The condition of society is peculiar absence of
towns, social equality, no abject poverty or great wealth, rarity
of crime, making it easy for the whole country to be administered
as a co-operative commonwealth without the great and striking
changes rendered necessary by more complicated systems.
Iceland. has always borne a high name for learning and
literature; on both sides of their descent people inherited
special poetic power. Some of older Eddaic fragments attest the
great reach and deep overpowering strength of imagination
possessed by their Norse ancestors; and they themselves had been
quickened by a new leaven. During the first generations of the
"land-taking" a great school of poetry which had arisen among the
Norsemen of the Western Isles was brought by them to Iceland.
(11) The poems then produced are quite beyond parallel with
those of any Teutonic language for centuries after their date,
which lay between the beginning of the ninth and the end of the
tenth centuries.
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