restored. The condition of society is peculiar absence of
towns, social equality, no abject poverty or great wealth, rarity
of crime, making it easy for the whole country to be administered
as a co-operative commonwealth without the great and striking
changes rendered necessary by more complicated systems.

Iceland. has always borne a high name for learning and
literature; on both sides of their descent people inherited
special poetic power. Some of older Eddaic fragments attest the
great reach and deep overpowering strength of imagination
possessed by their Norse ancestors; and they themselves had been
quickened by a new leaven. During the first generations of the
"land-taking" a great school of poetry which had arisen among the
Norsemen of the Western Isles was brought by them to Iceland.
(11) The poems then produced are quite beyond parallel with
those of any Teutonic language for centuries after their date,
which lay between the beginning of the ninth and the end of the
tenth centuries. Through the Greenland colony also came two, or
perhaps more, great poems of this western school. This school
grew out of the stress and storm of the viking life, with its
wild adventure and varied commerce, and the close contact with an
artistic and inventive folk, possessed of high culture and great
learning. The infusion of Celtic blood, however slight it may
have been, had also something to do with the swift intense
feeling and rapidity of passion of the earlier Icelandic poets.
They are hot-headed and hot-hearted, warm, impulsive, quick to
quarrel or to love, faithful, brave; ready with sword or song to
battle with all comers, or to seek adventure wheresoever it might
be found. They leave Iceland young, and wander at their will to
different courts of northern Europe, where they are always held