THE BODY OF OLD NORSE LITERATURE.


First, let us understand what the Old Norse literature was that has been
sending out this constantly increasing influence into the world of
poetry.

It was in the last four decades of the ninth century of our era that
Norsemen began to leave their own country and set up new homes in
Iceland. The sixty years ending with 930 A.D. were devoted to taking up
the land, and the hundred years that ensued after that date were devoted
to quarreling about that land. These quarrels were the origin of the
Icelandic family sagas. The year 1000 brought Christianity to the
island, and the period from 1030 to 1120 were years of peace in which
stories of the former time passed from mouth to mouth. The next century
saw these stories take written form, and the period from 1220 to 1260
was the golden age of this literature. In 1264, Iceland passed under the
rule of Norway, and a decline of literature began, extending until 1400,
the end of literary production in Iceland. In the main, the authors of
Iceland are unknown[2].

There are several well-marked periods, therefore, in Icelandic literary
production. The earliest was devoted to poetry, Icelandic being no
different from most other languages in the precedence of that form.
Before the settlement of Iceland, the Norse lands were acquainted with
songs about gods and champions, written in a simple verse form. The
first settlers wrote down some of these, and forgot others. In the
_Codex Regius_, preserved in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, we have a
collection of these songs. This material was published in the
seventeenth century as the _Sæmundar Edda_, and came to be known as the