Norwegian Life | Page 5

a feast, and the Earl of More cut his hair,
which had not been cut or combed for ten years, and gave him the name
of Fairhaired. Harald shortly afterward married Gyda.
From this time on, the history of Norway for nearly three hundred years
consists mainly in internecine warfare among the various claimants of
the throne, and the result of all this warfare was not only to exhaust the
material resources of the people, but to drive a large proportion of the
population to make viking excursions to win land elsewhere, and also
to make peaceable settlements in other countries. Iceland was settled by
the leading men of Norway in Harald the Fairhaired's reign because
they would not submit to his rule and therefore emigrated to a land
where they could rule. In 912 Duke Rollo with a large following
conquered Normandy and settled there with many of his countrymen.
As the result of over three centuries of foreign and domestic war,
Norway and her people and her industries were prostrate when in 1389
Queen Margaret of Denmark claimed the succession to the throne of
Norway for her son Eric of Pomerania. The council of Norway and the
people were willing to accept a union with a more populous country

under a powerful sovereign in order to obtain peace and reestablish
order and prosperity. Norway had not been conquered by Denmark, and
the union was supposed to be equal. The Danish sovereigns, however,
without directly interfering with the local laws and usages of the people
of Norway, filled all the executive and administrative offices in
Norway with Danes; the important commands in the army were also
given exclusively to them. The result was that the interpretation and
execution of the laws of the land were in the hands of foreigners, and
Norway became and remained for four hundred years a province of
Denmark and unable to throw off the yoke because her army was in the
control and command of her oppressor, and her material resources
inadequate to wage successful war against him.
Like Norway, the most that we know of prehistoric times in Sweden we
gather from the early sagas, which are more or less faulty in their
statements, romantic and tragic though they be. Like the Norwegians,
the early Swedes are reported to have migrated from Asia under the
leadership of a chief who called himself Odin. And for centuries under
different kings and queens, the romantic and tragic story of Sweden
goes on to form at last her authentic history. In this brief survey we can
not go into details, and its history is very much the same as that of
Norway, except that Sweden was oftener her own mistress and at
longer intervals.
The sources of Swedish history during the first two centuries of the
Middle Ages are very meager. This is a deplorable fact, for during that
period Sweden passed through a great and thorough development, the
various stages of which consequently are not easily traced. Before the
year 1060, Sweden is an Old Teutonic state, certainly of later form and
larger compass than the earliest of such, but with its democracy and its
elective kingdom preserved. The older Sweden was, in regard to its
constitution, a rudimentary union of states. The realm had come into
existence through the cunning and violence of the king of the Sviar,
who made way with the kings of the respective lands, making their
communities pay homage to him. No change in the interior affairs of
the different lands was thereby effected; they lost their outward
political independence, but remained mutually on terms of perfect

equality. They were united only through the king, who was the only
center for the government of the union. No province had
constitutionally more importance than the rest, no supremacy by one
over the other existed. On this historic basis the Swedish realm was
built, and rested firmly until the commencement of the Middle Ages. In
the Old Swedish state-organism the various parts thus possessed a high
degree of individualized and pulsating life; the empire as a whole was
also powerful, although the royal dignity was its only institution. The
king was the outward tie which bound the provinces together; besides
him there was no power of state which embraced the whole realm. The
affairs of state were decided upon by the king alone, as regard to war,
or he had to gather the opinion of the Thing in each province, as any
imperial representation did not exist and was entirely unknown, both in
the modern sense and in the form of one provincial, or sectional,
assembly deciding for all the others. In society there existed no classes.
It was a democracy of free men, the slaves and free men enjoying no
rights. The first