Book I is entitled "Sigmund" and the description is set at the head of

THE INFLUENCE OF OLD NORSE LITERATURE UPON ENGLISH LITERATURE

by

CONRAD HJALMAR NORDBY

1901

Deyr fé

deyja frændr,

deyr siálfr it sama;

en orðstírr

deyr aldrigi

hveim er sér góðan getr.

_Hávamál_, 75.

Cattle die,

kindred die,

we ourselves also die;

but the fair fame

never dies

of him who has earned it.

Thorpe's _Edda_.

PREFATORY NOTE.

The present publication is the only literary work left by its author.

Unfortunately it lacks a few pages which, as his manuscript shows, he

intended to add, and it also failed to receive his final revision. His

friends have nevertheless deemed it expedient to publish the result of

his studies conducted with so much ardor, in order that some memorial of

his life and work should remain for the wider public. To those

acquainted with him, no written words can represent the charm of his

personality or give anything approaching an adequate impression of his

ability and strength of character.

Conrad Hjalmar Nordby was born September 20, 1867, at Christiania,

Norway. At the age of four he was brought to New York, where he was

educated in the public schools. He was graduated from the College of the

City of New York in 1886. From December of that year to June, 1893, he

taught in Grammar School No. 55, and in September, 1893, he was called

to his Alma Mater as Tutor in English. He was promoted to the rank of

Instructor in 1897, a position which he held at the time of his death.

He died in St. Luke's Hospital, October 28, 1900. In October, 1894, he

began his studies in the School of Philosophy of Columbia University,

taking courses in Philosophy and Education under Professor Nicholas

Murray Butler, and in Germanic Literatures and Germanic Philology under

Professors Boyesen, William H. Carpenter and Calvin Thomas. It was under

the guidance of Professor Carpenter that the present work was conceived

and executed.

Such a brief outline of Mr. Nordby's career can, however, give but an

imperfect view of his activities, while it gives none at all of his

influence. He was a teacher who impressed his personality, not only upon

his students, but upon all who knew him. In his character were united

force and refinement, firmness and geniality. In his earnest work with

his pupils, in his lectures to the teachers of the New York Public

Schools and to other audiences, in his personal influence upon all with

whom he came in contact, he spread the taste for beauty, both of poetry

and of life. When his body was carried to the grave, the grief was not

confined to a few intimate friends; all who had known him felt that

something noble and beautiful had vanished from their lives.

In this regard his career was, indeed, rich in achievement, but when we

consider what, with his large equipment, he might have done in the world

of scholarship, the promise, so untimely blighted, seems even richer.

From early youth he had been a true lover of books. To him they were not

dead things; they palpitated with the life blood of master spirits. The

enthusiasm for William Morris displayed in the present essay is typical

of his feeling for all that he considered best in literature. Such an

enthusiasm, communicated to those about him, rendered him a vital force

in every company where works of creative genius could be a theme of

conversation.

A love of nature and of art accompanied and reinforced this love of

literature; and all combined to produce the effect of wholesome purity

and elevation which continually emanated from him. His influence, in

fact, was largely of that pervasive sort which depends, not on any

special word uttered, and above all, not on any preachment, but upon the

entire character and life of the man. It was for this reason that his

modesty never concealed his strength. He shrunk above all things from

pushing himself forward and demanding public notice, and yet few ever

met him without feeling the force of character that lay behind his

gentle and almost retiring demeanor. It was easy to recognize that here

was a man, self-centered and whole.

In a discourse pronounced at a memorial meeting, the Rev. John Coleman

Adams justly said: "If I wished to set before my boy a type of what is

best and most lovable in the American youth, I think I could find no

more admirable character than that of Conrad Hjalmar Nordby. A young man

of the people, with all their unexhausted force, vitality and

enthusiasm; a man of simple aims and honest ways; as chivalrous and

high-minded as any knight of old; as pure in life as a woman; at once

gentle and brave, strong and sweet, just and loving; upright, but no

Pharisee; earnest, but never sanctimonious; who took his work as a

pleasure, and his pleasure as an innocent joy; a friend to be coveted; a

disciple such as the Saviour must have loved; a true son of God, who

dwelt in the Father's house. Of such youth our land may well be proud;

and no man need speak despairingly of a nation whose life and

institutions can ripen such a fruit."

L.F.M.

COLLEGE OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK,

May 15, 1901.

INTRODUCTORY.

It should not be hard for the general reader to understand that the

influence which is the theme of this dissertation is real and

explicable. If he will but call the roll of his favorite heroes, he will

find Sigurd there. In his gallery of wondrous women, he certainly

cherishes Brynhild. These poetic creations belong to the

English-speaking race, because they belong to the world. And if one will

but recall the close kinship of the Icelandic and the Anglo-Saxon

languages, he will not find it strange that the spirit of the old Norse

sagas lives again in our English song and story.

The survey that this essay takes begins with Thomas Gray (1716-1771),

and comes down to the present day. It finds the fullest measure of the

old Norse poetic spirit in William Morris (1834-1896), and an increasing

interest and delight in it as we come toward our own time. The

enterprise of learned societies and enlightened book publishers has

spread a knowledge of Icelandic literature among the reading classes of

the present day; but the taste for it is not to be accounted for in the

same way. That is of nobler birth than of erudition or commercial pride.

Is it not another expression of that changed feeling for the things that

pertain to the common people, which distinguishes our century from the

last? The historian no longer limits his study to camp and court; the

poet deigns to leave the drawing-room and library for humbler scenes.

Folk-lore is now dignified into a science. The touch of nature has made

the whole world kin, and our highly civilized century is moved by the

records of the passions of the earlier society.

This change in taste was long in coming, and the emotional phase of it

has preceded the intellectual. It is interesting to note that Gray and

Morris both failed to carry their public with them all the way. Gray,

the most cultured man of his time, produced art forms totally different

from those in vogue, and Walpole[1] said of these forms: "Gray has

added to his poems three ancient odes from Norway and Wales ... they are

not interesting, and do not, like his other poems, touch any passion....

Who can care through what horrors a Runic savage arrived at all the joys

and glories they could conceive--the supreme felicity of boozing ale out

of the skull of an enemy in Odin's Hall?"

Morris, the most versatile man of his time, found plenty of praise for

his art work, until he preached social reform to Englishmen. Thereafter

the art of William Morris was not so highly esteemed, and the best poet

in England failed to attain the laurel on the death of Tennyson.

Of this change of taste more will be said as this essay is developed.

These introductory words must not be left, however, without an

explanation of the word "Influence," as it is used in the subject-title.

This paper will not undertake to prove that the course of English

literature was diverted into new channels by the introduction of Old

Norse elements, or that its nature was materially changed thereby. We

find an expression and a justification of our present purpose in Richard

Price's Preface to the 1824 edition of Warton's "History of English

Poetry" (p. 15): "It was of importance to notice the successive

acquisitions, in the shape of translation or imitation, from the more

polished productions of Greece and Rome; and to mark the dawn of that

æra, which, by directing the human mind to the study of classical

antiquity, was to give a new impetus to science and literature, and by

the changes it introduced to effect a total revolution in the laws which

had previously governed them." Were Warton writing his history to-day,

he would have to account for later eras as well as for the Elizabethan,

and the method would be the same. How far the Old Norse literature has

helped to form these later eras it is not easy to say, but the

contributions may be counted up, and their literary value noted. These

are the commission of the present essay. When the record is finished, we

shall be in possession of information that may account for certain

considerable writers of our day, and certain tendencies of thought.

CONTENTS.

Prefatory Note

Introductory

I. The Body of Old Norse Literature

II. Through the Medium of Latin

Thomas Gray

The Sources of Gray's Knowledge

Sir William Temple

George Hickes

Thomas Percy

Thomas Warton

Drake and Mathias

Cottle and Herbert

Walter Scott

III. From the Sources Themselves

Richard Cleasby

Thomas Carlyle

Samuel Laing

Longfellow and Lowell

Matthew Arnold

George Webbe Dasent

Charles Kingsley

Edmund Gosse

IV. By the Hand of the Master

William Morris' works

" " " 1

" " " 2

" " " 3

" " " 4

" " " 5

" " " 6

" " " 7

" " " 8

V. In the Latter Days

Echoes of Iceland in Later Poets

Recent Translations

I.

THE BODY OF OLD NORSE LITERATURE.

First, let us understand what the Old Norse literature was that has been

sending out this constantly increasing influence into the world of

poetry.

It was in the last four decades of the ninth century of our era that

Norsemen began to leave their own country and set up new homes in

Iceland. The sixty years ending with 930 A.D. were devoted to taking up

the land, and the hundred years that ensued after that date were devoted

to quarreling about that land. These quarrels were the origin of the

Icelandic family sagas. The year 1000 brought Christianity to the

island, and the period from 1030 to 1120 were years of peace in which

stories of the former time passed from mouth to mouth. The next century

saw these stories take written form, and the period from 1220 to 1260

was the golden age of this literature. In 1264, Iceland passed under the

rule of Norway, and a decline of literature began, extending until 1400,

the end of literary production in Iceland. In the main, the authors of

Iceland are unknown[2].

There are several well-marked periods, therefore, in Icelandic literary

production. The earliest was devoted to poetry, Icelandic being no

different from most other languages in the precedence of that form.

Before the settlement of Iceland, the Norse lands were acquainted with

songs about gods and champions, written in a simple verse form. The

first settlers wrote down some of these, and forgot others. In the

_Codex Regius_, preserved in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, we have a

collection of these songs. This material was published in the

seventeenth century as the _Sæmundar Edda_, and came to be known as the

_Elder_ or _Poetic Edda_. Both titles are misnomers, for Sæmund had

nothing to do with the making of the book, and _Edda_ is a name

belonging to a book of later date and different purpose.

This work--not a product of the soil as folk-songs are--is the fountain

head of Old Norse mythology, and of Old Norse heroic legends. _Völuspá_

and _Hávamál_ are in this collection, and other songs that tell of Odin

and Baldur and Loki. The Helgi poems and the Völsung poems in their

earliest forms are also here.

