Denmark was the first of the Scandinavian States to develop a considerable commerce, beginning as did Holland on the footing of the fishery;[661] and on that basis there was a certain renewal of Danish empire. But this again could not hold out against the neighbouring forces; and in the thirteenth century, the herring fishery in the Baltic failing, it had to yield its hold on the mainland cities of Hamburg and Lübeck, which began a new career of commercial power as the nucleus of the great trading federation of the Hansa cities, while Denmark itself was riven by the struggles of six claimants of the throne. The result was a "feudal and sacerdotal oligarchy,"[662] leading to an era of "the complete triumph of the Romish clergy over the temporal power in Denmark," in which the peasantry were reduced to absolute predial slavery.[663] Similar evolution took place in Norway,[664] though with less depression of the peasantry,[665] by reason of the small scope there for capitalistic agriculture; and there too the now nascent commerce was appropriated by the Hansa.[666] In Sweden, where industry remained so primitive that down till the sixteenth century there was hardly any attempt to work up the native iron,[667] Germans greatly predominated in the cities and controlled trade,[668] even before the accession of Albert of Mecklenburg (1363), who further depressed the native nobility in the German interest.[669] On the other hand, the clergy were less plenipotent than in the sister kingdoms, the people having retained more of their old power.
Cp. Schweitzer, Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur, i, 129. The Swedish peasantry, like the Norwegian, were less easy to enslave than the Danish by reason of the natural conditions; those of the remote mountain and mining districts in particular retaining their independence (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 375, 376; Geijer, pp. 50, 81, 89, 97, 103), so that they ultimately enabled Gustavus Vasa to throw off the Danish yoke. Yet they had at first refused to recognise him, being satisfied with their own liberties; and afterwards they gave him much serious trouble (Otté, Scandinavian History, 1874, pp. 228, 235; Geijer, pp. 109, 112, 115, 116, 118, 120-24). Slavery, too, was definitely abolished in Sweden as early as 1335 (Geijer, pp. 57, 86; Crichton and Wheaton, i, 316, 333). As regards the regal power, the once dominant theory that the Swedish kings in the thirteenth century obtained a grant of all the mines, and of the province of the four great lakes (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 332), appears to be an entire delusion (Geijer, pp. 51, 52). Such claims were first enforced by Gustavus Vasa (id. p. 129). As regards the clergy, they appear from the first, quâ churchmen, to have been kept in check by the nobles, who kept the great Church offices largely in the hands of their own order (Geijer, p. 109), though Magnus Ladulas strove to strengthen the Church in his own interest (id. pp. 52-53). Thus the nobles became specially powerful (id. pp. 50, 56, 108); and when in the fifteenth century Sweden was subject to Denmark, they specially resented the sacerdotal tyranny (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 356).
In Sweden, as in the other Scandinavian States, however, physical strife and mental stagnation were the ruling conditions. Down till the sixteenth century her history is pronounced "a wretched detail of civil wars, insurrections, and revolutions, arising principally from the jealousies subsisting between the kings and the people, the one striving to augment their power, the other to maintain their independence."[670] The same may be said of the sister kingdoms, all alike being torn and drained by innumerable strifes of faction and wars with each other. The occasional forcible and dynastic unions of crowns came to nothing; and the Union of Calmar (1397), an attempt to confederate the three kingdoms under one crown, repeatedly collapsed. The marvel is that in such an age even the attempt was made. The remarkable woman who planned and first effected it, Queen Margaret of Norway, appealed in the first instance with heavy bribes for the co-operation of the clergy,[671] who, especially in Sweden, where they preferred the Danish rule to the domination of the nobles,[672] were always in favour of it for ecclesiastical reasons.
Had such a union permanently succeeded, it would have eliminated a serious source of positive political evil; but to carry forward Scandinavian civilisation under the drawbacks of the medieval difficulty of inter-communication (involving lack of necessary culture-contacts), the natural poverty of the soil, and the restrictive pressure of the Catholic Church, would have been a task beyond the power of a monarchy comprising three mutually jealous sections. As it was, the old strifes recurred almost as frequently as before, and moral union was never developed. If historical evidence is to count for anything, the experience of the Scandinavian stocks should suffice to discredit once for all the persistent pretence that the "Teutonic races" have a faculty for union denied to the Celtic, inasmuch as they, apparently the most purely Teutonic of all, were even more irreconcilable, less fusible, than the Anglo-Saxons before the Norman Conquest and the Germans down till our own day, and much more mutually jealous than the quasi-Teutonic provinces of the Netherlands, which, after the severance of Belgium, have latterly lost their extreme repulsions, while those of Scandinavia are not yet dead.[673] The explanation, of course, is not racial in any case; but it is for those who affirm that capacity for union is a Teutonic gift to find a racial excuse.
