Gradually the ideas which were agitating Europe spread through Scandinavia into Iceland, and its claims were more respectfully listened to. The continental system, Modern times. which, by its leading to the blockade of Denmark, threatened to starve Iceland, was neutralized by special action of the British government. Trade and fishery grew a little brisker, and at length the turn came.
The rationalistic movement, headed by Magnus Stephenson, a patriotic, narrow-minded lawyer, did little good as far as church reform went, but was accompanied by a more successful effort to educate the people. A Useful Knowledge Society was formed and did some honest work. Newspapers and periodicals were published, and the very stir which the ecclesiastical disputes encouraged did good. When free trade came, and when the free constitution of Denmark had produced its legitimate effects, the endeavours of a few patriots such as Jon Sigurdsson were able to push on the next generation a step further. Questions of a modern political complexion arose; the cattle export controversy and the great home rule struggle began. After thirty years’ agitation home rule was conceded in 1874 (see above, Government).
(F. Y. P.)
Ancient Literature
Poetry.—Iceland has always borne a high renown for song, but has never produced a poet of the highest order, the qualities which in other lands were most sought for and admired in poetry being in Iceland lavished on the saga, a prose epic, while Icelandic poetry is to be rated very high for the one quality which its authors have ever aimed at—melody of sound. To these generalizations there are few exceptions, though Icelandic literature includes a group of poems which possess qualities of high imagination, deep pathos, fresh love of nature, passionate dramatic power, and noble simplicity of language which Icelandic poetry lacks. The solution is that these poems do not belong to Iceland at all. They are the poetry of the “Western Islands.”
It was among the Scandinavian colonists of the British coasts that in the first generations after the colonization of Iceland therefrom 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. To this school, which is totally distinct from the Icelandic, ran its own course apart and perished before the 13th century, the following works belong (of their authors we have scarcely a name or two; their dates can be rarely exactly fixed, but they lie between the beginning of the 9th and the end of the 10th centuries), classified into groups:—
(a) The Helgi trilogy (last third lost save a few verses, but preserved in prose in Hromund Gripsson’s Saga), the Raising of Anganty and Death of Hialmar (in Hervarar Saga), the fragments of a Volsung Lay (Volsungakiraða) (part interpolated in earlier poems, part underlying the prose in Volsunga Saga), all by one poet, to whom Dr Vigfusson would also ascribe Völuspá, Vegtamskviða, Þrymskviða, Grötta Song and Völundarkviða.
(b) The Dramatic Poems:—Flyting of Loki, the För Skirnis, the Harbarðslioð and several fragments, all one man’s work, to whose school belong, probably, the Lay underlying the story of Ivar’s death in Skioldunga Saga.
(c) The Didactic Poetry:—Grímnismál, Vafpruðnismál, Alvíssmal, &c.
(d) The Genealogical and Mythological Poems:—Hyndluljoð written for one of the Haurda-Kari family, so famous in the Orkneys; Ynglingatal and Haustlong, by Thiodolf of Hvin; Rig’s Thul, &c.