During not less than five hundred years the Slav republic, greater in extent than any other except our own, maintained intact the freedom of its barbaric founders, the emigrant Slavs who ended their wanderings by the borders of the lakes. Its conquest by the Mongols is one of the mournfulest chapters in history. An avenging though inadequate sequel to it is “The flight of a Tartar Tribe” as recorded by DeQuincey.[B]
“To live is not merely to breath, it is to act; it is to make use of our organs, senses, faculties, of all those parts of ourselves which give us the feeling of existence. The man who has lived longest is not the man who has counted most years, but he who has enjoyed life most. Such a one was buried a hundred years old, but he was dead from his birth. He would have gained by dying young; at least he would have lived till that time.”—_Rousseau._
[A] In the Baltic, midway between Russia and Sweden.
A GLANCE AT THE HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF SCANDINAVIA.
We have reserved to the last to speak of the religious books of the early Norsemen,—the Elder and the Younger Edda.
The Elder Edda, it has been often said, is the Old Testament of the Norseman’s faith. This is not because of its surpassing age, for the Younger Edda was compiled perhaps as early. The name was suggested because, in the first place, it is composed mostly in verse. It also tells the story of man’s creation, and the limit of his existence on the earth; it prophesies the final destruction of the universe and the genesis of a new heaven and a new earth. It is not a religious history of mankind in early ages; it is rather a biography of the gods, a register of their exploits and wisdom. In its present form it dates probably from the middle of the thirteenth century, but no one knows when its different parts were first composed. It consists of various distinct treatises, which were never united or considered together, until they had almost perished from the memory of the race. After the Scandinavians ceased to be idolaters, the old stories about Thor and Odin lost their charm, and were at length forgotten; only in the far off and dreary Iceland they were still told to enliven the winter evenings, and keep up the memory of life in the old Fatherland of Scandinavia. Even here they began to drop out of mind, when some quaint clerk put what he could remember of them together under the name of Edda (or “great-grandmother”). Some of the chapters are imperfect and fragmentary, showing they were caught and fixed in writing in the nick of time. There are many difficulties in the interpretation, and hints abound that the compiler took liberties with his materials and somewhat idealized his version. It was a Christian hand which copied out the legends, and here and there it wrote Christian sentiments and thought.