A second class of poetry in this ancient literature is that called

"Skaldic." Some of this deals with mythical material, and some with

historical material. A few of the skalds are known to us by name,

because their lives were written down in later sagas. Egill

Skallagrímsson, known to all readers of English and Scotch antiquities,

Eyvind Skáldaspillir and Sigvat are of this group.

Poetic material that is very rich is found in Snorri Sturluson's work on

Old Norse poetics, entitled _The Edda_, and often referred to as the

_Younger_ or _Prose Edda_.

More valuable than the poetry is the prose of this literature,

especially the _Sagas_. The saga is a prose epic, characteristic of the

Norse countries. It records the life of a hero, told according to fixed

rules. As we have said, the sagas were based upon careers run in

Iceland's stormy time. They are both mythical and historical. In the

mythical group are, among others, the _Völsunga Saga_, the _Hervarar

Saga_, _Friðthjófs Saga_ and _Ragnar Loðbróks Saga_. In the historical

group, the flowering time of which was 1200-1270, we find, for example,

_Egils Saga_, _Eyrbyggja Saga_, _Laxdæla Saga_, _Grettis Saga_, _Njáls

Saga_. A branch of the historic sagas is the Kings' Sagas, in which we

find _Heimskringla_, the _Saga of Olaf Tryggvason_, the _Flatey Book_,

and others.

This sketch does not pretend to indicate the quantity of Old Norse

literature. An idea of that is obtained by considering the fact that

eleven columns of the ninth edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ are

devoted to recording the works of that body of writings.

II.

THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF LATIN.

THOMAS GRAY (1716-1771).

In the eighteenth century, Old Norse literature was the lore of

antiquarians. That it is not so to-day among English readers is due to a

line of writers, first of whom was Thomas Gray. In the thin volume of

his poetry, two pieces bear the sub-title: "An Ode. From the Norse

Tongue." These are "The Fatal Sisters," and "The Descent of Odin," both

written in 1761, though not published until 1768. These poems are among

the latest that Gray gave to the world, and are interesting aside from

our present purpose because they mark the limit of Gray's progress

toward Romanticism.

We are not accustomed to think of Gray as a Romantic poet, although we

know well that the movement away from the so-called Classicism was begun

long before he died. The Romantic element in his poetry is not obvious;

only the close observer detects it, and then only in a few of the poems.

The Pindaric odes exhibit a treatment that is Romantic, and the Norse

and Welsh adaptations are on subjects that are Romantic. But we must go

to his letters to find proof positive of his sympathy with the breaking

away from Classicism. Here are records of a love of outdoors that

reveled in mountain-climbing and the buffeting of storms. Here are

appreciations of Shakespeare and of Milton, the like of which were not

often proclaimed in his generation. Here is ecstatic admiration of

ballads and of the Ossian imitations, all so unfashionable in the

literary culture of the day. While dates disprove Lowell's statement in

his essay on Gray that "those anti-classical yearnings of Gray began

after he had ceased producing," it is certain that very little of his

poetic work expressed these yearnings. "Elegance, sweetness, pathos, or

even majesty he could achieve, but never that force which vibrates in

every verse of larger moulded men." Change Lowell's word "could" to

"did," and this sentence will serve our purpose here.

Our interest in Gray's Romanticism must confine itself to the two odes

from the Old Norse. It is to be noted that the first transplanting to

English poetry of Old Norse song came about through the scholar's

agency, not the poet's. It was Gray, the scholar, that made "The Descent

of Odin" and "The Fatal Sisters." They were intended to serve as

specimens of a forgotten literature in a history of English poetry. In

the "Advertisement" to "The Fatal Sisters" he tells how he came to give

up the plan: "The Author has long since drop'd his design, especially

after he heard, that it was already in the hands of a Person well

qualified to do it justice, both by his taste, and his researches into

antiquity." Thomas Warton's _History of English Poetry_ was the

execution of this design, but in that book no place was found for these

poems.

In his absurd _Life of Gray_, Dr. Johnson said: "His translations of

Northern and Welsh Poetry deserve praise: the imagery is preserved,

perhaps often improved, but the language is unlike the language of other

poets." There are more correct statements in this sentence, perhaps,

than in any other in the essay, but this is because ignorance sometimes

hits the truth. It is not likely that the poems would have been

understood without the preface and the explanatory notes, and these, in

a measure, made the reader interested in the literature from which they

were drawn. Gray called the pieces "dreadful songs," and so in very

truth they are. Strength is the dominant note, rude, barbaric strength,

and only the art of Gray saved it from condemnation. To-day, with so

many imitations from Old Norse to draw upon, we cannot point to a single

poem which preserves spirit and form as well as those of Gray. Take the

stanza:

Horror covers all the heath,

Clouds of carnage blot the sun,

Sisters, weave the web of death;

Sisters, cease, the work is done.

The strophe is perfect in every detail. Short lines, each ending a

sentence; alliteration; words that echo the sense, and just four strokes

to paint a picture which has an atmosphere that whisks you into its own

world incontinently. It is no wonder that writers of later days who have

tried similar imitations ascribe to Thomas Gray the mastership.

That this poet of the eighteenth century, who "equally despised what

was Greek and what was Gothic," should have entered so fully into the

spirit and letter of Old Norse poetry is little short of marvelous. If

Professor G.L. Kittredge had not gone so minutely into the question of

Gray's knowledge of Old Norse,[3] we might be pardoned for still

believing with Gosse[4] that the poet learned Icelandic in his later

life. Even after reading Professor Kittredge's essay, we cannot

understand how Gray could catch the metrical lilt of the Old Norse with

only a Latin version to transliterate the parallel Icelandic. We suspect

that Gray's knowledge was fuller than Professor Kittredge will allow,

although we must admit that superficial knowledge may coexist with a

fine interpretative spirit. Matthew Arnold's knowledge of Celtic

literature was meagre, yet he wrote memorably and beautifully on that

subject, as Celts themselves will acknowledge.[5]

THE SOURCES OF GRAY'S KNOWLEDGE.

It has already been said that only antiquarians had knowledge of things

Icelandic in Gray's time. Most of this knowledge was in Latin, of

course, in ponderous tomes with wonderful, long titles; and the list of

them is awe-inspiring. In all likelihood Gray did not use them all, but

he met references to them in the books he did consult. Professor

Kittredge mentions them in the paper already quoted, but they are here

arranged in the order of publication, and the list is lengthened to

include some books that were inspired by the interest in Gray's

experiments.

=1636= and =1651=. Wormius. _Seu Danica literatura antiquissima,

vulgo Gothica dicta, luci reddita opera Olai Wormii. Cui accessit de

prisca Danorum Poesi Dissertatio._ Hafniæ. 1636. Edit. II. 1651.

The essay on poetry contains interlinear Latin translations of the

_Epicedium_ of Ragnar Loðbrók, and of the _Drápa_ of Egill

Skallagrímsson. Bound with the second edition of 1651, and bearing the

date 1650, is: _Specimen Lexici runici, obscuriorum quarundam vocum, quæ

in priscis occurrunt historiis et poetis Danicis enodationem exhibens.

Collectum a Magno Olavio pastore Laufasiensi, ... nunc in ordinem

redactum, auctum et locupletatum ab Olao Wormio_. Hafniæ.

This glossary adduces illustrations from the great poems of Icelandic

literature. Thus early the names and forms of the ancient literature

were known.

=1665.= Resenius. _Edda Islandorum an. Chr. MCCXV islandice

conscripta per Snorronem Sturlæ Islandiæ. Nomophylacem nunc primum

islandice, danice et latine ... Petri Johannis Resenii_ ... Havniæ.

1665.

A second part contains a disquisition on the philosophy of the _Völuspá_

and the _Hávamál_.

=1670.= Sheringham. _De Anglorum Gentis Origine Disceptatio. Qua

eorum migrationes, variæ sedes, et ex parte res gestæ, a confusione

Linguarum, et dispersione Gentium, usque ad adventum eorum in Britanniam

investigantur; quædam de veterum Anglorum religione, Deorum cultu,

eorumque opinionibus de statu animæ post hanc vitam, explicantur._

_Authore_ Roberto Sheringhamo. Cantabrigiæ. 1670.

Chapter XII contains an account of Odin extracted from the _Edda_,

Snorri Sturluson and others.

=1679-92.= Temple. Two essays: "Of Heroic Virtue," "Of Poetry,"

contained in The Works of Sir William Temple. London. 1757. Vol. 3, pp.

304-429.

=1689.= Bartholinus. _Thomæ Bartholini Antiquitatum Danicarum de

causis contemptæ a Danis adhuc gentilibus mortis libri III ex vetustis

codicibus et monumentis hactenus ineditis congestæ._ Hafniæ. 1689.

The pages of this book are filled, with extracts from Old Norse sagas

and poetry which are translated into Latin. No student of the book could

fail to get a considerable knowledge of the spirit and the form of the

ancient literature.

=1691.= Verelius. _Index linguæ veteris Scytho-Scandicæ sive Gothicæ

ex vetusti ævi monumentis ... ed Rudbeck._ Upsalæ. 1691.

=1697=. Torfæus. _Orcades, seu rerum Orcadensium historiæ_. Havniæ.

1697.

=1697=. Perinskjöld. _Heimskringla, eller Snorre Sturlusons

Nordländske Konunga Sagor_. Stockholmiæ. 1697.

Contains Latin and Swedish translation.

=1705=. Hickes. _Linguarum Vett. Septentrionalium thesaurus

grammatico criticus et archæologicus_. Oxoniæ. 1703-5.

This work is discussed later.

=1716=. Dryden. _Miscellany Poems. Containing Variety of New

Translations of the Ancient Poets_.... Published by Mr. Dryden. London.

1716.

=1720=. Keysler. _Antiquitates selectæ septentrionales et Celticæ

quibus plurima loca conciliorum et capitularium explanantur, dogmata

theologiæ ethnicæ Celtarum gentiumque septentrionalium cum moribus et

institutis maiorum nostrorum circa idola, aras, oracula, templa, lucos,

sacerdotes, regum electiones, comitia et monumenta sepulchralia una cum

reliquiis gentilismi in coetibus christianorum ex monumentis potissimum

hactenus ineditis fuse perquiruntur._ _Autore_ Joh. Georgio Keysler.

