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LIFE OF CHARLES HALIDAY. lii
It was not until the twelfth century that they made use of
written characters and surprised the world with the beauty
and accuracy of their sagas.
Critics of the most competent taste have praised their gongs and
beauty ; their truth and accuracy is confirmed by contem-
porary chronicles of Ireland, England, and Wales.
Before the introduction of writing into their
original
country, or into the island of their adoption, the settlers carried
with them thither the songs or rhymes which contained the
history of their country. For at first, in the days before
writing, everything was necessarily in rhyme, as there was
no other way of recording the smallest history, memory
without such aid being too treacherous.
Such was the literature of the rhapsodists of ancient
Greece, and thus were recorded the genealogies of the gods,
and even precepts of morality by Hesiod, and thus was pre-
served the history of the early Greeks by Homer. After their
settlement in Iceland the Norsemen, their sons and descen-
dants, brought thither fresh news of the old country, acquired
in their yearly voyages to Norway as traders or otherwise. 1
These they put into sagas or tales ;
or the scalds, the profes-
sional oral chroniclers, recited them at banquets and public
meetings, interspersing in their recitals fragments of ancient
.verse to adorn and enliven them, a practice they probably
learned in Ireland. For it will be seen how regularly this
was the Irish practice by turning to the Annals of the Four
Masters, or to the Wars of the Gaedhil with the Gaill.
But having learned so much from their intercourse with
the Irish, it may seem strange that they did not adopt the
practice of writing, which had been in use in Ireland from
the introduction there of the Roman alphabet by Saint
Patrick (A.D. 450). For that there was no use of writing
in Iceland, or even of an alphabet, is an admitted fact by all
1 See Series Dynastarum et De historiarum Islandicarra funda-
Regutn Daniae, &c., per Thormo- mentis ae authoritate, pp. 49-61 ;
duin Torfofum, Liber L, cap. 6. 4to, Ilavniae, 1702.