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