leagues of republics, but these were too small to have developed
national feeling in the modern sense; and the Roman system left most
of them a certain measure of self-government which modified their
regret for an independence the delight in which had been (in many
cases) reduced by domestic disorders.
-----
Is it possible, then, to arrive at any conclusion regarding the
respective strength which these two sets of forces are likely to display
in the coming centuries? Will the tendency to aggregation continue, and
does the future belong to great States? Or may new forces appear which
will reverse the process, as it was reversed, though through causes most
unlikely to reappear, at the fall of the Roman Empire?
At first sight the probabilities seem to point to further aggregation.
Although none of the five great national States—Russia, Germany, France,
Italy, Britain—is in the least likely to be absorbed by any of the
others, there is reason to think that within the next century some of
the smaller states will have disappeared from the map of Europe. In one
or two other parts of the world—as for instance in South and in Central
America—the process by which the great States are expanding is not yet
complete. The influences of swifter and cheaper communications by land
and sea, of increasing commerce, and of the closer intercourse which
commerce brings, of the power exerted by the printing press in
extinguishing the languages which prevail over a small area and
diffusing those spoken by vast masses of men—all these things make for
unity within each of the great States and add to the attractive power
which the greater have for the smaller. These influences, moreover, all
promise to be permanent.
Against them we must set the fact that Conquest, so far as civilized
peoples are concerned, seems likely to play a smaller rôle in the future
than in the past, because it begins to be perceived how tenacious is the
sentiment of nationality in a vanquished people, and how much the
maintenance of that sentiment may endanger the victor State. As was
observed in an earlier page, the progress of a community in civilization
often tends to intensify both its capacity for political discontent and
its peculiar national sentiment, thus counterworking the influences of
trade and wealth. A people, or a nationality included in a large State,
while feeling the centripetal forces of material interest, may
nevertheless feel the repellent instinct of an unquenched attachment to
its national traditions and cling to the hope of reviving its old
national life.
The problem is, however, a far more complex one than any comparison of
the influences of material interest on the one side and national
sentiment on the other would suggest. Many phenomena may be imagined
which would affect it as the world moves on. One is a change in the
conditions under which war is waged. Another is a removal of some of the
causes which induce war, or a means, better than now exists, of averting
its outbreak. Another is the growth of what is called Collectivism and a
disposition to apply its principles in small rather than in large areas,
seeing that there are obviously some things which can be better managed
in the former. We are far from having exhausted the possibilities of the
influence of scientific discovery upon economic life, and through it
upon social and political life. Both the relations of Nations and States
to one another and the relations of the groups or communities within
each State to each other may be affected in ways as yet scarcely dreamt
of. Neither can we foresee the modes in which the scientific way of
looking at all questions may come ultimately to tinge and modify men’s
habits of thought even in social and political matters. No institution
was at one time more generally prevalent over the world, or seemed more
deeply rooted, than Slavery; and slavery, which has now vanished from
civilized communities, will soon have vanished from all countries. There
is indeed hardly any institution for which permanence can be predicted
except—and some will not admit even this exception—the Family.
Imagine a world in which all the hitherto unappropriated territories had
been allotted to one or other of the few strongest States. Imagine
tariffs abolished and the principle of equality of trade-facilities
among States established. Imagine a system of international arbitration
created under which the risks of war were so greatly reduced that the
prospect of war did not occupy men’s minds and give a military and
aggressive tinge to their patriotism. The present relations of
centripetal and centrifugal forces would under such conditions be
greatly altered, as respects both the wide theatre of the world and the
internal conditions of each particular State.
Imagine also a great advance in the desire to use governmental agencies
for the benefit of the citizens, and a general conviction that such
agencies could best be used by comparatively small communities rather
than by the State as a whole. A new centrifugal force, centrifugal at
least in respect of each State, would thereby have been called into
action. No one will venture to foretell any of these things. But none of
them is impossible; and it is plain that they might produce a set of
conditions, and a play of forces, unlike the present, and unlike any
period in the past. We must not therefore assume that the large States
and the present structure and organization of States will be permanent.
