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66 THE VIKING PERIOD
Conditions in Iceland were especially favourable to the
development of the art of story-telling, owing partly to the
isolated position of the country itself and to the difficulties
of communication across the wide tracts of land separating
the various settlements within it, partly also to the love of
travel which characterised its inhabitants. In Icelandic
literature the recital of stories is mentioned in connection
with public meetings such as the annual general assembly
(Althingi) and with social gatherings at the "winter-
nights," the chief season for hospitality in Iceland, when
travellers had returned from abroad.
The Icelanders were famous, too, for the cultivation of
poetry. This art was evidently much practised in Norway
in early times, but we hear of hardly any Norwegian poets
after Eyvindr (c. 980), whereas in Iceland poetry flourished
for a considerable period after this. Icelandic poets were
received with favour not only in Norway, but elsewhere,
for instance, in England and Ireland. It has been stated
that sagas dealing with the early part of the tenth century
owe a good deal to poetry, while stories relating to times
earlier than the settlement of Iceland are often almost
entirely dependent on poetic sources. Moreover, the culti-
vation of poetry probably contributed very largely to the
development of the faculty of story-telling, and the two
arts may have been practised by the same person. On this
point, however, we have no precise information.
II.
Yet the remarkable fact that this faculty of story-telling
was peculiar to the Icelanders alone among the Teutonic
peoples still remains to be explained. It can hardly be
without significance that the only parallel in Europe for
such a form of literature is to be found in Ireland.
From the allusions to this type of composition in old
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