that the workings of the human fancy will be found to bear a strong family likeness wherever the circumstances and condition of the race are nearly similar. To use the beautiful language of an author, himself at once a poet and a philosopher,-❝ Fiction travels on still lighter wings [than science], and scatters the seeds of her wild flowers imperceptibly over the world, until they surprise us by springing up with similarity in regions the most remotely divided."* The popular mythology and superstitions of every age and country, not even excepting the classic nations of antiquity, are interwoven together, and constantly present a perpetual recurrence.of the same fictions closely connected with the moral and physical being of man, and which have ever furnished to the romancer and the poet their favourite subjects and their choicest imagery. The Norman minstrels, appropriated the fictions and personages they found already accredited among the people for whom they versified-the British king Arthur, his fabled knights of the Round Table, and the enchanter Merlin, with his wonderful prophecies-the Frankish monarch Charlemagne and his paladins and the rich inventions of oriental fancy, borrowed from the Arabs and the Moors. The Eddaic and heroic lays of the North were to them unknown, but the spirit of the muse, which had inspired these ancient songs, still continued its secret workings in the national character. The Northern romantic Sagas of the middle ages, which borrow their fictions and their imagery from the popular traditions of the South, bear a strong similitude to the romances and fabliaux of the NormanFrench.

Thomas Campbell.

Not so with their history. Wide indeed is the interval between the Northern annalists, who wrote in their vernacular tongue from the tenth to the thirteenth century inclusive, Are-frode, Snorre Sturleson, or even the monkish biographers of Olaf Tryggvason,* and such chroniclers as Dudon de St Quentin, William de Jumiege, and Robert Wace, who wrote during the same period, under the patronage of the dukes of Normandy and kings of England, of the Norman line. The rhymed chronicle, composed by the latter is, however, justly appreciated as a monument of the language and as an historical document, incorrect indeed in many of its details, but highly valuable as a faithful picture of the state of society in the middle ages. Wace was born in the island of Jersey, towards the commencement of the twelfth century, and died in England in 1184. Consequently he was a cotemporary of the three Henries, kings of England and dukes of Normandy during that century. He received his education at Caen, and afterwards fixed his residence in that town, where Henry I. usually held his Norman court. Among other works, he translated into Norman-French, from the Latin of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the old British history of Brut-y-Brerhined, which Wace published,

To these may be added another very curious book, the Kongs-SkuggSio, or Speculum Regale, written by an anonymous author (supposed to be king Sverre) in Norway, towards the end of the twelfth century, and which, though not strictly an historical work, is full of the most valuable information respecting the state of society, and the economy of human life, in the countries of the North, during the middle ages, and to which the cotemporary vernacular literature of no other European nation can furnish a parallel.

under the title of Brut d'Angleterre, in the form of a poem, containing 18,000 verses of eight syllables. But his most important work, and the one which has the closest connexion with the present subject, is the Roman de Rou, or history of the dukes of Normandy, from the first invasion by Rollo down to the sixth year of king Henry I. This historical poem, written under the patronage of Henry II, contains exactly 16,547 verses. The first or introductory part, is written in verses of eight syllables, and contains the history of the first invasions of France and England by the Northmen or Danes. The second, in Alexandrine verses, includes the history of duke Rollo or Rou; the third, in the same metre, the history of William Long-Sword and duke Richard I. his son and the fourth, in the same octo-syllabic measure with the first, contains the sequel of the history of Richard, and that of his successors to the year 1106.

Robert Wace generally follows his predecessors, Dudon and William of Jumieges as his guides in the pursuit of historical facts. He is less credulous than these eclesiastical writers, but agrees with them in representing the primitive Normans as ferocious barbarians, destitute of every redeeming virtue. No wonder that the clergy, both in France and England, who were the principal sufferers by their cruel incursions, and who (to use their own expressions) "wrote amidst the smoke of their burning monasteries, with a trembling hand, and their blood frozen with fear,"-should be unable or unwilling to do justice to the heroic qualities of their Pagan conquerors.* But Wace had given animation and colour to the lifeless narratives of his predecessors,

and if there is not much of the soul of poetry or the philosophic spirit of history in this rhymed chronicle, at least he pourtrays with fidelity the men and manners of the time, and even his most incredible legends are valuable proofs of popular opinion.*

Benedict St Maur was another of the ecclesiastics retained by Henry II. to write the history of his predecessors, dukes of Normandy and kings of England. His chronicle in verse is principally translated from the monkish historians above-mentioned, with additions from some other unknown sources, and contains about 46,000 verses. His style is more antiquated and difficult to be understood than that of Robert Wace, which is probably to be attributed to his having been educated in that part of Normandy where the old Danish language was longest preserved.†

• The first part of the Roman de Rou was published, with a Danish translation in verse by Prof. Brondsted, at Copenhagen in 1817-18. The text of the entire work has been since published in a beautiful edition at Rouen in Normandy, in 1827, in two 8vo. vols. with valuable notes by M. Pluquet.

The only existing MS. of this rhymed chronicle is that now preserved in the British Museum. M. Depping has published a considerable portion of it in his excellent work.

2 K

CHAPTER XIII.

Reign of Gorm the Old in Denmark.-Constitution of the monarchy.-Free spirit of the people.-Expulsion of Erik Blodaxe from Norway.-His death and Drapa.-Hakon the Good attempts to introduce Christianity into Norway. Opposition of the nation.-Sigurd Jarl.-Death of Hakon.The Hakonar-mal, or elegiac lay of Hakon.

WHILST the Norman adventurers were engaged in these distant and eventful expeditions in the southern countries of Europe, an important revolution had occurred in Denmark, similar to that which happened about the same period in Norway under Harald Fairhaired, and in Sweden under king Erik Edmundson.

Gorm, the son of Harde-Knud I., surnamed the Old, from the length of his reign, was enabled, by a similar concurrence of circumstances, to subdue the petty kings of Jutland, and to unite into one state the different countries which now constitute the Danish monarchy, including the provinces of Scania and Halland, since ceded to Sweden by the treaty of 1720. This change was facilitated both in Norway and Denmark by the absence of many of the petty kings, Jarls, and other principal chieftains, in distant sea-roving and other predatory expeditions. Gorm had distinguished himself in his early youth for his wild, adventurous spirit in common with the other Norman invaders of