iu chint uuas. tén berezinthia minnôt. taz chît terra. uuánde si ist in uuintere betân. unde lángêt sia des lénzen. sô blûomen sínt." "Thou art the fair flower that was once the child whom Berecyntia loves that is to say Terra whenas she is oppressed in winter, and she longeth for the Lenten when the flowers are."

Notker died on St Peter's Eve, 1022, of the plague brought back from Italy by the army of Henry II. Ekkehard gives the story of his death in the Liber Benedictionum. He confessed his sins; the worst of them was that one day while wearing the habit of the order he had killed a wolf. One of the brothers standing by, a simple-minded man, cried out in his grief, "I would not care though you had killed all the wolves in the world!" Notker called for the doors to be opened, that the poor might be brought in and fed. He would not be undressed for burial: he kept the chain on his loins that he always wore.