Hannoveræ. 1720.

=1755=. Mallet. _Introduction à l'Histoire de Dannemarc où l'on

traite de la Réligion, des Lois, des Moeurs, et des Usages des Anciens

Danois. Par_ M. Mallet. Copenhague. 1755.

Discussed later.

=1756=. Mallet. _Monumens de la Mythologie et la Poësie des Celtes et

particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves ... Par_ M. Mallet. Copenhague.

1756.

=1763=. Percy. _Five Pieces of Runic Poetry translated from the

Islandic Language_. London. 1763.

This book is described on a later page.

=1763=. Blair. _A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the

Son of Fingal_. [By Hugh Blair.] London. 1763.

=1770=. Percy. _Northern Antiquities: or a description of the

Manners, Customs, Religion and Laws of the ancient_ _Danes, and other

Northern Nations; including these of our own Saxon Ancestors. With a

translation of the Edda or System of Runic Mythology, and other Pieces

from the Ancient Icelandic Tongue. Translated from M. Mallet's

Introduction à l'Histoire de Dannemarc_. London. 1770.

=1774=. Warton. _The History of English Poetry_. By Thomas Warton.

London. 1774-81.

In this book the prefatory essay entitled "On the Origin of Romantic

Fiction in Europe" is significant. It is treated at length later on.

SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE (1628-1699).

From the above list it appears that the earliest mention in the English

language of Icelandic literature was Sir William Temple's. The two

essays noted above have many references to Northern customs and songs.

Macaulay's praise of Temple's style is well deserved, and the slighting

remarks about the matter do not apply to the passages in evidence here.

Temple's acknowledgments to Wormius indicate the source of his

information, and it is a commentary upon the exactness of the

antiquarian's knowledge that so many of the statements in Temple's

essays are perfectly good to-day. Of course the terms "Runic" and

"Gothic" were misused, but so were they a century later. Odin is "the

first and great hero of the western Scythians; he led a mighty swarm of

the Getes, under the name of Goths, from the Asiatic Scythia into the

farthest northwest parts of Europe; he seated and spread his kingdom

round the whole Baltic sea, and over all the islands in it, and extended

it westward to the ocean and southward to the Elve."[6] Temple places

Odin's expedition at two thousand years before his own time, but he gets

many other facts right. Take this summing up of the old Norse belief as

an example:

"An opinion was fixed and general among them, that death was but the

entrance into another life; that all men who lived lazy and inactive

lives, and died natural deaths, by sickness, or by age, went into vast

caves under ground, all dark and miry, full of noisom creatures, usual

in such places, and there forever grovelled in endless stench and

misery. On the contrary, all who gave themselves to warlike actions and

enterprises, to the conquests of their neighbors, and slaughters of

enemies, and died in battle, or of violent deaths upon bold adventures

or resolutions, they went immediately to the vast hall or palace of

Odin, their god of war, who eternally kept open house for all such

guests, where they were entertained at infinite tables, in perpetual

feasts and mirth, carousing every man in bowls made of the skulls of

their enemies they had slain, according to which numbers, every one in

these mansions of pleasure was the most honoured and the best

entertained."[7]

Thus before Gray was born, Temple had written intelligently in English

of the salient features of the Old Norse mythology. Later in the same

essay, he recognized that some of the civil and political procedures of

his country were traceable to the Northmen, and, what is more to our

immediate purpose, he recognized the poetic value of Old Norse song. On

p. 358 occurs this paragraph:

"I am deceived, if in this sonnet (two stanzas of 'Regner Lodbrog'), and

a following ode of Scallogrim there be not a vein truly poetical, and in

its kind Pindaric, taking it with the allowance of the different

climates, fashions, opinions, and languages of such distant countries."

Temple certainly had no knowledge of Old Norse, and yet, in 1679, he

could write so of a poem which he had to read through the Latin. Sir

William had a wide knowledge and a fine appreciation of literature, and

an enthusiasm for its dissemination. He takes evident delight in telling

the fact that princes and kings of the olden time did high honor to

bards. He regrets that classic culture was snuffed out by a barbarous

people, but he rejoices that a new kind came to take its place. "Some of

it wanted not the true spirit of poetry in some degree, or that natural

inspiration which has been said to arise from some spark of poetical

fire wherewith particular men are born; and such as it was, it served

the turn, not only to please, but even to charm, the ignorant and

barbarous vulgar, where it was in use."[8]

It is proverbial that music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.

That savage music charms cultivated minds is not proverbial, but it is

nevertheless true. Here is Sir William Temple, scion of a cultured race,

bearing witness to the fact, and here is Gray, a life-long dweller in a

staid English university, endorsing it a half century later. As has been

intimated, this was unusual in the time in which they lived, when, in

Lowell's phrase, the "blight of propriety" was on all poetry. But it was

only the rude and savage in an unfamiliar literature that could give

pause in the age of Pope. The milder aspects of Old Norse song and saga

must await the stronger century to give them favor. "Behold, there was a

swarm of bees and honey in the carcass of the lion."

GEORGE HICKES (1642-1715).

The next book in the list that contains an English contribution to the

knowledge of our subject is the _Thesaurus_ of George Hickes. On p. 193

of Part I, there is a prose translation of "The Awakening of Angantyr,"

from the _Harvarar Saga_. Acknowledgment is given to Verelius for the

text of the poem, but Hickes seems to have chosen this poem as the gem

of the Saga. The translation is another proof of an antiquarian's taste

and judgment, and the reader does not wonder that it soon found a wider

audience through another publication. It was reprinted in the books of

1716 and 1770 in the above list. An extract or two will show that the

vigor of the old poem has not been altogether lost in the translation:

_Hervor_.--Awake Angantyr, Hervor the only daughter of thee and Suafu

doth awaken thee. Give me out of the tombe, the hardned[9] sword, which

the dwarfs made for Suafurlama. Hervardur, Hiorvardur, Hrani, and

Angantyr, with helmet, and coat of mail, and a sharp sword, with sheild

and accoutrements, and bloody spear, I wake you all, under the roots of

trees. Are the sons of Andgrym, who delighted in mischief, now become

dust and ashes, can none of Eyvors sons now speak with me out of the

habitations of the dead! Harvardur, Hiorvardur! so may you all be within

your ribs, as a thing that is hanged up to putrifie among insects,

unlesse you deliver me the sword which the dwarfs made ... and the

glorious belt.

_Angantyr_.--Daughter Hervor, full of spells to raise the dead, why

dost thou call so? wilt thou run on to thy own mischief? thou art mad,

and out of thy senses, who art desperatly resolved to waken dead men. I

was not buried either by father or other freinds. Two which lived after

me got Tirfing, one of whome is now possessor thereof.

_Hervor_.--Thou dost not tell the truth: so let Odin hide thee in the

tombe, as thou hast Tirfing by thee. Art thou unwilling, Angantyr, to

give an inheritance to thy only child?...

_Angantyr_.--Fals woman, thou dost not understand, that thou speakest

foolishly of that, in which thou dost rejoice, for Tirfing shall, if

thou wilt beleive me, maid, destroy all thy offspring.

_Hervor_.--I must go to my seamen, here I have no mind to stay longer.

Little do I care, O Royall friend, what my sons hereafter quarrell

about.

_Angantyr_.--Take and keep Hialmars bane, which thou shalt long have and

enjoy, touch but the edges of it, there is poyson in both of them, it is

a most cruell devourer of men.

_Hervor_.--I shall keep, and take in hand, the sharp sword which thou

hast let me have: I do not fear, O slain father! what my sons hereafter

may quarrell about.... Dwell all of you safe in the tombe, I must be

gon, and hasten hence, for I seem to be, in the midst of a place where

fire burns round about me.

One can well understand, who handles the ponderous _Thesaurus_, why the

first English lovers of Old Norse were antiquarians. "The Awakening of

Angantyr" is literally buried in this work, and only the student of

Anglo-Saxon prosody would come upon it unassisted, since it is an

illustration in a chapter of the _Grammaticæ Anglo-Saxonicæ et

Moeso-Gothicæ_. Students will remember in this connection that it was

a work on poetics that saved for us the original Icelandic _Edda_. The

Icelandic skald had to know his nation's mythology.

THOMAS PERCY (1729-1811).

The title of Chapter XXIII in Hickes' work indicates that even among

learned doctors mistaken notions existed as to the relationship of the

Teutonic languages. It took more than a hundred years to set the error

right, but in the meanwhile the literature of Iceland was becoming

better known to English readers. To the French scholar, Paul Henri

Mallet (1730-1807), Europe owes the first popular presentation of

Northern antiquities and literature. Appointed professor of

belles-lettres in the Copenhagen academy he found himself with more time

than students on his hands, because not many Danes at that time

understood French. His leisure time was applied to the study of the

antiquities of his adopted country, the King's commission for a history

of Denmark making that necessary. As a preface to this work he

published, in 1755, an _Introduction a l'Histoire de Dannemarc où l'on

traite de la Réligion, des Lois, des Moeurs et des Usages des Anciens

Danois_, and, in 1756, the work in the list on a previous page. In this

second book was the first translation into a modern tongue of the

_Edda_, and this volume, in consequence, attracted much attention. The

great English antiquarian, Thomas Percy, afterward Bishop of Dromore,

was early drawn to this work, and with the aid of friends he

accomplished a translation of it, which was published in 1770.

Mallet's work was very bad in its account of the racial affinities of

the nations commonly referred to as the barbarians that overturned the

Roman empire and culture. Percy, who had failed to edit the ballad MSS.

so as to please Ritson, was wise enough to see Mallet's error, and to

insist that Celtic and Gothic antiquities must not be confounded.

Mallet's translation of the _Edda_ was imperfect, too, because he had

followed the Latin version of Resenius, which was notoriously poor.

Percy's _Edda_ was no better, because it was only an English version of

Mallet. But we are not concerned with these critical considerations

here; and so it will be enough to record the fact that with the

publication of Percy's _Northern Antiquities_--the English name of

Mallet's work--in 1770, knowledge of Icelandic literature passed from

the exclusive control of learned antiquarians. More and more, as time

went on, men went to the Icelandic originals, and translations of poems

and sagas came from the press in increasing numbers. In the course of

time came original works that were inspired by Old Norse stories and Old

Norse conceptions.

