43. Old Icelandic, literary monuments. Old Icelandic is usually called Old Norse. Old Norse

During the Age of Migrations, when many other Germanic groups were migrating from the ancestral homeland in the north, the ancestors of the speakers of Old Norse stayed close to home. Yet, Danes moved south out of southern Sweden into Zealand and the Jutland Peninsula, which after the departures of the Angles and other tribes was relatively empty. The Swedes set about conquering their neighbors, the Geats, and slowly expanded their power base through central Sweden and Götland. The royal house of Norway also originally came from Sweden to the Oslo region. It was not until late in the eighth century, that the rest of Europe came to hear much about these people. And when they did it was of little joy. For the northernmost Germanic peoples appeared on the world scene as Vikings, professional pirates who attacked from the sea without warning and carried away any treasure they could get their hands on.

It was in the mid-eighth century that the Vikings began their attacks and conquests in Western Europe. For by the time the Norwegians attacked Ireland and England, they had already established their bases in the Shetlands and Orkneys. They raided England in 789, and they were responsible for the sack of the Lindisfarne monastery in northeastern England in 793. In the main, the Norwegians concentrated on northern Scotland and the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, and the various coasts of the Irish sea. In 836 they founded Dublin as a trading post and military base for raids elsewhere. In the ninth century, they arose as a Norse kingdom in Ireland, based on mixed Scandinavian and Celtic elements, which was independent of any control from the Norwegian homeland.

The Danes first appeared in Europe about forty years after the Norwegians, but from the outset their attacks were far more central than the Norwegians. The course of the ninth century they attacked Dorestad on the Rhine in Frisia. In 845 they attacked Hamburg, and throughout the ninth century they raided Low Countries and northern France. The Danes made their most permanent presence in England. They first wintered in England in 851, and in 865 the great army had arrived. In 878 the Danes briefly captured most of the last remaining Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Wessex, but king Alfred the Great forced them to leave that kingdom in the same year. They took East Anglia as consolation prize.

The Vikings were not only pirates; they were also explorers. Pushing westward far out of sight of the land, the Norwegians discovered the Faroe islands and in the late ninth century, Iceland. Their first settlement in Iceland is dated to 874, and by the mid-tenth century about 50.000 people were living there. Iceland became not a kingdom but a kind of aristocratic republic ruled by priest-chieftans. From 930 it had its own parliament under the chairman of a law-speaker.

Greenland was discovered in 981 by Eric the Red, who had been banished for manslaughter. He brought 14 ships full of people there. About the year 1000, Eric’s son Leif, investigating a report of land farther to the west, discovered and explored ‘Vinland’, which could be nothing other than some part of North America.

If the Danes and Norwegians can be described as mercantile pirates, the Swedes are better characterised as piratical merchants. Before the Viking age Swedes had established profitable trading towns on the Baltic, whence they carried out a trade in furs, cloth, spices, precious metals, and the like. The principal trading routes lay through Russia and Ukraine, especially along the Dnieper and Volga rivers. There is a hypothesis according to which Swedes (under the name of Rus) founded the major cities, Kiev and Novgorod.

Christianity first came to Denmark, where it was generally introduced by the mid-tenth century. It then arrived in Norway. In Sweden Christianity was adopted in the twelfth century.

Old Norse is unique among the Germanic languages in the volume and richness of its literature. The basic bulk of Old Norse manuscripts are in Latin. Runic inscriptions (about 45) have no value as literary monuments.

1. Eddic poetry (Edda) represents the oldest preserved genre of Old Norse literature. These poems, short, dramatic, and alliterative, are found primarily in a single manuscript written after 1250. The poems deal with two subjects: the gods and myths of Germanic heathendom, and the heroes of the Germanic Age of Migrations.

2. Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson written about 1220. It has three parts: 1. Myths of the heathen world, told in prose with occasional poetic quotations; 2. A textbook of poetic speech; 3.A long poem in honor of Snorri’s benefactors.

3. Scaldic verse was an ancient genre. Much of skaldic poetry deals with the exploits of kings and other patrons, and was clearly meant as praise poetry. It was subject to very rigid rules of meter, alliteration, and rhyme; it deviated considerably from everyday syntax.

4. Konungasögur (King’s sagas) dealt with the two Norwegian kings Olaf Tryggvason and St. Olaf Haraldsson. Etymologically the word saga means ‘something said’, but in the Icelandic tradition it is a piece of prose literature, a deliberate composition by a particular author.