It represents only the result of human experience in society, the wisdom that men get by contact with each other, the results of familiarity with right and wrong.

By studying the proverbs of a people, you can always make a very good guess as to whether you could live comfortably among them or not.
Froude, in one of his sketches of travel in Norway, made the excellent observation that if we could suddenly go back to the time of the terrible sea-kings, if we could revisit to-day the homes of the old Northern pirates, and find them exactly as they were one thousand or fifteen hundred years ago, we should find them very much like the modern Englishmen--big, simple, silent men, concealing a great deal of shrewdness under an aspect of simplicity.

The teachings of the "Havamal" give great force to this supposition.

The book must have been known in some form to the early English--or at least the verses composing it (it is all written in verse); and as I have already said, the morals of the old English, as well as their character, differed very little from those of the men of the still further North, with whom they mingled and intermarried freely, both before and after the Danish conquest, when for one moment England and Sweden were one kingdom.
Of course you must remember that Northern society was a very terrible thing in some ways.

Every man carried his life in his hands; every farmer kept sword and spear at his side even in his own fields; and every man expected to die fighting.