We have already noted that Gray's poems on Icelandic themes, though

written in 1761, were not published until 1768. Another delayed work on

similar themes was Percy's _Five Pieces of Runic Poetry_, which, the

author tells us, was prepared for the press in 1761, but, through an

accident, was not published until 1763. The preface has this interesting

sentence: "It would be as vain to deny, as it is perhaps impolitic to

mention, that this attempt is owing to the success of the Erse

fragments." The book has an appendix containing the Icelandic originals

of the poems translated, and that portion of the book shows that a

scholar's hand and interest made the volume. So, too, does the close of

the preface: "That the study of ancient northern literature hath its

important uses has been often evinced by able writers: and that it is

not dry or unamusive this little work it is hoped will demonstrate. Its

aim at least is to shew, that if those kind of studies are not always

employed on works of taste or classic elegance, they serve at least to

unlock the treasures of native genius; they present us with frequent

sallies of bold imagination, and constantly afford matter for

philosophical reflection by showing the workings of the human mind in

its almost original state of nature."

That original state was certainly one of original sin, if these poems

are to be believed. Every page in this volume is drenched with blood,

and from this book, as from Gray's poems and the other Old Norse

imitations of the time, a picture of fierceness and fearfulness was the

only one possible. Percy intimates in his preface that Icelandic poetry

has other tales to tell besides the "Incantation of Hervor," the "Dying

Ode of Regner Lodbrog," the "Ransome of Egill the Scald," and the

"Funeral Song of Hacon," which are here set down; he offers the

"Complaint of Harold" as a slight indication that the old poets left

"behind them many pieces on the gentler subjects of love or friendship."

But the time had not come for the presentation of those pieces.

All of these translations were from the Latin versions extant in Percy's

time. This volume copied Hickes's translation of "Hervor's Incantation"

modified in a few particulars, and like that one, the other translations

in this volume were in prose. The work is done as well as possible, and

it remained for later scholars to point out errors in translation. The

negative contractions in Icelandic were as yet unfamiliar, and so, as

Walter Scott pointed out (in _Edin. Rev._, Oct., 1806), Percy made

Regner Lodbrog say, "The pleasure of that day (of battle, p. 34 in this

_Five Pieces_) was like having a fair virgin placed beside one in the

bed," and "The pleasure of that day was like kissing a young widow at

the highest seat of the table," when the poet really made the contrary

statement.

Of course, the value of this book depends upon the view that is taken of

it. Intrinsically, as literature, it is well-nigh valueless. It

indicates to us, however, a constantly growing interest in the

literature it reveals, and it undoubtedly directed the attention of the

poets of the succeeding generation to a field rich in romantic

possibilities. That no great work was then created out of this material

was not due to neglect. As we shall see, many puny poets strove to

breathe life into these bones, but the divine power was not in the

poets. Some who were not poets had yet the insight to feel the value of

this ancient literature, and they made known the facts concerning it. It

seems a mechanical and unpromising way to have great poetry written,

this calling out, "New Lamps for Old." Yet it is on record that great

poems have been written at just such instigation.

THOMAS WARTON (1728-1790).

Historians[10] of Romanticism have marked Warton's _History of English

Poetry_ as one of the forces that made for the new idea in literature.

This record of a past which, though out of favor, was immeasurably

superior to the time of its historian, spread new views concerning the

poetic art among the rising generation, and suggested new subjects as

well as new treatments of old subjects. We have mentioned the fact that

Gray handed over to Warton his notes for a contemplated history of

poetry, and that Warton found no place in his work for Gray's

adaptations from the Old Norse. Warton was not blind to the beauties of

Gray's poems, nor did he fail to appreciate the merits of the literature

which they illustrated. His scheme relegated his remarks concerning that

poetry to the introductory dissertation, "Of the Origin of Romantic

Fiction in Europe." What he had to say was in support of a theory which

is not accepted to-day, and of course his statements concerning the

origin of the Scandinavian people were as wrong as those that we found

in Mallet and Temple. But with all his misinformation, Warton managed to

get at many truths about Icelandic poetry, and his presentation of them

was fresh and stimulating. Already the Old Norse mythology was well

known, even down to Valhalla and the mistletoe. Old Norse poetry was

well enough known to call forth this remark:

"They (the 'Runic' odes) have a certain sublime and figurative cast of

diction, which is indeed one of their predominant characteristics....

When obvious terms and phrases evidently occurred, the Runic poets are

fond of departing from the common and established diction. They appear

to use circumlocution and comparisons not as a matter of necessity, but

of choice and skill: nor are these metaphorical colourings so much the

result of want of words, as of warmth of fancy." The note gives these

examples: "Thus, a rainbow is called, the bridge of the gods. Poetry,

the mead of Odin. The earth, the vessel that floats on ages. A ship, the

horse of the waves. A tongue, the sword of words. Night, the veil of

cares."

A study of the notes to Warton's dissertation reveals the fact that he

had made use of the books already mentioned in the list on a previous

page, and of no others that are significant. But such excellent use was

made of them, that it would seem as if nothing was left in them that

could be made valuable for spreading a knowledge of and an enthusiasm

for Icelandic literature. When it is remembered that Warton's purpose

was to prove the Saracenic origin of romantic fiction in Europe, through

the Moors in Spain, and that Icelandic literature was mentioned only to

account for a certain un-Arabian tinge in that romantic fiction, the

wonder grows that so full and fresh a presentation of Old Norse poetry

should have been made. He puts such passages as these into his

illustrative notes: "Tell my mother Suanhita in Denmark, that she will

not this summer comb the hair of her son. I had promised her to return,

but now my side shall feel the edge of the sword." There is an

appreciation of the poetic here, that makes us feel that Warton was not

an unworthy wearer of the laurel. He insists that the Saxon poetry was

powerfully affected by "the old scaldic fables and heroes," and gives in

the text a translation of the "Battle of Brunenburgh" to prove his

case. He admires "the scaldic dialogue at the tomb of Angantyr," but

wrongly attributes a beautiful translation of it to Gray. He quotes at

length from "a noble ode, called in the northern chronicles the Elogium

of Hacon, by the scald Eyvynd; who, for his superior skill in poetry was

called the Cross of Poets (Eyvindr Skálldaspillir), and fought in the

battle which he celebrated."

He knows how Iceland touched England, as this passage will show: "That

the Icelandic bards were common in England during the Danish invasions,

there are numerous proofs. Egill, a celebrated Icelandic poet, having

murthered the son and many of the friends of Eric Blodaxe, king of

Denmark or Norway, then residing in Northumberland, and which he had

just conquered, procured a pardon by singing before the king, at the

command of his queen Gunhilde, an extemporaneous ode. Egill compliments

the king, who probably was his patron, with the appellation of the

English chief. 'I offer my freight to the king. I owe a poem for my

ransom. I present to the ENGLISH CHIEF the mead of Odin.' Afterwards he

calls this Danish conqueror the commander of the Scottish fleet. 'The

commander of the Scottish fleet fattened the ravenous birds. The sister

of Nera (Death) trampled on the foe: she trampled on the evening food of

the eagle.'"

So wide a knowledge and so keen an appreciation of Old Norse in a

Warton, whose interest was chiefly elsewhere, argues for a spreading

popularity of the ancient literature. Thus far, only Gray has made

living English literature out of these old stories, and he only two

short poems. There were other attempts to achieve poetic success with

this foreign material, but a hundred exacting years have covered them

with oblivion.

DRAKE (1766-1836). MATHIAS (1754-1835).

In the second decade of the nineteenth century, Nathan Drake, M.D., made

a strong effort to popularize Norse mythology and literature. The fourth

edition of his work entitled _Literary Hours_ (London, 1820)

contains[11] an appreciative article on the subject, the fullness of

which is indicated in these words from p. 309:

"The most striking and characteristic parts of the Scandinavian

mythology, together with no inconsiderable portion of the manners and

customs of our northern ancestors, have now passed before the reader;

their theology, warfare, and poetry, their gallantry, religious rites,

and superstitions, have been separately, and, I trust, distinctly

reviewed."

The essay is written in an easy style that doubtless gained for it many

readers. All the available knowledge of the subject was used, and a

clearer view of it was presented than had been obtainable in Percy's

"Mallet." The author was a thoughtful man, able to detect errors in

Warton and Percy, but his zeal in his enterprise led him to praise

versifiers inordinately that had used the "Gothic fables." He quotes

liberally from writers whose books are not to be had in this country,

and certainly the uninspired verses merit the neglect that this fact

indicates. He calls Sayers' pen "masterly" that wrote these lines:

Coucher of the ponderous spear,

Thou shout'st amid the battle's stound--

The armed Sisters hear,

Viewless hurrying o'er the ground

They strike the destin'd chiefs and call them to the skies.

(P. 168.)

From Penrose he quotes such lines as these:

The feast begins, the skull goes round,

Laughter shouts--the shouts resound.

The gust of war subsides--E'en now

The grim chief curls his cheek, and smooths his rugged brow.

(P. 171.)

From Sterling comes this imitation of Gray:

Now the rage of combat burns,

Haughty chiefs on chiefs lie slain;

The battle glows and sinks by turns,

Death and carnage load the plain.

(P 172.)

From these extracts, it appears that the poets who imitated Gray

considered that only "dreadful songs," like his, were to be found in

Scandinavian poetry.

Downman, Herbert and Mathias are also adduced by Dr. Drake as examples

of poets who have gained much by Old Norse borrowings, but these

borrowings are invariably scenes from a chamber of horrors. It occurs

to me that perhaps Dr. Drake had begun to tire of the spiritless echoes

of the classical schools, and that he fondly hoped that such shrieks and

groans as those he admired in this essay would satisfy his cravings for

better things in poetry. But the critic had no adequate knowledge of the

way in which genius works. His one desire in these studies of

Scandinavian mythology was "to recommend it to the votaries of the Muse,

as a machinery admirably constructed for their purpose" (p. 158). He

hopes for "a more extensive adoption of the Scandinavian mythology,

especially in our _epic_ and _lyric_ compositions" (p. 311). We smile at

the notion, to-day, but that very conception of poetry as "machinery" is

characteristic of a whole century of our English literature.

