SCANDINAVIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. The language which was spoken durine.the heathen ages in all the northern or Scandinavian lands, and which, in accord ance with traditionary belief, had been introduced by Odin and his companiens. when the Gothic tribes supplanted the morn ancient races of the Finns and Lapps, is always referred to by the oldest authorities either us the Doask tauga, "Danish tongue," or as the .2V9rrirena. "Norse." We never hear of the "Swedish" or "Gothic tongue," and although different dialects no doubt existed, from an early period, among the Scandi navian people, it is certain that substantially the same language was spoken by the Northmen generally till the 11th century. According to recent inquiries, the nice of the Northmen, before their settlement in Sweden and Norway, was divided into 1111 eastern and western branch, the former of which is supposed to have used the old lan guage of Norway and Iceland, and the latter the Swedish and Danish dialects. These two divisions of the race had entered Scandinavia by different routes, the eastern having passed along the gulf of Bothnia, through the country of the Finns and Lapps, while the western branch had crossed from Russia to the Aland islands, and spread from thence southward and westward; and it seems natural to infer that in their respective lines of migration they may have incorporated into their own speech some of the special character istics that belonged to the language of the peoples with whom they come in contact. But the differences thus introduced could not have been important, for we find the same lan guage employed in the several most ancient laws of the different people of Scandinavia, while the two Eddas (q.v.)—the oldest monuments of Scandinavian speech—which were in Iceland, whither the Northmen had carried their language on their settlement in the island in the Dth c., give evidence of an almost complete identity of local and personal names. his unity of language is further proved by the agreement which is found to exist in all runic inscriptions, from Gleswick to the northern parts of Sweden, and from Zealand to the western shores of Iceland. All monuments of this old North
ern tongue would, however, have been lost to us, had not the Norrwmt or Norwegian form of it been carefully preserved and cultivated in Iceland through the short songs (ldjud or quida)rehting to the deeds of the gods and heroes of the north, which had existed as early probably as the 7th c., and had passed with the religion and usages of Norway to the new colony. After the introduction of Christianity into Iceland in the year 1000, schools were founded there, classic literature was cultivated, and Roman characters were adopted for the writing of the national tongue, but this did not interfere with the zeal with which the national laws and poems were collected and studied by native scholars. This literary activity continued unabated till the 13th c., when the republic of Iceland, after having long been distracted by the dissensions of the rival aristocratic families of the island, was conquered by Mikan VI., king of Norway. Since 1380, Iceland has formed part of the Danish dominions, and although since that period the colonists have partly succumbed to the cramping influences of the subordinate and dependent conditions in which they have been placed; the distance from the mother-country, and the with which the people cling to all memorials of their former history, have enabled them to preserve their language so unchanged, that the Icelander of the present day can read the sagas of a thousand years since, and still writes in the same phraseology that his forefathers used ages ago. But while the old Scandinavian tongue was thus preserved in the far-distant colonyy, it had undergone great changes in Norway; and when, by the union of Calmar in 1880, the latter country was united to Denmark, the Danish form of speech, that had in the meanwhile been changing under the modifying influences due to to the intrduction of Latin and to contact with other nations, supplanted the Not wegian language, which thenceforth being banished from the pulpit, the law courts, and from literature, split up into numerous dialects peculiar to special valleys and fijords, but unknown in the larger towns.