Shakespeare,Milton,and Pope have been translated into the native tongue;one of the best printed newspapers Ihave ever seen is now published at Reykjavik;and the Colleges of Copenhagen are adorned by many an illustrious Icelandic scholar;but the glory of the old days is departed,and it is across a wide desolate flat of ignoble annals,as dull and arid as their own lava plains,that the student has to look back upon the glorious drama of Iceland's early history.As I gazed around on the silent,deserted plain,and paced to and fro along the untrodden grass that now clothed the Althing,I could scarcely believe it had ever been the battle-field where such keen and energetic wits encountered,--that the fire-scathed rocks I saw before me were the very same that had once inspired one of the most successful rhetorical appeals ever hazarded in a public assembly.
As an account of the debate to which I allude has been carefully preserved,I may as well give you an abstract of it.A more characteristic leaf out of the Parliamentary Annals of Iceland you could scarcely have.
In the summer of the year 1000,when Ethelred the Unready ruled in England,and fourteen years after Hugh Capet had succeeded the last Carlovingian on the throne of France,--the Icelandic legislature was convened for the consideration of a very important subject--no less important,indeed,than an inquiry into the merits of a new religion lately brought into the country by certain emissaries of Olaf Tryggveson,--the first Christian king of Norway,--and the same who pulled down London bridge.
The assembly met.The Norse missionaries were called upon to enunciate to the House the tenets of the faith they were commissioned to disclose;and the debate began.
Great and fierce was the difference of opinion.The good old Tory party,supported by all the authority of the Odin establishment,were violent in opposition.The Whigs advocated the new arrangement,and,as the king supported their own views,insisted strongly on the Divine right.
Several liberal members permitted themselves to speak sarcastically of the Valhalla tap,and the ankles of Freya.The discussion was at its height,when suddenly a fearful peal of subterranean thunder roared around the Althing."Listen!"cried an orator of the Pagan party;"how angry is Odin that we should even consider the subject of a new religion.His fires will consume us."To which a ready debater on the other side replied,by "begging leave to ask the honourable gentleman,--with whom were the gods angry when these rocks were melted?"--pointing to the devastated plain around him.
Taking advantage of so good a hit,the Treasury "whips"immediately called for a division;and the Christian religion was adopted by a large majority.
The first Christian missionaries who came to Iceland seem to have had a rather peculiar manner of enforcing the truths of the Gospel.Their leader was a person of the name of Thangbrand.Like the Protestant clergymen Queen Elizabeth despatched to convert Ireland,he was bundled over to Iceland principally because he was too disreputable to be allowed to live in Norway.The old Chronicler gives a very quaint deion of him."Thangbrand,"he says,"was a passionate,ungovernable person,and a great man-slayer;but a good scholar,and clever.Thorvald,and Veterlid the Scald,composed a lampoon against him;but he killed them both outright.Thangbrand was two years in Iceland,and was the death of three men before he left it."From the Althing we strolled over to the Almanna Gja,visiting the Pool of Execution on our way.As I have already mentioned,a river from the plateau above leaps over the precipice into the bottom of the Gja,and flows for a certain distance between its walls.At the foot of the fall the waters linger for a moment in a dark,deep,brimming pool,hemmed in by a circle of ruined rocks;to this pool,in ancient times,all women convicted of capital crimes were immediately taken,and drowned.
Witchcraft seems to have been the principal weakness of ladies in those days,throughout the Scandinavian countries.
For a long period no disgrace was attached to its profession.Odin himself,we are expressly told,was a great adept,and always found himself very much exhausted at the end of his performance;which leads me to think that perhaps he dabbled in electro-biology.At last the advent of Christianity threw discredit on the practice;severe punishments were denounced against all who indulged in it;and,in the end,its mysteries became the monopoly of the Laplanders.