Of the more remote future, History can venture to say little more than
this—that it will never bring back the past. She recognizes that, as
Heraclitus says, one cannot step twice into the same river. Even when
she is able to declare that certain forces will assuredly be present,
she cannot forecast their relative strength at any given moment, nor say
what hitherto unobserved forces they may not, in their action upon one
another, call into activity. All she can do for the lawyer, the
statesman and the legislator, when they have to study and use the forces
operative in their own time, is to indicate to them the nature and the
character, the significant elements of strength and weakness, that
belong to each and every force that has been heretofore conspicuous, so
as to direct and guide them in observing and reflecting on the present.
This is much less than has sometimes been claimed for history.
Nevertheless it is a real service, for nothing is more difficult than to
observe exactly, and the ripest fruit of historical study is that
detachment of mind, created by the habit of scientific thinking, which
prevents observation from being coloured by prejudice or passion.
V
PRIMITIVE ICELAND
Iceland is known to most men as a land of volcanoes, geysers and
glaciers. But it ought to be no less interesting to the student of
history as the birthplace of a brilliant literature in poetry and prose,
and as the home of a people who have maintained for many centuries a
high level of intellectual cultivation. It is an almost unique instance
of a community whose culture and creative power flourished independently
of any favouring material conditions, and indeed under conditions in the
highest degree unfavourable. Nor ought it to be less interesting to the
student of politics and laws as having produced a Constitution unlike
any other whereof records remain, and a body of law so elaborate and
complex that it is hard to believe that it existed among men whose chief
occupation was to kill one another.
With the exception of Madeira and the Azores, Iceland is the only part
of what we call the Old World[116] which was never occupied by a
prehistoric race, and in which, therefore, the racial origin of the
population is historically known to us.
-----
Footnote 116:
Though geographically Iceland belongs rather to North America than to
Europe, geologically its affinities are with the Cape Verde Islands,
the Canaries, Madeira, and possibly the Azores to the South, with Jan
Mayen to the North, as it seems to owe its origin to a line of
volcanic action stretching from the Cape Verde Islands to far beyond
the Arctic Circle.
-----
None of those rude tribes who dwell scattered over the north of Asia,
Europe and America—Lapps, Samoyedes or Esquimaux—ever set foot in it.
Adamnan, Abbot of Iona from A.D. 679 to 704, reports in his famous _Life
of St. Columba_[117], a prophecy of the saint regarding a holy man named
Kormak, who, in Columba’s days (A.D. 521-597), made three long voyages
from Ireland in search of the ‘Desert in the Ocean’ (_eremum in
Oceano_), a term so happily descriptive of Iceland that one is tempted
to believe it to be the region referred to. A little later the Venerable
Bede (A.D. 673-735) speaks of contemporaries of his own who, coming from
the isle of Thule, declared that in it the sun could be seen at midnight
for a few days[118]. Still later the Irish monk Dicuil (writing about
A.D. 825) tells[119] of an isle lying far to the North-West where monks
known to him had spent the summer some thirty years before. And our
earliest Icelandic authority, the famous _Landnámabók_ (Book of the
Land-takings), mentions that when the first Norwegian settlers arrived
they found a few hermits of Irish race already established there, who
soon vanished from the presence of the stronger heathen, leaving behind
books, bells and staves (probably croziers). The Norse settlers called
them Papas (_i.e._ priests), or Westmen, a term used to describe the
Scots of Ireland. No doubt, then, the earliest discoverers of the isle
were these Celtic hermits, who had crossed the wide and stormy sea in
their light coracles of wood and leather, consecrating themselves to
prayer and fasting in this inclement wilderness. But they contributed no
element to the population of the island, and can hardly be said to have
a place in its history, which begins with the great Norwegian
immigration.