The Mathias mentioned by Drake is Thomas James Mathias, whose book,

_Odes Chiefly from the Norse Tongue_ (London, 1781), received the

distinction of an American reprint (New York, 1806). Bartholinus

furnishes the material and Gray the spirit for these pieces.

AMOS S. COTTLE(1768-1800). WILLIAM HERBERT (1778-1847).

In this period belong two works of translation that mark the approach of

the time when Old Norse prose and poetry were to be read in the

original. As literature they are of little value, and they had but

slight influence on succeeding writers.

At Bristol, in 1797, was published _Icelandic Poetry, or, The Edda of

Saemund translated into English Verse_, by A.S. Cottle of Magdalen

College, Cambridge. This work has an Introduction containing nothing

worth discussing here, and an "Epistle" to A.S. Cottle from Robert

Southey. The laureate, in good blank verse, discourses on the Old Norse

heroes whom he happens to know about. They are the old favorites, Regner

Lodbrog and his sons; in Southey's poem the foeman's skull is, as usual,

the drinking cup. It was certainly time for new actors and new

properties to appear in English versions of Scandinavian stories.

The translations are twelve in number, and evince an intelligent and

facile versifier. When all is said, these old songs could contribute to

the pleasure of very few. Only a student of history, or a poet, or an

antiquarian, would dwell with loving interest on the lays of

Vafthrudnis, Grimner, Skirner and Hymer (as Cottle spells them).

Besides, they are difficult to read, and must be abundantly annotated to

make them comprehensible. In such works as this of Cottle, a Scott might

find wherewith to lend color to a story or a poem, but the common man

would borrow Walpole's words, used in characterizing Gray's "Odes":

"They are not interesting, and do not ... touch any passion; our human

feelings ... are not here affected. Who can care through what horrors a

Runic savage arrived at all the joys and glories they could

conceive--the supreme felicity of boozing ale out of the skull of an

enemy in Odin's hall?"[12]

In 1804 a book was published bearing this title-page: _Select Icelandic

Poetry, translated from the originals: with notes_. The preface was

signed by the author, William Herbert. The pieces are from Sæmund,

Bartholinus, Verelius, and Perinskjöld's edition of _Heimskringla_, and

were all translated with the assistance of the Latin versions. The notes

are explanatory of the allusions and the hiatuses in the poems.

Reference is made to MSS. of the Norse pieces existing in museums and

libraries, which the author had consulted. Thus we see scholarship

beginning to extend investigations. As for the verses themselves not

much need be said. They are not so good as Cottle's, although they

received a notice from Scott in the _Edinburgh Review_. The thing to

notice about the work is that it pretends to come direct from Old Norse,

not, as most of the work dealt with so far, _via_ Latin.

Icelandic poetry is more difficult to read than Icelandic prose, and so

it seems strange that the former should have been attacked first by

English scholars. Yet so it was, and until 1844 our English literature

had no other inspiration in old Norse writings than the rude and rugged

songs that first lent their lilt to Gray. The _human_ North is in the

sagas, and when they were revealed to our people, Icelandic literature

began to mean something more than Valhalla and the mead-bouts there. The

scene was changed to earth, and the gods gave place to nobler actors,

men and women. The action was lifted to the eminence of a world-drama.

But before the change came Sir Walter Scott, and it is fitting that the

first period of Norse influence in English literature should close, as

it began, with a great master.

SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832).

In 1792, Walter Scott was twenty-one years old, and one of his

note-books of that year contains this entry: "Vegtam's Kvitha or The

Descent of Odin, with the Latin of Thomas Bartholine, and the English

poetical version of Mr. Gray; with some account of the Death of Balder,

both as related in the Edda, and as handed down to us by the Northern

historians--_Auctore Gualtero Scott_." According to Lockhart,[13] the

Icelandic, Latin and English versions were here transcribed, and the

historical account that followed--seven closely written quarto

pages--was read before a debating society.

It was to be expected that one so enthusiastic about antiquities as

Scott would early discover the treasury of Norse history and song. At

twenty-one, as we see, he is transcribing a song in a language he knew

nothing about, as well as in translations. Fourteen years later, he has

learned enough about the subject to write a review of Herbert's _Poems

and Translations_.[14]

In 1813, he writes an account of the _Eyrbyggja Saga_ for _Illustrations

of Northern Antiquities_ (edited by Robert Jameson, Edinburgh, 1814).

There are two of Scott's contributions to literature that possess more

than a mere tinge of Old Norse knowledge, namely, the long poem "Harold,

the Dauntless" (published in 1817), and the long story "The Pirate"

(published in 1821). The poem is weak, but it illustrates Scott's theory

of the usefulness of poetical antiquities to the modern poet. In another

connection Scott said: "In the rude song of the Scald, we regard less

the strained imagery and extravagance of epithet, than the wild

impressions which it conveys of the dauntless resolution, savage

superstition, rude festivity and ceaseless depredations of the ancient

Scandinavians."[15] The poet did his work in accordance with this

theory, and so in "Harold, the Dauntless," we note no flavor of the

older poetry in phrase or in method. Harold is fierce enough and grim

enough to measure up to the old ideal of a Norse hero.

"I was rocked in a buckler and fed from a blade," is his boast before

his newly christened father, and in his apostrophe to his grandsire

Eric, the popular notion of early Norse antiquarianism is again

exhibited:

In wild Valhalla hast thou quaffed

From foeman's skull metheglin draught?

Scott's scholarship in Old Norse was largely derived from the Latin

tomes, and such conceptions as those quoted are therefore common in his

poem. That the poet realized the inadequacy of such knowledge, the

review of Herbert's poetry, published in the _Edinburgh Review_ for

October, 1806, shows. In this article he has a vision of what shall be

when men shall be able "to trace the Runic rhyme" itself.

"The Pirate," exhibited the Wizard's skill in weaving the old and the

new together, the old being the traditions of the Shetlands, full of the

ancestral beliefs in Old Norse things, the new being the life in those

islands in a recent century. This is a stirring story, that comes into

our consideration because of its Scandinavian antiquities. Again we find

the Latin treasuries of Bartholinus, Torfæus, Perinskjöld and Olaus

Magnus in evidence, though here, too, mention is made of "Haco," and

Tryggvason and "Harfager." With a background of island scenery, with

which Scott became familiar during a light-house inspector's voyage made

in 1814, this story is a picture full of vivid colors and characters. In

Norna of the Fitful Head, he has created a mysterious personage in whose

mouth "Runic rhymes" are the only proper speech. She stills the tempest

with them, and "The Song of the Tempest" is a strong apostrophe, though

it is neither Runic nor rhymed. She preludes her life-story with verses

that are rhymed but not Runic, and she sings incantations in the same

wise. This _Reimkennar_ is an echo of the _Völuspá_, and is the only

kind of Norse woman that the time of Scott could imagine. Claud Halcro,

the poet, is fond of rhyming the only kind of Norseman known to his

time, and in his "Song of Harold Harfager" we hear the echoes of Gray's

odes. Scott's reading was wide in all ancient lore, and he never missed

a chance to introduce an odd custom if it would make an interesting

scene in his story. So here we have the "Sword Dance" (celebrated by

Olaus Magnus, though I have never read of it in Old Norse), the

"Questioning of the Sibyl" (like that in Gray's "Descent of Odin"), the

"Capture and Sharing of the Whale," and the "Promise of Odin." In most

of the natives there are turns of speech that recall the Norse ancestry

of the Shetlanders.

In Scott, then, we see the lengthening out of the influence of the

antiquarians who wrote of a dead past in a dead language. The time was

at hand when that past was to live again, painted in the living words of

living men.

III.

FROM THE SOURCES THEMSELVES.

In the preceding section we noted the achievements of English

scholarship and genius working under great disadvantages. Gray and Scott

may have had a smattering of Icelandic, but Latin translations were

necessary to reveal the meaning of what few Old Norse texts were

available to them. This paucity of material, more than the ignorance of

the language, was responsible for the slow progress in popularizing the

remarkable literature of the North. Scaldic and Eddie poems comprised

all that was known to English readers of that literature, and in them

the superhuman rather than the human elements were predominant.

We have come now to a time when the field of our view broadens to

include not only more and different material, but more and different

men. The sagas were annexed to the old songs, and the body of literature

to attract attention was thus increased a thousand fold. The

antiquarians were supplanted by scholars who, although passionately

devoted to the study of the past, were still vitally interested in the

affairs of the time in which they lived. The second and greatest stage

of the development of Old Norse influence in England has a mark of

distinction that belongs to few literary epochs. The men who made it

lived lives that were as heroic in devotion to duty and principle as

many of those written down in the sagas themselves. I have sometimes

wondered whether it is merely accidental that English saga scholars were

so often men of high soul and strong action. Certain it is that Richard

Cleasby, and Samuel Laing, and George Webbe Dasent, and Robert Lowe are

types of men that the Icelanders would have celebrated, as having "left

a tale to tell" in their full and active lives. And no less certain is

it that Thomas Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold, and William Morris, and

Charles Kingsley, and Gerald Massey labored for a better manhood that

should rise to the stature and reflect the virtues of the heroes of the

Northland.

RICHARD CLEASBY (1797-1847).

In the forties of the nineteenth century several minds began to work,

independently of one another, in this wider field of Icelandic

literature. Richard Cleasby (1797-1847), an English merchant's son with

scholarly instincts, began the study of the sagas, but made slight

progress because of what he called an "unaccountable and most scandalous

blank," the want of a dictionary. This was in 1840, and for the next

seven years he labored to fill up that blank. The record[16] of those

years is a wonderful witness to the heroism and spirit of the scholar,

and justifies Sir George Dasent's characterization of Cleasby as "one of

the most indefatigable students that ever lived." The work thus begun

was not completed until many years afterward (it is dated 1874), and, by

untoward circumstances, very little of it is Richard Cleasby's. But

generous scholarship acknowledged its debt to the man who gave his

strength and his wealth to the work, by placing his name on the

title-page. No less shall we fail to honor his memory by mentioning his

labors here. Although the dictionary was not completed in the decade of

its inception, the study that it was designed to promote took hold on a

number of men and the results were remarkable for both literature and

scholarship.

