The Vikings like the Franks before them threw off their old speech and submitted to the all-embracing power of Latin civilisation, and the result was a race endowed with vigorous personality, untiring activity, and the instinct for ruling men. The Normans may have become largely French but they lost none of their old enterprise and spirit of adventure. In the 11th century they conquered England and founded great kingdoms for themselves in Sicily and South Italy. No Viking stock was more vigorous than that which resulted from the grafting of Gallo-Latin culture on the ruder civilisation of the Teutonic north.

Their influence on France as a whole is not nearly as great as the influence of their kinsmen in England, probably because English government was centralised (under Norman rule) much sooner than French government, and their influence was thus able to make itself felt outside the actual districts in which they settled. The settlement of Normandy helped however towards the consolidation of power in the hands of Charles the Bald and his successors, much as the settlement of the Danelagh helped in establishing the final supremacy of Wessex.

It remains to speak of one great home of Viking civilisation to which more than one reference has been made in previous chapters, viz. Iceland. The story of its settlement is a very simple one. It commenced about 870, when many great Norwegian noblemen sought there for themselves and their followers a freer life than they could obtain under the growing power of Harold Fairhair. It was greatly strengthened by settlers both from Norway and from Ireland and the Western Islands when that power was firmly established by the battle of Hafrsfjord, and by the year 930 the settlement was practically complete. Iceland was more purely Scandinavian than any other settlement made during the Viking age. Here we have not the case of one civilisation grafted on another and earlier one as in England, Ireland or the Frankish empire, but the transference of the best and finest elements in a nation to new and virgin soil where, for good or ill, they were free to develop their civilisation on almost entirely independent lines. Settlers from the Western Islands and from Ireland may have brought Celtic elements, and Christianity was not without influence, when it was introduced from Norway at the close of the 10th century, but on the whole we see in Iceland just what Viking civilisation was capable of when left to itself.

At first the settlers lived in almost complete isolation, political and religious, from one another, but they soon found that some form of organisation was necessary and groups of settlers began by choosing from among their number a goði, or chieftain, half-priest, half-leader, who was the speaker at their moot and their representative in negotiation with neighbouring groups. Then, continued disputes and the lack of a common law led to the establishment of a central moot or alþing, with a speaker to speak one single law for all. But the Norsemen were much better at making constitutions and enacting laws than they were at observing them when instituted, and the condition of Iceland has been vividly if roughly summarised as one of 'all law and no government.' The local þings or the national alþing might enact perfect laws, but there was no compelling force, except public opinion, to make them be obeyed. Even the introduction of Christianity made no difference: the Icelanders quarrelled as bitterly over questions of ecclesiastical as of civil law and the authorities of the medieval Church were scandalised by their anarchic love of freedom. In the words of Professor Ker 'the settlers made a commonwealth of their own, which was in contradiction to all the prejudices of the middle ages and of all ancient and modern political philosophy; a commonwealth which was not a state, which had no government, no sovereignty.' 'It was anarchy without a police-constable.' The result was that the rich men grew richer, the poor became poorer, the smaller gentry died out and the large estates fell into fewer and fewer hands. The great men quarrelled among themselves, intrigued against one another and played into the hands of the Norwegian kings who were only waiting their opportunity. It came in the days of Hákon the Old. 'Land and thanes' were sworn into subjection to that king at the Althing in 1262, and in 1271 the old Icelandic common law was superseded by a new Norse code.

The failure of the Icelandic commonwealth is amply compensated for by the rich intellectual development of Icelandic literature, which owed many of its most characteristic features to the fact that it was written in a land almost completely isolated and detached from the main currents of Western medieval thought and the general trend of European history, but in itself that failure is full of deepest import for a right understanding of the part played by Viking civilisation in Europe. Powerful and highly developed as that civilisation was in many ways, it only reached its highest and best expression when brought into fruitful contact with other and older civilisations. There it found the corrective for certain inherent weaknesses, more especially for certain tendencies of too strongly individualistic character leading to political and intellectual anarchy, while at the same time by its own energy and vigour it quickened the life of the older civilisations where they were tending to become effete or outworn. The Germanic peoples had done much for the development of European civilisation in the time of the wanderings of the nations, but by the end of the 8th century they had lost much of their pristine vigour through contact with the richer and more luxurious civilisation of the Roman world. It was reserved for the North Germanic peoples, or the Northmen as we can more fitly describe them, in the 9th and 10th centuries to give a yet more powerful stimulus to European life, if not to European thought, a stimulus which perhaps found its highest expression in the great creations of the Norman race in the world of politics, the world of commerce, the world of architecture and the world of letters.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

[The appended bibliography does not attempt to deal with primary authorities, with the large mass of valuable periodical literature which has been published within the last thirty years, or with books only incidentally concerned with the movement. It is much to be regretted that so few of the important Scandinavian books on the subject have been translated into English.]

Björkman, E. Scandinavian Loan-words in Middle English. Halle. 1906.

Bugge, A. Vikingerne. 2 series. Christiania. 1904-6. (German trans. of 1st series. Leipzig. 1896.)

—— Vesterlandenes Inflydelse paa Nordboernes i Vikingetiden. Christiania. 1905.

—— Norges Historie. Vol. I, Pt. II. Christiania. 1910.

Collingwood, W. G. Scandinavian Britain. London. 1908.

Craigie, W. A. The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia. London. 1906.

Dietrichson, L. and Meyer, S. Monumenta Orcadica. Christiania. 1906. (Abridged English edition.)

Du Chaillu, P. B. The Viking Age. 2 vols. London. 1889.

Gustafson, G. Norges Oldtid. Christiania. 1906.

Henderson, G. The Norse Influence on Celtic Scotland. Glasgow. 1910.

Keary, C. F. The Vikings in Western Christendom. London. 1891.

Kermode, P. M. C. Manx Crosses. London. 1907.

Maurer, K. Die Bekehrung des Norwegischen Stammes. 2 vols. Munich. 1855-9.

Montelius, O. Sveriges Historia. Vol. I. Stockholm. 1903. (German tr. Kulturgeschichte Schwedens. Leipzig. 1906.)

Müller, S. Vor Oldtid. Copenhagen. 1897. (German tr. Nordische Altertümskunde. 2 vols. Strasburg. 1897-8.)

Olrik, A. Nordisk Aaandsliv i Vikingetid. Copenhagen. 1907. (German tr. Nordisches Geistesleben. Heidelberg. 1908.)

Steenstrup, J. C. H. R. Normannerne. 4 vols. Copenhagen. 1876-82.

—— Danmarks Riges Historie. Vol. I. Copenhagen. 1876-82.

Thomsen, V. The Relations between Ancient Russia and Scandinavia. Oxford. 1877.

Vogel, W. Die Normannen und das Fränkische Reich. Heidelberg. 1906.

Vogt, L. J. Dublin som Norsk By. Christiania. 1906.