-----
Footnote 117:
_Vita S. Columbae_, cap. vi.
Footnote 118:
Comment. on 2 Kings xx. 9. The extreme northernmost point of Iceland
just touches the Arctic Circle.
Footnote 119:
In his book _De Mensura Orbis Terrae_, cap. 7, he identifies the isle
with Thule; and the reports of the monks point rather to Iceland than
to the Faeroe Isles, a group which Dicuil mentions elsewhere, and
which therefore he cannot mean by his Thule. The name Thule has of
course been applied by different writers to different lands. When
Tacitus says that it was seen in the distance by the fleet of
Agricola, he probably means either Shetland or the Fair Isle between
the Shetlands and the Orkneys.
-----
The first Teuton to reach Iceland was a Norse Viking named Naddođ, who
was driven to the isle by a storm in the latter half of the ninth
century. He called it Snæland, or Snowland. A second visitor, a Swede
named Gardar, sailed round it; a third (Flóki, a Norseman) landed, and
gave it the name it still bears. But though the news of the discovery
soon spread far and wide through the whole Northland, the isle might
possibly have lain unoccupied but for the events that were passing in
Norway. King Harald the Fairhaired was then in the full career of his
conquests. The great battle of Hafrsfjord had established his power in
Central and Southern Norway, and he was traversing the fjords with his
fleet, compelling the petty chieftains who stood at the head of the
numerous small independent communities that filled the country to
acknowledge his supremacy, and imposing a tax upon the land-holding
freemen.
The proud spirit of the warriors who for more than a century had been
ravaging the coasts of all Western Europe could not brook subjection,
and, being unable to offer a united opposition, the boldest and bravest
among them resolved to find freedom in exile. Some sought the Orkneys,
Shetlands and Faeroe isles, already settled by Northmen. Some joined the
Norwegian settlers in Ireland, and drove the Celtic population out of
some districts on its eastern coast. Others, again, followed Hrolf
Ganger (Göngu Hrolfr) (‘the Walker’), or Rollo as our books call him, a
Viking who, having incurred the wrath of Harald, sailed forth from his
home on the fjords near Bergen to found in Northern Gaul a dynasty of
Norsemen whence came the long line of Norman dukes and English kings,
_Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae_. And yet others, hearing the
praises of the lately-discovered isle far off in the ocean, turned their
prows to the west and landed on the solitary shores of Iceland. They
embarked without any concert or common plan; each chieftain, or head of
a household, taking his own family, and perhaps a group of friends or
dependents; and they settled in the new land where they pleased,
sometimes throwing overboard as they neared the shore the wooden
columns, adorned with figures of Thor and Oðin, of the high-seat in
their old Norwegian hall, and disembarking at the point to which these
were driven by the winds and currents. At first each took for himself as
much land as he desired, but those who came later, when the better
pastures had been already occupied, were obliged to buy land or to fight
for it; and a curious custom grew up by which the extent of territory to
which a settler was entitled was fixed. A man could claim no more than
what he could carry fire round in a single day; a woman, than that round
which she could lead a two-year-old heifer. So rapid was the
immigration, many colonists from Norwegian Ireland and the Scottish
isles, Orkneys, Shetlands and Hebrides (the two former groups being then
Scandinavian) joining those who came direct from Norway, that in sixty
years the population had risen (so far as our data enable it to be
estimated) to about 50,000, a number which seems not to have been
exceeded down to the census of A.D. 1823. With those who came from
Ireland and the Hebrides there came some small infusion of Celtic blood,
which we note in such names as Njál, Kjartan, and Kormak, given to men
descended from the daughters of Irish chieftains.