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881).

First in order of time was the work of Thomas Carlyle. It will not seem

strange to the student of English literature to find that this writer

came under the influence of the old skalds and sagaman and spoke

appreciative words concerning them. His German studies had to take

cognizance of the Old Norse treasuries of poetry, and he became a

diligent reader of Icelandic literature in what translations he could

get at, German and English. The strongest utterance on the subject that

he left behind him is in "Lecture I" of the series "On Heroes,

Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History," dated May, 1840. This is a

treatment of Scandinavian mythology, rugged and thorough, like all of

this man's work. Carlyle evinces a scholar's instinct in more than one

place, as, for instance, when he doubts the _grandmother_ etymology of

_Edda_, an etymology repeated until a much later day by scholars of a

less sure sense.[17] But this lecture "On Heroes" is also a

glorification of the literature with which we are dealing, and in this

regard it is worthy of special note here.

In the first place, Carlyle with true critical instinct caught the

essence of it; to him it seemed to have "a rude childlike way of

recognizing the divineness of Nature, the divineness of Man." For him

Scandinavian mythology was superior in sincerity to the Grecian, though

it lacked the grace of the latter. "Sincerity, I think, is better than

grace. I feel that these old Northmen were looking into Nature with open

eye and soul: most earnest, honest; childlike, and yet manlike; with a

great-hearted simplicity and depth and freshness, in a true, loving,

admiring, unfearing way. A right valiant, true old race of men." This is

a truer appreciation than Gray and Walpole had, eighty years before. In

the second place, Carlyle was not misled into thinking that valor in war

was the only characteristic of the rude Norseman, and skill in drinking

his only household virtue. "Beautiful traits of pity, too, and honest

pity." Then he tells of Baldur and Nanna, in his rugged prose account

anticipating Matthew Arnold. Other qualities of the literature appeal to

him. "I like much their robust simplicity; their veracity, directness of

conception. Thor 'draws down his brows' in a veritable Norse rage;

'grasps his hammer till the _knuckles grow white_." Again; "A great

broad Brobdignag grin of true humor is this Skrymir; mirth resting on

earnestness and sadness, as the rainbow on the black tempest: only a

right valiant heart is capable of that." Still again: "This law of

mutation, which also is a law written in man's inmost thought, has been

deciphered by these old earnest Thinkers in their rude style."

Thomas Carlyle, seeking to explain the worship of a pagan divinity,

chose Odin as the noblest example of such a hero. The picture of Odin he

drew from the prose Edda, mainly, and his purpose required that he

paint the picture in the most attractive colors. So it happened that our

English literature got its first _complete_ view of Old Norse ethics and

art. The memory of Gray's "dreadful songs" had ruled for almost a

century, and ordinary readers might be pardoned for thinking that Old

Norse literature, like Old Norse history, was written in blood. We have

seen that Gray's imitators perpetuated the old idea, and that even Scott

sanctioned it, and now we see England's emancipation from it. The grouty

old Scotchman of Craigenputtoch knew no more Icelandic than most of his

fellow countrymen (be it noted that he said: "From the Humber upwards,

all over Scotland, the speech of the common people is still in a

singular degree Icelandic, its Germanism has still a peculiar Norse

tinge"); but he saw far more deeply into the heart of Icelandic

literature than anybody before him. His emphasis of its many sidedness,

of its sincerity, its humanity, its simplicity, its directness, its

humor and its wisdom, was the signal for a change in the popular

estimation of its worth to our modern art. Since his day we have had

Morris and Arnold and a host of minor singers, and the nineteenth

century revival of interest in Old Norse literature.

The other work by Carlyle dealing directly with Old Norse material is

_The Early Kings of Norway_. Here he digests _Heimskringla_, which was

obtainable through Laing's translation, in a way to stir the blood. The

story, as he tells it, is breathlessly interesting, and it is a pity

that readers of Carlyle so often stop short of this work. As in the

_Hero-Worship_, he shows this Teutonic bias, and the religious training

that minified Greek literature.

Snorri's work elicits from him repeated applause. Here, for instance, in

Chap. X: "It has, all of it, the description (and we see clearly the

fact itself had), a kind of pathetic grandeur, simplicity, and rude

nobleness; something Epic or Homeric, without the metre or the singing

of Homer, but with all the sincerity, rugged truth to nature, and much

more of piety, devoutness, reverence for what is ever high in this

universe, than meets us in those old Greek Ballad-mongers."

SAMUEL LAING (1780-1868).

It was the work of Samuel Laing that gave Carlyle the material for this

last-mentioned book.[18] Laing's translation of _Heimskringla_ bears the

date 1844, and although Mr. Dasent's quaint version of the _Prose Edda_

preceded it by two years, _The Sagas of the Norse Kings_ was the

"epoch-making" book. It is true that a later version has superseded it

in literary and scholarly finish, but Laing's work was a pioneer of

sterling intrinsic value, and many there be that do it homage still.

Laing had the laudable ambition--so seldom found in these days--"to give

a plain, faithful translation into English of the _Heimskringla_,

unencumbered with antiquarian research, and suited to the plain English

reader."[19] With this work, then, Icelandic lore passes out of the

hands of the antiquarian into the hands of common readers. It matters

little that the audience is even still fit and few; from this time on he

that runs may read.

For our purpose it will not be necessary to characterize the

translation. Laing commanded an excellent style, and he was enthusiastic

over his work. Indeed, the commonest criticism passed on the

"Preliminary Dissertation" was that the author's zeal had run away with

his good sense. Be that as it may, Laing called the attention of his

readers to the neglect of a literature and a history which should be

England's pride, as Anglo-Saxon literature and history even then were.

The reviews of the time made it appear as if another Battle of the Books

were impending--Anglo-Saxon versus Icelandic; a writer in the _English

Review_ (Vol. 82, p. 316), pro-Saxon in his zeal, admitting at last that

"of none of the children of the Norse, whether Goth or Frank, Saxon or

Scandinavian, have the others any reason to be ashamed. All have earned

the gratitude and admiration of the world, and their combined or

successive efforts have made England and Europe what they are."

It is refreshing to come upon new views of Old Norse character, that

recognize "amidst anarchy and bloodshed, redeeming features of

kindliness and better feeling which tell of the mingled principles that

war within our nature for the mastery." Laing's translation accomplished

this for English readers, and with the years came a deeper knowledge

that showed those touches of tenderness and traits of beauty which, even

in 1844, were not perceptible to those readers.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882).

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (1819-1891).

_The Story of the Norse Kings_, thus translated by an Englishman,

suggested to our American poet, Longfellow, a series of lyrics on King

Olaf. The young college professor that wrote about _Frithjof's Saga_ in

the _North American Review_ for 1837, was bound, sooner or later, to

come back to the field when he found that the American reading public

would listen to whatever songs he sang to them. Before 1850, Longfellow

had written "The Challenge of Thor," a poem which imitated the form of

Icelandic verse and catches much of its spirit. In 1859, the thought

came to him "that a very good poem might be written on the Saga of King

Olaf, who converted the North to Christianity." Two years later he

completed the lyrics that compose "The Musician's Tale" in _The Tales of

a Wayside Inn_, published in 1863, and in this work "The Challenge of

Thor" serves as a prelude. The pieces after this prelude are not

imitations of the Icelandic verse, but are like Tegner's _Frithjof's

Saga_, in that each new portion has a meter of its own. There is not,

either, a consistent effort to put the flavor of the North into the

poetry, so that, properly speaking, we have here only the retelling of

an old tale. The ballad fervor and movement are often perceptible,

though nowhere does the poet strike the ringing note of "The Skeleton in

Armor," published in the volume of 1841.

Truth to tell, Longfellow's "Saga of King Olaf" is not a remarkable

work. One who reads the few chapters in Carlyle's _Early Kings of

Norway_ that deal with Olaf Tryggvason gets more of the fire and spirit

of the old saga at every turning. The poet chooses scenes and incidents

very skilfully, but for their proper presentation a terseness is

necessary that is not reconcilable with frequent rhymes. Compare the

saga account with the poem's: "What is this that has broken?" asked King

Olaf. "Norway from thy hand, King," answered Tamberskelver.

"What was that?" said Olaf, standing

On the quarter deck.

"Something heard I like the stranding

Of a shattered wreck."

Einar then, the arrow taking

From the loosened string,

Answered, "That was Norway breaking

From thy hand, O King!"

Nevertheless, Longfellow is to be thanked for acquainting a wide circle

of readers with the sterling saga literature.

One other American poet was busy with the ancient Northern literature at

this time. James Russell Lowell wrote one notable poem that is Old Norse

in subject and spirit, "The Voyage to Vinland." The third part of the

poem, "Gudrida's Prophecy," hints at Icelandic versification, and the

short lines are hammer-strokes that warm the reader to enthusiasm. Far

more of the spirit of the old literature is in this short poem than is

to be found in the whole of Longfellow's "Saga of King Olaf." The

character of Biörn is well drawn, recalling Bodli, of Morris' poem, in

its principal features. Certainly there is a reflection here of that Old

Norse conception of life which gave to men's deeds their due reward, and

which exalted the power of will. This poem was begun in 1850, but was

not published till 1868.

In Lowell's poems are to be found many figures and allusions pointing to

his familiarity with Icelandic song and story. At the end of the third

strophe of the "Commemoration Ode," for instance, Truth is pictured as

Brynhild,

plumed and mailed,

With sweet, stern face unveiled.

In these borrowings of themes and allusions, Lowell is at one with most

of the poets of the present day. It used to be the fashion, and is

still, for tables of contents in volumes of verse to show titles like

these: "Prometheus"; "Iliad VIII, 542-561"; "Alectryon." Present-day

volumes are becoming more and more besprinkled with titles like these:

"Balder the Beautiful"; "The Death of Arnkel," etc. In this fact alone

is seen the turn of the tide. Heroes and heroines in dramas and novels

are beginning to bear Old Norse names, even where the setting is not

northern; witness Sidney Dobell's _Balder_, where not even a single

allusion is made to Icelandic matters.

MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-1888).

