Brooklyn Museum Quarterly . ing in a separate valleyand meeting only once a year for the Althing. Some-thing similar continues to the present day in the small SwissAlpine cantons. During the long, dark winter montlis theyhad leisure to cultivate their poetic gifts, this being their onlydiversion, and thus the Sagas and Eddas arose. This love of liberty and of individual action was asmuch a fact in Normandy as elsewhere. It resulted therein a society of violent passions, insatiable in the need ofphysical movement, incessant in conflict. Castles were aterrible reality, and no sentimental dream;
Brooklyn Museum Quarterly . ing in a separate valleyand meeting only once a year for the Althing. Some-thing similar continues to the present day in the small SwissAlpine cantons. During the long, dark winter montlis theyhad leisure to cultivate their poetic gifts, this being their onlydiversion, and thus the Sagas and Eddas arose. This love of liberty and of individual action was asmuch a fact in Normandy as elsewhere. It resulted therein a society of violent passions, insatiable in the need ofphysical movement, incessant in conflict. Castles were aterrible reality, and no sentimental dream; nests of \iilturesin which were men of iron. Every one sought his right inmight, and judicial c()ni])ats decided lawsuits, says F. Lau-rent. Strange to say, that whereas the peace of the Romanempire has deteriorated the peoples, this rude existence, ifit destroyed individual lives, regenerated and reproducedsociety, and mediaeval life elaborated the future Europeannationalities. This incessant movement and individualism, 37. AON Jlho. NORMAN KNIGHTHORSEBACK WITH SPEAR AND CHAIN MAIL. in which nothing was repeated, isindeed the cause of the characteristicquahties of Gothic art, not foundeither in the Germanic empire, norin Southern France or Italy; stillless in the Byzantine empire. Personal liherty was then anessential of the Northern ideal, andto it was joined the honor given towomen, a characteristic of Normanand Anglo-Norman society, as op-posed to the French. The Valkyries,or goddesses of war in the Scandinavian mythology, whoselected the heroes worthy of entering the Hall of Odinafter death, and the prophetesses (Vala), who lived amongmen, are evidences of this honor. The word queen,common to ladies in Viking society, has come down in though it is limited now to theIMalory uses the word in its originalsense as late as the fifteenth cen-tury. Still another point is the honorpaid to the handicrafts both among theNorthmen and the Normans. In Scan-dinavia and Iceland men had t
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