Planting themselves in this irregular way, and in a country where the
good land lay in scattered patches, and where deserts, glaciers and
morasses, as well as torrents, passable only with difficulty or even
danger, cut off one settlement from another, the first settlers did not
create, and indeed felt little need of, any political or social
organization. But after a time a sort of polity began to shape itself,
and the process of its growth is one of the most interesting phenomena
of mediaeval history. The elements out of which it sprang were of course
those two which the settlers had brought with them from Norway, and both
of which were part of the common heritage of the Teutonic race—the habit
of joint worship at a temple, and the habit of holding an assembly of
all freemen to discuss and dispatch matters of common interest, and more
especially lawsuits[120]. This assembly resembled the Old English Folk
Mot, and was called the Thing, a name which survives in our English word
Hustings (Husting or House Thing), the platform from whence candidates
spoke at parliamentary elections, which disappeared in A.D. 1872 when
written nominations were prescribed by the statute which introduced vote
by ballot. The Þing[121] was held at the temple, usually dedicated to
Thor, the favourite deity of the Norsemen as Oðin was of the Swedes;
since the place of worship was the natural centre of the neighbourhood,
and the Þing was presided over by the local magnate or chief, who was
usually also the owner or guardian of the local temple, there being
among the Scandinavian peoples no special sacerdotal caste.
-----
Footnote 120:
Not but what the habit of holding such an assembly has existed among
peoples of very diverse race in many parts of the world. It existed
among the Greeks. It exists among the Kafirs of South Africa.
Footnote 121:
I use the Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon letter þ in this word to
distinguish it from the common English word.
-----
Now when a Norse chief settled himself in Iceland, one of his first acts
was to erect a temple, often with the sacred pillars which he had
brought from the ancestral temple in the old country. The temple soon
became a place of resort, not only for his own immediate dependents, but
also for those other settlers of the district who might not be rich
enough to build and maintain a shrine of their own. Of this temple the
chieftain and his descendants were the priests; and as the meetings of
the local Þing were held at it, he was the natural person to preside
over such meetings, both because he was usually (though not invariably)
eminent by his wealth and power, and also because he offered the
sacrifices and kept the sacred temple-ring on which judicial oaths were
taken, as at Rome men swore at the Ara Maxima of Hercules. Thus the
priest acquired, if he had not already enjoyed it, the position of a
sort of local chieftain or magnate, not unlike those kings of heroic
Greece whom we read of in Homer, or those German tribe-princes whom
Tacitus describes. Although his title was that of Goði[122] (originally
Guði) or priest, a word derived from the name of the Deity, he lost in
becoming the depositary of a certain measure of political power most of
such religious character as his office had possessed. Nor did any
sanctity attach to his person. In that age at least religion had come to
sit rather lightly upon the Norsemen. Either from inner decay, or from
the influence of the Christian peoples with whom they came in contact
beyond the seas, the old faith was beginning to disintegrate. Worship
was often cold or careless, and we read of men who regarded neither Þor
nor Oðin, but trusted in their own might and main.
-----
Footnote 122:
The term goði does not seem to have been used in Norway, but Ulfila,
in his translation of the Bible into Gothic (in the fourth century
A.D.), renders ἱερεύς by _gudja_. The ð is pronounced like th in
‘then.’
-----
The Goði was therefore much more of a secular than of an ecclesiastical
person, a chieftain rather than a priest in our sense of the word[123].
His powers as a chieftain were very indefinite, as indeed had been those
of the local chieftains of Norway. He was only the first among a number
of free and warlike landowners, some of them equal or superior to him in
lineage, with an official dignity which was little more than formal in
the hands of a weak man, but might be turned to great account by a
person of vigour and ability. As he presided in the Þing, so he was the
appropriate person to see to the regularity of its judicial proceedings,
to preserve order, and to provide for the carrying out of any measures
of common concern on which it might determine. When any unforeseen
danger or difficulty arose, he was looked to to advise or take the lead
in action; the members of his Þing expected aid and protection from him,
while he, like a thegn among the Teutons of contemporary England,
expected support and deference from them. But he had no legal powers of
coercion. Any one might oppose him in the Þing or out of it. Any
Þing-man might withdraw at pleasure, join himself to some other Goði,
and become a member of some other Þing[124]. There was, it must be
noted, no territorial circumscription corresponding to the Þing. Land
had nothing to do with the position held by the Goði to the Þingmen, and
herein, as well as in the absence of the relation of commendation and
homage, we see a capital difference between this system and feudality.
