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fore, contend that we ought to place the Vinland of the Northmen on the coast of Labrador, and they treat the supposition of the Northern Antiquaries, that the Esquimaux race formerly extended much farther south than at present, as perfectly gratuitous. It requires, however, but a very superficial knowledge of ethnological history to be aware of the fact that whenever two races of men have come into contact, the one that was the inferior in physical or intellectual endowments has necessarily given way to the other. It was thus that the Finns retired before the Scandinavian and Slavonic races; the Slavonians of ancient Pannonia before the Magyars; the Celtic race of the British Isles before the Teutonic; the Britons before the Germanic (Anglo-Saxon); the Gaels before the Scandinavian branch: and we have in our own times seen how the Red men of the New World have gradually been obliged to recede before the Spaniards and Anglo-Americans. Though unsupported by historical evidence, we may therefore reasonably conclude that the Esquimaux were driven, in like manner, to the Polar regions by the superior race of Red Indians.

CHAPTER II.

ON THE LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS OF THE ICELANDIC COMMON

WEALTH.

THE preceding chapters will have made the reader acquainted with the religious doctrines, manners and customs of the ancient Scandinavians. It will remain for us to give a succinct account of their literature; but as almost all the old Norse poems and sagas that have been handed down to us were either collected or written by Icelanders, we shall previously enter into a few details respecting the social institutions of these Norwegian colonists, in order to show what peculiar circumstances enabled them to acquire such a literary pre-eminence over their fellow-countrymen in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, who, it must be borne in mind, spoke, at that period, precisely the same language.

We have elsewhere observed that Scandinavian bistory does not reach beyond the middle of the ninth century. The person

• See page 84.

ages who figure in the legendary accounts of events that hap pened, or that are said to have happened, before that period, belong to the heroic age, in which, among all nations, it is next to impossible to draw a line of demarcation between facts and fiction. Events that may have taken place, and which probably actually did take place-as Ragnar Lodbrok's famous. expedition to Northumbria, for instance,-are so blended with what is purely imaginative, that any arguments founded on them must necessarily be inconclusive. It is, therefore, a fortunate circumstance that the colonization of Iceland falls within the historical period, which, for Norway, may be said to begin with Halfdan the Black, and more especially with his son Harald Hárfagra.

At this period Norway was divided into a number of independent states, each under its chieftain or king, whose authority, however, was far from being unlimited, all public affairs being discussed and decided at the Things, or general assemblies of the freemen, who gave their assent to a measure by striking their shields with their drawn swords. These freemen, or thingsmen, as they were called, were the landed proprietors of the country, and their sons and kindred. The tenure of land in Norway was then, as we believe it still continues to be, strictly allodial. The odalsman (ódalsmaðr) or dominus allodialis, whether he held extensive domains or only a few acres, could not alienate the land. At his death it was equally divided amongst his children, or next of kin, and at a later and more civilized period, when legal right became better defined, any one who could establish his relationship with the original proprietor, might evict a person who had acquired an estate once belonging to the family, without having any allodial claim to it. It would lead us too far to point out the advantages and evils resulting from this kind of tenure, which also prevails in Hungary, where it is regarded at the present day as one of the greatest obstacles to social improvement. Its obvious tendency is to to fritter away

Some of the Hungarian domains, those of Prince Esterházy, for instance, are entailed and inherited according to the law of primogeniture, but the tenure that generally prevails is such as we have described. Every manor in Hungary was originally bestowed by the crown, and, at the death of the last legitimate descendant of the person to whom it was granted, becomes again crown property. According to the strict letter of the law, a manor

the estates of a family by continual subdivisions, though they will at times become concentrated in the hands of two or three individuals, who have been lucky enough to survive their relatives. There was, however, no great fear in the turbulent ages we are speaking of, when a Scandinavian never quitted his arms, and scarcely passed a day without exposing him self to danger, that an estate would have to be parcelled out among a too numerous progeny. We thus find that the chiefs of a powerful family continued to maintain their dignity for several generations, a circumstance which in more peaceable times would have been of rare occurrence.

A chieftain throughout Scandinavia generally presided over the herad, or district, in which his allodial possessions were situated, in the triple capacity of chieftain, or military commander, pontiff, and judge. In Norway, the herad frequently formed an independent state, and its chief, when the territory was tolerably extensive, bore the title of Fylkis-Kóngr‡. that has devolved to the crown, is merely held in trust for the purpose of being ag in bestowed as a reward for services rendered to the state, but in point of fact is always sold to the highest bidder; a proceeding, however, which the Diet never fails to protest against. It might naturally be supposed that this law of Aviticity, as it is very appropriately termed, would prevent a person from selling an estate, for, by virtue of its provisions, any of the descendants of the original donee might make use of his right, either of pre-emption or re-emption. In the latter case, he would, however, have to refund any sums that might have been laid out in improvements, and, as a clever lawyer generally hits upon some expedient for evading a bad law, the Hungarian gentlemen of the long-robe have introduced the practice of inserting in the deed of conveyance double the sum actually given for an estate, and thus effectually deterring those who enjoy the right of re-emption from making use of it. The last Diet appointed a committee to inquire into the aviticity laws, and the next Diet will probably entirely abolish them, or at least render their operation less pernicious.