Matthew Arnold's strong sympathy with noble and virile literature of

whatever age or nation led him in time to Old Norse, and his poem

"Balder Dead" is of distinct importance among the works of the

nineteenth century in English literature. It is an addition of permanent

value to our poetry, because of its marked originality and its high

ethical tone. "Mallet, and his version of the Edda, is all the poem is

based upon," says Arnold.[20] It is the poet's divinely implanted

instinct that gathers from the few chapters of an old book a knowledge

wonderfully full and deep of the cosmogony and eschatology of the

northern nations of Europe. "Balder Dead" tells the familiar story of

the whitest of the gods, but it also contains the essence of Old

Icelandic religion; indeed there is no single short work in our language

which gives a tithe of the information about the North, its spirit, and

its philosophy, which this poem of Matthew Arnold's sets forth. In

future days a text-book of original English poems will be in the hands

of our boys and girls which will enable them to get, through the medium

of their own language, the message and the spirit of foreign literature.

Old Norse song will need no other representative than Matthew Arnold's

"Balder Dead."

This is an original poem. It does not imitate the verse nor the word of

the older song, but the flavor of it is here. Gray and his imitators

drew from the Icelandic fountain "dreadful songs" and many poets since

have heard no milder note. Matthew Arnold's instincts were for peace and

the arts of peace, and he found in Balder a type for the ennobling of

our own century. Balder says to his brother who has come to lament that

Lok's machinations will keep the best beloved of the gods in Niflheim:

For I am long since weary of your storm

Of carnage, and find, Hermod, in your life

Something too much of war and broils, which make

Life one perpetual fight, a bath of blood.

Mine eyes are dizzy with the arrowy hail;

Mine ears are stunn'd with blows, and sick for calm.

Arnold has exalted the Revelator of the Northern mythology, and in

magnificent poetry sets forth his apocalyptic vision:

Unarm'd, inglorious; I attend the course

Of ages, and my late return to light,

In times less alien to a spirit mild,

In new-recover'd seats, the happier day.

. . . . . . . . .

Far to the south, beyond the blue, there spreads

Another Heaven, the boundless--no one yet

Hath reach'd it; there hereafter shall arise

The second Asgard, with another name.

. . . . . . . . .

There re-assembling we shall see emerge

From the bright Ocean at our feet an earth

More fresh, more verdant than the last, with fruits

Self-springing, and a seed of man preserved,

Who then shall live in peace, as now in war.

Here is the grandest message that the Old Norse religion had to give,

and Matthew Arnold concerned himself with that alone. It is a far cry

from Regner Lodbrog to this. There is a fine touch in the introduction

of Regner into the lamentation of Balder. Arnold makes the old warrior

say of the ruder skalds:

But they harp ever on one string, and wake

Remembrance in our souls of war alone,

Such as on earth we valiantly have waged,

And blood, and ringing blows, and violent death.

But when thou sangest, Balder, thou didst strike

Another note, and, like a bird in spring,

Thy voice of joyance minded us, and youth,

And wife, and children, and our ancient home.

Here is a human Norseman, a figure not often presented in the versions

of the old stories that English poets and romancers have given us.

Arnold did a good service to Icelandic literature when he put into

Regner's mouth mild sentiments and a love for home and family. The note

is not lacking in the ancient literature, but it took Englishmen three

centuries to find it. It was the scholar, Matthew Arnold, who first

repeated the gentler strain in the rude music of the North, as it was

the scholar, Thomas Gray, who first echoed the "dreadful songs" of that

old psalmody. Gray has all the culture of his age, when it was still

possible to compass all knowledge in one lifetime; Arnold had all the

literary culture of his fuller century when multiplied sciences force a

scholar to be content with one segment of human knowledge. The former

had music and architecture and other sciences among his accomplishments;

the latter spread out in literature, as "Sohrab and Rustum," "Empedocles

on Etna," "Tristram and Iseult," as well as "Balder Dead" attest. The

quatrain prefixed to the volume containing the narrative and elegiac

poems be-tokens what joy Arnold had in his literary work, and indicates

why these poems cannot fail to live:

What poets feel not, when they make,

A pleasure in creating,

The world in its turn will not take

Pleasure in contemplating.

Balder is the creation of Old Norse poetry that is most popular with

contemporary English writers, and Matthew Arnold first made him so. As

Bugge points out, no deed of his is "celebrated in song or story. His

personality only is described; of his activity in life almost no

external trait is recorded. All the stress is laid upon his death; and,

like Christ, Baldr dies in his youth."[21]

SIR GEORGE WEBBE DASENT (1820-1896).

Among the scholars who have labored to give England the benefit of a

fuller and truer knowledge of Norse matters, none will be remembered

more gratefully than Sir George Webbe Dasent. Known to the reading

public most widely by his translations of the folk-tales of Asbjörnsen

and Moe, he has still a claim upon the attention of the students of

Icelandic. As we have seen, he gave out a translation of the _Younger

Edda_ in 1842, and during the half century and more that followed he

wrote other works of history and literature connected with our subject.

Two saga translations were published in 1861 and 1866, _The Story of

Burnt Njal_, and _The Story of Gisli the Outlaw_, which will always rank

high in this class of literature. _Njala_ especially is an excellent

piece of work, a classic among translations. The "Prolegomena" is rich

in information, and very little of it has been superseded by later

scholarship. In 1887 and 1894 he translated for the Master of the Rolls,

_The Orkney Saga_ and _The Saga of Hakon_, the texts of which Vigfusson

had printed in the same series some years before. The interest of the

government in Icelandic annals connected with English history is

indicated in these last publications, and England is fortunate to have

had such enthusiastic scholars as Vigfusson and Dasent to do the work.

These men had been collaborators on the Cleasby Dictionary, and in this

work as in all others Dasent displayed an eagerness to have his

countrymen know how significant England's relationship to Iceland was.

He was as certain as Laing had been before him of the preeminence of

this literature among the mediæval writings. Like Laing, too, he would

have the general reader turn to this body of work "which for its beauty

and richness is worthy of being known to the greatest possible number of

readers."[22]

To mark the progress away from the old conception of unmitigated

brutality these words of Dasent stand here:[23] "The faults of these

Norsemen were the faults of their time; their virtues they possessed in

larger measure than the rest of their age, and thus when Christianity

had tamed their fury, they became the torch-bearers of civilization; and

though the plowshare of Destiny, when it planted them in Europe,

uprooted along its furrow many a pretty flower of feeling in the lands

which felt the fury of these Northern conquerers, their energy and

endurance gave a lasting temper to the West, and more especially to

England, which will wear so long as the world wears, and at the same

time implanted principles of freedom which shall never be rooted out.

Such results are a compensation for many bygone sorrows."

CHARLES KINGSLEY (1819-1875).

In 1874, Charles Kingsley visited America and delivered some lectures.

Among these was one entitled "The First Discovery of America." This

interests us here because it displays an appreciation, if not a deep

knowledge, of Icelandic literature. In it the lecturer commended to

Longfellow's attention a ballad sung in the Faroes, begging him to

translate it some day, "as none but he can translate it." "It is so sad,

that no tenderness less exquisite than his can prevent its being

painful; and at least in its _denouement_, so naive, that no purity less

exquisite than his can prevent its being dreadful."[24] Later in the

lecture he commends to his hearers the _Heimskringla_ of Snorri

Sturluson, the "Homer of the North."[25]

Speaking of the elements that mingled to produce the British character,

Kingsley says: "In manners as well as in religion, the Norse were

humanized and civilized by their contact with the Celts, both in

Scotland and in Ireland. Both peoples had valor, intellect, imagination:

but the Celt had that which the burly, angular Norse character, however

deep and stately, and however humorous, wanted; namely, music of nature,

tenderness, grace, rapidity, playfulness; just the qualities, combining

with the Scandinavian (and in Scotland with the Angle) elements of

character which have produced, in Ireland and in Scotland, two schools

of lyric poetry second to none in the world."[26] Over the page,

Kingsley has this to say: "For they were a sad people, those old Norse

forefathers of ours."[27] Humorous and sad are not inconsistent words in

these sentences; the Norseman had a sense of the ludicrous, and could

jest grimly in the face of death. Of the sadness of his life, no one

needs to be told who has read a saga or two. Kingsley says: "There is,

in the old sagas, none of that enjoyment of life which shines out

everywhere in Greek poetry, even through its deepest tragedies. Not in

complacency with Nature's beauty, but in the fierce struggle with her

wrath, does the Norseman feel pleasure."[28]

This lecture shows a deeper acquaintance with Old Norse literature than

Kingsley was willing to acknowledge. Not only are the stories well

chosen which he uses throughout, but the intuitions are sound, and the

inferences based upon them. He anticipated the work of this

investigation in the last words of the address. He has been telling the

fine story of Thormod at Sticklestead:

"I shall not insult your intelligence by any comment or even epithet of

my own. I shall but ask you, Was not this man your kinsman? Does not the

story sound, allowing for all change of manners as well as of time and

place, like a scene out of your own Bret Harte or Colonel John Hay's

writings; a scene of the dry humor, the rough heroism of your own far

West? Yes, as long as you have your _Jem Bludsos_ and _Tom Flynns of

Virginia City_, the old Norse blood is surely not extinct, the old Norse

spirit is not dead."[29]

EDMUND GOSSE (1849-).

Among contemporary English poets who have taught the world of readers

that things Norse are worthy of attention, is Edmund Gosse. He has been

more intimately connected with the popularization of modern Norwegian

literature, notably of Ibsen, but he has also found in Old Norse story

themes for poetic treatment. We mention "The Death of Arnkel," found in

the volume _Firdausi in Exile_, more because it shows that our poets are

turning to _the gesta islandicorum_ for themes, than because it is a

remarkable poem. More pretentious is _King Erik, a Tragedy_, London,

1876. Here is a noble drama which displays an intimate acquaintance with

the literature that gave it its themes and inspiration. The author

dedicates it to Robert Browning, calling it:

... this lyric symbol of my labour,

This antique light that led my dreams so long,

This battered hull of a barbaric tabor,

Beaten to runic song.