Nor was the post of Goði a place whence much emolument could be drawn.
The Þingmen were indeed required to pay a sort of tax called the temple
toll (_hoftollr_), but this did no more than meet the expenses to which
the Goði was put in keeping up the temple, and feasting those who came
to the sacrifices; it gave him no revenue which he could use to extend
his authority. Accordingly, the Goðorð was regarded as implying power
rather than property, and was not (after the introduction of
Christianity) liable to the payment of tithe. A curious feature of the
office was its alienability. Probably because it had arisen out of the
ownership of the temple, it was regarded as a piece of private property
which could be transferred by way of sale or gift, and could be vested
in several persons jointly. And similarly a number of Goðorðs might by
inheritance or purchase become vested in the same person.
-----
Footnote 123:
It is true that as the Sagas whence we draw our knowledge of the Goði
were all written down at a time when heathenism had vanished, it is
possible that they may not fully represent the original character of
the office.
Footnote 124:
The illustrious Konrad Maurer, to whose learned researches and sound
judgement every one who writes about the constitutional antiquities of
Iceland must feel infinitely indebted, thinks that the name of Goði
was used in Norway before the emigration to Iceland, though probably
the priest was there a less important person than he became in
Iceland, where his custody of the temple put him to some extent in the
position held in the Norwegian motherland by the hereditary chieftain,
who was in Norway the natural president of the local Thing.
Those who desire to study the early history of Iceland may be referred
to the writings of Dr. Maurer, and especially to his _Island bis zum
Untergange des Freistaats_ (Munich, 1874), and his _Beiträge zur
Rechtsgeschichte des Germanischen Nordens_ (Munich, 1852).
-----
Thus in the years immediately following the immigration there sprang up
round the coasts of Iceland a great number of petty, unconnected and
loosely aggregated groups of settlers. We must not venture to call them
states, scarcely even communities, not principalities, such as those
which were beginning to spring up in Western Europe, not in a strict
sense republics, yet nearer to republics than to principalities,
organized, so far as they were organized at all, chiefly for the
purposes of justice, and particularly for the exaction of fines for
homicide, but with no settled plan of government, no written laws—if
indeed writing was yet in use at all—no defined territory, and a
comparatively weak cohesion among their own members, the Thingmen. The
really effective tie was, in those ages, the tie of kindred; and the
Þingmen of the same Goði were not kinsfolk, were not a clan or sept,
like the Celtic communities of Scotland and Ireland. That tie was strong
enough to involve a whole district in the blood-feud of a single man.
For when any member of a family was killed, it was the duty of his
nearest relatives to avenge his death, either by obtaining a full
compensation in money, for which, if the offender refused to pay it, a
lawsuit was brought in the Þing, or else by slaying the murderer or some
member of his family. Thus a feud, like a _Vendetta_ in Corsica or in
Eastern Kentucky, might go on from generation to generation, each act of
revenge drawing others in its train, and tending to draw more and more
families into the feud, because when fights took place, the friends of
each party often joined, and if some were killed, their relatives had a
new blood-claim to prosecute.
Between the different communities that had thus sprung up there was no
political tie whatever. There did not as yet exist any Icelandic nation,
much less any common Icelandic State of which all the communities felt
themselves members. Each was an independent body; and if a dispute arose
between the members of two different Þings, there was no means of
adjusting it except by voluntary submission to the award of some other
Þing or else by open war. Seeing that slayings and plunderings and
burnings were everyday occurrences in this fierce race, where Vikingry
(_i.e._ piracy) was the most honoured pursuit, such cases were very
frequent, especially as to take revenge for a kinsman’s death was deemed
a sacred duty.