they were not fey they must live, and that if they were fey they must die; but they never extended this reasoning to their antagonists, but took as active means for their destruction as if with their death destiny had nothing to do.

The Suitors of Penelope are described as 'fey,' in the twentieth Odyssey, 345. Thus rendered by Pope:

'A mirthful frenzy seized the fated crowd;

The roofs resound with causeless laughter loud;
Floating in gore, portentous to survey,

In each discoloured vase the viands lay;

Then down each cheek the tears spontaneous flow,
And sudden sighs precede approaching woe.'

The system of law and society which prevailed among these Icelanders was not so much founded on any superiority of might over right as on the belief that they were identical. Though incredibly brave, they were not chivalrous. They were generally ready to take, as they expressed it, the benefit of being more numerous. They had the power and they used it to the utmost. Thus Sigmund and Skiolld both attack Thord, though he challenges them to single combat, and five persons assist at the slaying of Hauskuld. They would not attack an antagonist asleep, as we see with Kari and the sons of Sigfus, but this was almost the only scruple they had. They carried the same spirit into their law, which was in fact a duel fought with quirks and quibbles instead of swords and spears. The principles of their law of procedure were much the same as our own; the difference was, that every slip, even of the most technical nature, with them was fatal, where with us it is remediable. Thus the challenge of a juror with us only leads to his being set aside. In Iceland it was fatal to the suit.

A short analysis of the case for the burning will show this. There was no evidence in our sense of the word. The case was proved by the verdict of the neighbours, nor was there an attempt to go into the merits. The first ground of defence was, that two of the inquest were related to the plaintiffs. To this it was answered that he was only plaintiff by assignment of the cause, and so that fell to the ground. Next two of the jurors were challenged for the want of a proper qualification; but it was adjudged that the qualification was sufficient. Then four men were challenged out of the inquest, because there were four others not summoned, who lived nearer to the place of the crime than they. The answer was, that still a majority of the inquest were rightly summoned. That was held good. The next grounded defence was, that the suit was brought in the wrong court, because Flosi, the defendant, had fraudulently

transferred himself out of the jurisdiction in order to raise that very point. This question, strange to say, was decided in favour of the defendant. The plaintiff then summoned the defendants into a higher court for having given a fee to a man skilled in the law to defend them; so that to this issue the question whether Flosi was or was not guilty of the burning is ultimately reduced. The judges bring in Flosi guilty, but then there were forty-two in number. The whole number was forty-eight, which ought to be reduced to thirty-six, or three twelves, by the striking six out by each party. The plaintiff struck out six, but the defendant refused to strike out his six, and the plaintiff, instead of striking out the other six himself, tried the case with forty-two. This was fatal, and so that which could not be decided by law was decided by arms.

Let those, if any such remain, who consider legal technicalities as an index of civilisation, study these curious details, and they will see how entirely the technicalities of the Icelandic law arose from the notion that law was, after all, only a substitute for private warfare, and might justly therefore be conducted on the same principle of taking every possible advantage. The truth was never inquired into, the facts were never sifted, but the impunity or punishment of a great crime entirely depended on whether any slip could be detected in a course of proceeding which seemed to have had no other object than to lead men aside from the real merits of the case.

The view of this subject would not be complete without noticing that except in the case of homicide, which the law assumed to be, and which generally was, a matter of notoriety, it was necessary to summon the defendant at his own house. This was a service of danger. The plaintiff was attended by armed men, and the defendant, if he was aware of it, was equally prepared. Bloodshed often ensued. Thus in the Saga of Hensa Thorir, Blundkettle, being in want of hay which his churlish neighbour refused to sell, laid down the price and took the hay by force. Thorir at the head of thirty men went to Blundkettle's house to summon him for theft, one of them was slain by an arrow, and the result was that the summoning party burnt the house, with Blundkettle and every living creature in it. Process servers are not generally held in much estimation; but they have their use, since for want of such an official occurred the greatest case of fire raising which had been in Iceland before the time of Njal. So we find the valiant Gunnar himself reduced to assume the dress and counterfeit the manners of a travelling tinker, in order to summon Hrut for the portion of his first cousin Unna, who had divorced herself from him.

This was not because Gunnar feared the prowess of Hrut, whom in this very suit he challenged to single combat to get over a technical objection to the form in which Unna pronounced the divorce, but because Gunnar lived in the southeast and Hrut in the north-west, so that Gunnar could not summon him without taking with him a large force at a great expense and with the probability of a battle.

The Njala furnishes abundant illustration of the sound policy of the laws against champerty and maintenance, that is, of the laws which prohibit the assigning of a suit from one person to another. The immediate cause of the burning of Njal and his family may be traced to the absence of such a prohibition in the jurisprudence of Iceland. The traitor Mord takes up the suit for the slaying of Hauskuld with the assent of the next of kin, the sons of Sigfus, to whom the prosecution as we should call it properly belonged; and this he did with the express purpose that the suit might fail, as having been commenced by one of the persons against whom it ought to have been brought. Defeated by this shameful manœuvre, Flosi could not be brought to any settlement, but sought satisfaction in his own way by sword and fire. So in the suit for the burning, the same Mord, the bitterest enemy of the slain, and more than any one guilty of their death, is made the prosecutor, and it is left at least ambiguous whether he did not wilfully commit the slip which deprived the friends of Njal of all legal redress, and brought on the battle at the Thing and the terrible vengeance of Kari. While, however, we justly condemn a state of law which treats the crime of murder as a private injury, we must not forget that for the first twenty years of this century, the barbarous appeal of Battle was the law of England, and that in 1819 that judicial combat which was abolished in Iceland about 1000 was actually demanded in the case of Abraham Thornton, who had been acquitted by a jury of murder.