With the Reformation, though that was nowhere more clearly than in Scandinavia a revolution of plunder, there began a new progress, in respect not of any friendliness of the Lutheran system to thought and culture, but of the sheer break-up of the intellectual ice of the old regimen. In Denmark the process is curiously instructive. Christian II, personally a capable and reformative but cruel tyrant, aimed throughout his life at reducing the power alike of the clergy and the nobles, and to that end sought on the one hand to abolish serfdom and educate the poor and the burghers,[674] and on the other to introduce Lutheranism (1520). From the latter attempt he was induced to desist, doubtless surmising that the remedy might for him be a new disease: but on his enforcing the reform of slavery he was rebelled against and forced to fly by the nobility, who thereupon oppressed the people more than ever.[675] His uncle and successor, Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein, accepted the mandate of the nobles to the extent of causing to be publicly burned in his presence all the laws of the last reign in favour of the peasants, closing the poor schools throughout the kingdom, burning the new books,[676] and pledging himself to expel Lutheranism. He seems, however, to have been secretly a Protestant, and to have evaded his pledge; and the rapid spread of the new heresy, especially in the cities, brought about a new birth of popular literature in the vernacular, despite the suppression of the schools.[677] In a few years' time, Frederick, recognising the obvious interest of the crown, and finding the greater nobles in alliance with the clergy, made common cause with the smaller nobility, and so was able (1527) to force on the prelates, who could hope for no better terms from the exiled king, the toleration of Protestantism, the permission of marriage to the clergy, and a surrender of a moiety of the tithes.[678] A few years later (1530) the monasteries were either stormed by the populace or abandoned by the monks, their houses and lands being divided among the municipalities, the king and his courtiers, and the secular clergy.[679] After a stormy interregnum, in which the Catholic party made a strenuous reaction, the next king, Christian III, taking the nobles and commons-deputies into partnership, made with their help an end of the Catholic system; the remaining lands, castles, and manors of the prelates going to the crown, and the tithes being parcelled among the landowners, the king, and the clergy. Naturally a large part of the lands, as before, was divided among the nobles,[680] who were in this way converted to Protestantism. Thus whereas heathen kings had originally embraced Christianity to enable them to consolidate their power, Christian kings embraced Protestantism to enable them to recover wealth and power from the Catholic Church. Creed all along followed interest;[681] and the people had small concern in the change.[682]
Norway, being under the same crown, followed the course of Denmark. In Sweden the powerful Gustavus Vasa saw himself forced at the outset of his reign to take power and wealth from the Church if he would have any of his own; and after the dramatic scene in the Diet of Westeras (1527), in which he broke out with a passionate vow to renounce the crown if he were not better supported,[683] he carried his point. The nobles, being "squared"[684] by permission to resume such of their ancestral lands as had been given to churches and convents since 1454, and by promise of further grants, forced the bishops to consent to surrender to the king their castles and strongholds, and to let him fix their revenues; all which was duly done. The monasteries were soon despoiled of nearly all their lands, many of which were seized by or granted in fief to the barons;[685] and the king became head of the Church in as full a degree as Henry VIII in England;[686] sagaciously, and in part unscrupulously, creating for the first time in Scandinavia a strong yet not wholly despotic monarchy, with such revenues from many sources[687] as made possible the military power and activity of Gustavus Adolphus, and later the effort of Charles XII to create an "empire"—an effort which, necessarily failing, reduced Sweden permanently to her true economic basis.
Apart from those remarkable episodes, the development of the Scandinavian States since the sixteenth century has been, on their relatively small scale, that of the normal monarchic community with a variously vigorous democratic element; shaken frequently by civil strife; wasting much strength in insensate wars; losing much through bad kings and gaining somewhat from the good; passing painfully from bigotry to tolerance; getting rid of their old aristocracies and developing new; exhibiting in the mass the northern vice of alcoholism, yet maintaining racial vigour; disproportionately taxing their producers as compared with their non-producers; aiming, nevertheless, at industry and commerce, and suffering from the divisive social influences they entail; meddling in international strifes, till latterly the surrounding powers preponderated too heavily; disunited and normally jealous of each other, even when dynastically united, through stress of crude patriotic prejudice and lack of political science; frequently retrograding, yet in the end steadily progressing in such science as well as in general culture and well-being. Losses of territory—as Finland and Schleswig-Holstein—at the hands of stronger rivals, and the violent experiences and transitions of the Napoleonic period, have left them on a relatively stable and safe basis, albeit still mutually jealous and unable to pass beyond the normal monarchic stage. To-day their culture is that of all the higher civilisations, as are their social problems.
§ 4
In the history of Scandinavian culture, however, lie some special illustrations of sociological law. The remarkable fact that the first great development of old Norse literature occurred in the poor and remote colonial settlement of Iceland is significant of much. To the retrospective yearning of an exiled people, the desire to preserve every memory of the old life in the fatherland, is to be attributed the grounding of the saga-cult in Iceland; and the natural conditions, enforcing long spells of winter leisure, greatly furthered the movement. But the finest growth of the new literature, it turns out, is due to culture-contacts—an unexpected confirmation, in a most unlikely quarter, of a general principle arrived at on other data. The vigilant study of our own day has detected, standing out from the early Icelandic literature, "a group of poems which possess the very qualities of high imagination, deep pathos, fresh love of nature, passionate dramatic power, and noble simplicity of language, which [other] Icelandic poetry lacks. The solution is that these poems do not belong to Iceland at all. They are the poetry of the 'Western Islands'"[688]—that is, the poetry of the meeting and mixing of the "Celtic" and Scandinavian stocks in Ireland and the Hebrides—the former already much mixed, and proportionally rich in intellectual variations. It was in this area that "a magnificent school of poetry arose, to which we owe works that for power and beauty can be paralleled in no Teutonic language till centuries after their date.... This school, which is totally distinct from the Icelandic, ran its own course apart and perished before the thirteenth century."[689]
Compare Messrs. Vigfusson and Powell's Corpus Poeticum Boreale, 1883, vol. i, Introd. pp. lxii, lxiii; and, as regards the old Irish civilisation, the author's Saxon and Celt, pp. 127, 128, 131-33.