This continued to be the case for centuries after the introduction of Christianity. The Norwegians only quitted their arms when they entered a church, when they hung them up in the porch; hence to this day, in the rural districts of Norway, the porch of a church is called a weapon-houseVaabenhuus.

Herad, properly speaking, means a tribe-the word being derived from her, an army, an armed multitude-a host,

Folk's-King. Fylki signifies a district, and is derived from fólk, a word which has the same meaning as in English. The Old Norse name for king is konúngr, kongr; Swed., konung; Dan., kong, from kour, a man of noble birth, or simply a man; and úngr (young), a termination, signifying a son or descendant, and equivalent to the Ang.-Sax. and English ing. Hence the Ang.

However, whether independent or not, the union of the sacerdotal and magisterial functions must necessarily have given him much the same kind of influence over the smaller landed proprietors, as a Roman patrician exercised over his clients. An attentive perusal of the Sagas will, in fact, convince any one whose judgment is not biassed by some favourite theory of Scandinavian optimism, that the boasted independence of the bumbler class of thingsmen was more apparent than real. They, no doubt, made a great clatter with their shields, and bawled out most lustily for the adoption or rejection of the measure under discussion; but although a saganian is not exactly a Horace Walpole, he often lets us sufficiently behind the curtain to become aware of the fact, that, even in that rude age, a man who possessed his hundreds of acres, was never at a loss how to influence the vote of his humble neighbour, who, although in the enjoyment of the same political rights, possessed but a score *. All odalsmen were, however, regarded

Sax., cyning; Eng., king; Dutch, koning; in German, könig. Kings were formerly as plentiful in Scandinavia as dukes are at the present day at Naples, the son of a king, though without territories, bearing the same title as his father. In the Drontheim district alone, Harald Hárfagra, according to Snorri, defeated and slew no less than eight kings.-See Heimsk. iii. 7.

There is a striking coincidence between the civil institutions of the Hungarians (Magyars) and those of the ancient Scandinavians, and this ce incidence, which we believe has never been pointed out, is the more remarkable from there not existing the slightest or remotest analogy between the Magyar and the Old Norse languages; and although it is by no means ascertained whether the Magyars belong to the Tshudic, Tatar, or Turkish races, they are unquestionably not a tribe of any of the so-called Indo-European races, and therefore differ in every respect, physiologically as well as psychologically, from the Scandinavians. Nevertheless, each of the fifty-five districts or counties into which Hungary is divided, has its Thing (county congregation), at which public affairs are discussed, as in ancient Scandinavia, by all the odalsmen or thingsmen of the district; a man possessing but a single rood of allodial land having the same vote and the same rights and privileges as the proprietor of the most extensive domains. But those who may have an opportunity, as we have frequently had, of being present at one of these stormy meetings, will not fail to remark what a powerful influence the possessors of such domains, or full-spurred nobles, exercise over the half-spurred nobles, as the petty allodial landowners are contemptuously termed, and, perhaps arrive at the conclusion that, in a multitudinous assembly of freemen, sound lungs are more requisite than a sound judgment. Although the Hungarian Althing, or Diet, has become in modern times a bi-cameral legislative body, it differs materially from the British Parliament. Every bill must originate in the lower house, the members of which are the

as freemen, and constituted a privileged class. Another class was that of the so called unfree, under which negative denomination were included cottiers, labourers, artizans, and others, who enjoyed personal freedom, but had no political rights; that is to say, were not thingsmen. They were, however, entitled to bear arms, and most of the opulent landowners or allodial lords, the real nobility of the country, had a number of them in their service as armed retainers. After these came the freedmen, or manumitted slaves, and, last of all, the slaves themselves, or thralls, to whom the law afforded no protection whatsoever. Their masters might dispose of them as they thought proper, and even kill them with impunity. These thralls were generally captives taken in war, who, if not ransomed by their friends, were sold in regular slave markets.

In the year 863, Harald Hárfagra inherited Westfold and one or two other petty states, and, before the close of the century, had made himself master of the whole country, and become, de facto, king of Norway. One of his first measures was to introduce a kind of feudal system. He accordingly made it known that all the allodial property in the country belonged to the crown, and that those who wished to retain possession of their estates would thenceforward have to pay a land-tax. In order to render the royal authority paramount, he placed over each of the petty states and districts he had conquered one of his own followers, with the title of jarl (earl), who was charged with the administration of justice, and the collection of the royal revenue derived from fines, and the newly imposed land-tax. A jarl was bound to keep sixty menat-arms ready for the king's service, but was allowed to retain

mere delegates of the district Things, or county congregations, appointed by the majority of the Thingsmen, and are liable to be recalled at a moment's notice, so that, in point of fact, all legislative measures are decided by the fifty-five district Things, the table of magnates and the king having merely a veto, which, however, is, on most occasions, very adroitly made use of, though often in a manner the expediency of which it is foreign to our purpose to inquire into. The reader will find a graphic description of Hungarian public life in "The Village Notary," of Baron Joseph Eötvös, a work which has been translated into German, and which places its talented author-who has shown by his political writings and his eloquent speeches in the chamber of magnates, that a brilliant imagination may be happily combined with a correct judgment, and the most practical views of social amelioration-among the firstrate novelists of the present age.

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