Note 891 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

The concomitant of isolation is protection. Though this protection, if the result of extreme isolation, may mean an early cessation of development, history shows that in the lower stages of civilization, when the social organism is small and weak, and its germs of progress easily blighted, islands offer the sheltered environment in which imported flowers of culture not only survive but improve; in less protected fields they deteriorate or disappear. When learning and Christianity had been almost wiped out on the continent of Europe by the ravages of barbarian invasion between 450 and 800 A. D., in Ireland they grew and flourished. In the seventh and eighth centuries, the high scholarship of the Irish monks and their enthusiastic love of learning for its own sake drew to their schools students of the noblest rank from both England and France.891 It was from Irish teachers that the Picts of Scotland and the Angles of northern England received their first lessons in Christianity. These fixed their mission stations again on islands, on Iona off southwestern Scotland and on Lindisfarne or Holy Isle near the east coast of Northumbria.892 It was in the protected environment of the medieval Iceland that Scandinavian literature reached its highest development.