The Heimskringla

By: Sturluson, Snorri

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: internal or collateral evidence, but does not affect their literary value as the compositions, during five centuries, of the Northmen, and as such to be compared with the compositions, during the same five centuries, of the cognate Anglo-Saxon people. It is of great importance, however, to examine the value, as historical documents, of these compositions. The early history of every people can only have been preserved by traditionary stories, songs, ballads, until the age when they were fixed by writing. The early history of Rome, for many centuries, has had no other foundation than such a saga-literature as this of the Northmen. Homer, whether the Iliad and Odyssey be the works of one mind or of several, has had traditionary accounts as the historical foundation and authority for the events and personages he celebrates. Snorre Sturlason has done for the history of the Northmen what Livy did for the history of the Romans. The traditionary works of the predecessors of Livy in his historical field, the sagas of the Romans, have unfortunately not reached us. The ancient Roman writers themselves regret that the songs and legends, the sagas from which the historical accounts of their ancestors are derived, and which it appears from two passages in Cicero Gravissimus auctor in ' Oiiginibus' dixit Cato, morem apud majores himc epulamni fuisse, ut deinceps, qui accubarent, canerent ad tibiara clarorum virorum laudes atque virtu tea.'Cicero, Tusc. Quczst. iv. 3. Utinam exstarent ilia carniina quro multis sseculis ante swam rctatem in epulis cssc cantitata a singulis ccmvivis do clarorum virorum laudibus in ' Originibus' scriptum reliquit Cato.'Ciccr. Brutus, cap. xix. See on this subject the Preface to Lays of Ancient Rome. By Thomas Babington Macaulay. London: Longman and Co....

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0217083455
• ISBN13: 9780217083454
• Release Date: May 2014
• Publisher: General Books LLC
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"