The home of the Icelandic Chief consisted mainly of an ample hall, down which ran two sets of tables, which were removed after every meal, with benches next the wall, stools in the middle, and great fires burning between the two tables; the hall was surrounded by bed-rooms opening into it, much after the fashion of the cabin of a merchant's ship. The women sat on the cross bench; they were admitted to all festivals on perfectly equal terms with the men. The fact that the hall was surrounded by bed-rooms opening into it, made it an exceedingly unsafe place to talk secrets in, and this is probably the reason why we generally find that confidential communications were held out of doors. It was not good manners to be hasty

in inquiring into a guest's business; just as in the Odyssey, Nestor interposes some delay before he asks Telemachus his business, and Menelaus is equally delicate and dilatory.

The life described is that of hard-working yeomen or farmers. Gunnar and Hauskuld sow their own corn; Glum runs after his stray sheep; Thorvald loads his boat with meal and fish. The tale hinges on the ordinary events of country life: gossip brought by tramps from house to house, petty thefts by servants, quarrels about a right of cutting wood in common, and rough sports, like the horse-fight in the Njala, and football and hockey in other Sagas. Such a life in so severe a climate must have been not a little tedious, and the reaction from its ennui drove the Icelander to seek as a sea rover, or in the prosecution of feuds and lawsuits, or better still in the discovery of remote lands and the creation of an indigenous literature, that excitement with which the strongest and most self-supporting characters cannot wholly dispense. Yet amid all this violence and chicanery, confidence was not destroyed: men lent out their money freely at interest without security; Gunnar and Njal are both described as being creditors on these terms. When a ship came out in the autumn, the cargo was often sold on credit to be paid for in the spring. Land was let out to tenants; sales, where part of the purchase-money was not paid down, were not infrequent; and it was common to give time to collect the money due on a blood fine. Nothing was more usual than an engagement to postpone a marriage for three years, and such engagements were uniformly kept by the lady with exemplary good faith. See the case of Unna in this Saga, and that of Helga in the Saga of Gunnlang, Ormstunga. Thus Pallas, in the character of Mentor (Odyssey, 366.), tells Nestor that she is going next morning to the Cancones, where a debt is owing her, neither newly contracted nor small.

The money of the Icelanders, on which Mr. Dasent furnishes us with an excellent essay, is eminently curious. It had two standards, the one of measure, the unit of which consisted of an ell of woollen cloth, and its multiples up to a hundred; the other of weight, which consisted of an ounce of silver, the eighth part of a mark or pound; but as time went on these two standards were confounded together, and though ells and hundreds belonged, originally, strictly to the woollen standard or that of measure alone, and ounces and marks to that of weight alone, men began to speak of hundreds of weighed silver and of measured ounces and marks of woollen. We must refer those who wish to be delivered from this apparently inextricable confusion to Mr. Dasent's essay, from which it appears that

the blood fine paid for Njal was about equal to a hundred pounds at the present day, a sum certainly not too great, he thinks, for one of the wisest and most virtuous men that Iceland ever produced.

We cannot conclude this notice of a book, destined, we trust, to originate a new era in the study of Scandinavian literature in England, more appropriately than in the words of Mr. Dasent, to whose estimate of the work which he has introduced into our literature, and illustrated with so much diligence and so much eloquence, we give in our adhesion.

'We are entitled to ask, In what work of any age are the characters so boldly and yet so delicately drawn? Where shall we match the goodness and manliness of Gunnar struggling with the storms of fate and driven on by the wickedness of Hallgerda into quarrel after quarrel which were none of his own seeking, but led no less surely to his own end? Where shall we match Hallgerda herself, that noble frame so fair and tall, and yet with so foul a heart, the abode of all great crimes, and also the lurking place of tale-bearing and thieving? Where shall we find parallels to Skarphedinn's hastiness and readiness, as axe aloft he leapt twelve ells across Markfleet, and glided on to smite Thrain his death-blow on the slippery ice? Where for Bergthora's love and tenderness for her husband, she who was given young to Njal, and could not find it in her heart to part from him when the house blazed over their heads? Where for Kari's dash and gallantry, the man who dealt his blows straightforward even in the Earl's Hall, and never thought twice about them? Where for Njal himself, the man who never dipped his hands in blood; who could unravel all the knotty points of the law; who foresaw all that was coming whether for good or ill, for friend or for foe; who knew what his own end would be, though quite powerless to avert it; and when it came, laid him down to his rest, and never uttered sound or groan though the flames roared loud around him? Nor are the minor characters less carefully drawn: the scolding tongue of Thrain's first wife; the mischief-making Thiostolf, with his poleaxe, which divorced Hallgerda's first husbands; Hrut's swordsmanship; Asyrim's dignity; Gizur's good counsel; Snorri's common sense and shrewdness; Gudmund's grandeur; Thorgeir's thirst for fame; Kettle's kindliness; Ingialld's heartiness; and though last not least, Bjorn's boastfulness, which his gudewife is ever ready to cry down, are all sketched with a few sharp strokes, which leave their mark for once and for ever on the reader's mind. Strange, were it not that human nature is herself in every age, that such forbearance and forgiveness as is shown by Njal and Hauskuld, and Hall, should have shot up out of that social soil so stained and steeped with the bloodshedding of revenge. Revenge was the great duty of Icelandic life, yet Njal is always ready to make up a quarrel though he acknowledges the duty, when he refuses in his last moments to outlive his children, whom he feels himself unable to re