I have often thought that fate was very unkind to keep Browning so

persistently in the south of Europe, when, in Iceland and Norway, were

mines that he could have worked in to such supreme advantage. To be sure

his method clashes with the simplicity of the Old Norse manner, but from

him we should have had men and women superb in stature and virility, and

perhaps the Arctic influence would have killed the troublesome

tropicality of his language.

This drama by Gosse is not strictly Icelandic in motive. Jealousy was

not the passion to loosen the tongue of the sagaman, and in so far as

that is the theme of "King Erik," the play is not Old Norse in origin.

Christian material, too, has been introduced that gives a modern tinge

to the drama, but there is enough of the genuine saga spirit to warrant

attention to it here. Something more than the names is Icelandic. Here

is a woman, Botilda, with strength of character enough to recall a

Brynhild or a Bergthora. Gisli is the foster-brother that takes up the

blood-feud for Grimur. Adalbjörg and Svanhilda are the whisperers of

slander and the workers of ill. Marcus is the skald who is making a poem

about the king. Here are customs and beliefs distinctly Norse:

I loved him from the first,

And so the second midnight to the cliff

We went. I mind me how the round moon rose,

And how a great whale in the offing plunged,

Dark on the golden circle. There we cut

A space of turf, and lifted it, and ran

Our knife-points sharp into our arms, and drew

Blood that dripped into the warm mould and mixed.

So there under the turf our plighted faith

Starts in the dew of grasses.

(Act. IV, Sc. II.)

But all day long I hear amid the crowds,

. . . . . . . . .

A voice that murmurs in a monotone,

Strange, warning words that scarcely miss the ear,

Yet miss it altogether.

_Botilda_.

Oh! God grant,

You be not fey, nor truly near your end!

(Act. IV, Sc. III.)

Although this work is dramatic in form, it is not so in spirit. The true

dramatist would have put such an incident as the swearing of brotherhood

into a scene, instead of into a speech. This effort is, however, the

nearest approach to a drama in English founded on saga material. It is

curious that our poets have inclined to every form but the drama in

reproducing Old Norse literature. It is not that saga-stuff is not

dramatic in possibilities. Ewald and Oehlenschläger have used this

material to excellent effect in Danish dramas. Had the sagas been

accessible to Englishmen in Shakespeare's time, we should certainly have

had dramas of Icelandic life.

IV.

BY THE HAND OF THE MASTER.

Time has brought us to the man whose work in this field needs no

apology. The writer whom we consider next contributed almost as much

material to the English treasury of Northern gold as did all the writers

we have so far considered. Were it not for William Morris, the

examination that we are making would not not be worth while. The name

_literature_, in its narrow sense, belongs to only a few of the writings

that we have examined up to this point, but what we are now to inspect

deserves that title without the shadow of a doubt. For that reason we

set in a separate chapter the examination of Morris' Old Norse

adaptations and creations.

WILLIAM MORRIS (1834-1896).

The biographer of William Morris fixes 1868 as the beginning of the

poet's Icelandic stories.[30] Eirikr Magnusson, an Icelander, was his

guide, and the pupil made rapid progress. Dasent's work had drawn

Morris' attention to the sagas, and within a few months most of the

sagas had been read in the original. Although _The Saga of Gunnlang

Worm-tongue_ was published in the _Fortnightly Review_, for January,

1869, the _Grettis Saga_, of April, was the first published book on an

Old Norse subject. The next year gave the _Völsunga Saga_. In 1871,

Morris made a journey through Iceland, the fruits of which were

afterwards seen in many a noble work. In 1875, _Three Northern Love

Stories_ was published, and, in 1877, _The Story of Sigurd the Volsung

and the Fall of the Niblungs_. More than ten years passed before he

turned again to Icelandic work, the Romances of the years of 1889 to

1896 showing signs of it, and the translations in the _Saga Library_,

"Howard the Halt," "The Banded Men," _Eyrbyggja_ and _Heimskringla_ of

1891-95. These contributions to the subject of our examination are no

less valuable than voluminous, and we make no excuses for an extended

consideration of them. They deserve a wider public than they have yet

attained.

1.

_The Story of Grettir the Strong_ is the title of Morris and Magnusson's

version of the _Grettis Saga_. The version impresses the reader as one

made with loving care by artistic hands. Certainly English readers will

read no other translation of this work, for this one is satisfactory as

a version and as an art-work. English readers will here get all the

flavor of the original that it is possible to get in a translation, and

those who can read Icelandic if put to it, will prefer to get _Grettla_

through Morris and Magnusson. All the essentials are here, if not all

the nuances.

The reader unfamiliar with sagas will need a little patience with the

genealogies that crop out in every chapter. The sagaman has a

squirrel-like agility in climbing family trees, and he is well

acquainted with their interlocking branches. There are chapters in the

_Grettis Saga_ where this vanity runs riot, and makes us suspect that

Iceland differed little from a country town of to-day in its love for

gossip about the family of neighbors whose names happen to come into the

conversation. If the reader will persevere through the early chapters,

until Grettir commands exclusive attention, he will come to a drama

which has not many peers in literature. The outlaw kills a man in every

other chapter, but this record is no vulgar list of brutal fights. Not

inhuman nature, but human nature is here shown, human nature struggling

with unrelenting fate, making a grand fight, and coming to its end

because it must, but without ignominy. How fine a touch it is that

refuses to the outlaw's murderer the price set upon Grettir's head,

because the getting of it was through a "nithings-deed," the murder of a

dying man! William Morris was most felicitous in envoys and dedicating

poems, and in the sonnet prefixed to this translation he was

particularly happy. The first eight lines describe the hero of the

saga--the last six lines the significance of this literary creation:

A life scarce worth the living, a poor fame

Scarce worth the winning, in a wretched land,

Where fear and pain go upon either hand,

As toward the end men fare without an aim

Unto the dull grey dark from whence they came:

Let them alone, the unshadowed sheer rocks stand

Over the twilight graves of that poor band,

Who count so little in the great world's game!

Nay, with the dead I deal not; this man lives,

And that which carried him through good and ill,

Stern against fate while his voice echoed still

From rock to rock, now he lies silent, strives

With wasting time, and through its long lapse gives

Another friend to me, life's void to fill.

2.

In the three volumes of _The Earthly Paradise_, published by William

Morris in 1868-1870, there are three poems which hail from Old Norse

originals. They are "The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon," and

"The Lovers of Gudrun," in Vol. II, and "The Fostering of Aslaug," in

Vol. III. Of these "The Lovers of Gudrun" forms a class by itself; it is

a poem to be reckoned with when the dozen greatest poems of the century

are listed. The late Laureate may have equalled it in the best of the

_Idylls of the King_, but he never excelled it. Let us look at it in

detail.

First, be it said that "The Lovers of Gudrun" overtops all the other

poems in _The Earthly Paradise_. It would be possible to prove that

Morris was at his best when he worked with Old Norse material, but that

task shall not detain us now. It is enough to note that the "Prologue"

to _The Earthly Paradise_, called "The Wanderers," makes the leader of

these wanderers, who turn story-tellers when they reach the city by "the

borders of the Grecian sea," a Norseman. Born in Byzantium of a Greek

mother, he claimed Norway as his home, and on his father's death

returned to his kin. His speech to the Elder of the City reveals a

touching loyalty to his father's home and traditions:

But when I reached one dying autumn-tide

My uncle's dwelling near the forest-side,

And saw the land so scanty and so bare,

And all the hard things men contend with there,

A little and unworthy land it seemed,

And yet the more of Asagard I dreamed,

And worthier seemed the ancient faith of praise.

Here is the man, William Morris, in perfect miniature. Modern life and

training had given him a speech and aspect quite suave and cultured, but

the blood that flowed in his veins was red, and the tincture of iron was

in it. In religion, in art, in poetry, in economics, he loved the past

better than the present, though he was never unconscious of "our

glorious gains." In all departments of thought the scanty, the bare, the

hard, the unworthy, drew first his attention and then his love and

enthusiastic praise. And so perhaps it is explained that of all the

poems in _The Earthly Paradise_, the one indited first in the scarred

and dreadful land where neither wheat nor wine is at home, shall be the

finest in this latter-day retelling.

The first seventy years of the thirteenth century were the blossoming

time of the historic saga in Iceland, and those writings that record the

doings of the families of the land form, with the old songs and the best

of the kingly sagas, the flower of Northern literature. These family

records never extend over more than one generation, and sometimes they

deal with but a few years. They are half-way between romance and

history, with the balance oftenest in favor of truth. In this group are

found _Egils Saga_, known at second hand to Warton, the _Eyrbyggja

Saga_, translated by Walter Scott, and the _Laxdæla Saga_. It is the

_Laxdæla Saga_ that gives the story told by Morris in "The Lovers of

Gudrun." Among sagas it is famous for its fine portrayal of character.

The saga and the poem tell the story of two neighboring farms, Herdholt

and Bathsted, whose sons and daughters work out a dire tragedy. Kiartan

and Bodli are the son and foster-son of the first house, and Gudrun is

the daughter of the second. These are the principal personages in the

drama, though the list of the other _dramatis personæ_ is a long one.

Not only in the name of its heroine does the story suggest the

_Nibelungenlied_. The machinery of the Norse stories resembles the

German story's in many of its parts. In this version of Morris, the main

features of the saga are kept, and distracting details are properly

subordinated to the principal interest. Through the nineteen divisions

of this story the interest moves rapidly, and wonder as to the issue is

never lost. As a story-teller, Morris is distinctly powerful in this

poem, and all the qualities that endear the story-teller to us are here

found joined to many that make the poet a favorite with us. There are no

lyrics in the poem--the original saga was without the song-snatches that

are often found in sagas--but there are dramatic scenes that recall the

power of the Master-poet. Least of all the poems in the _Earthly

Paradise_ does "The Lovers of Gudrun" show the Chaucerian influence, and

the reader must be captious indeed who complains of the length of this

story.

To the unenlightened reader this poem reveals no traits that are

un-English. What there is of Old Norse flavor here is purely spiritual.

The original story being in prose, no attempt could be made to keep

original characteristics in verse-form. So "The Lovers of Gudrun" can

stand on its own merits as an English poem; no excuses need be made for

it on the plea that it is a translation.

Local color is not laid on the canvas after the figures have been

painted, but all the tints in the persons and the things are grandly

Norse. This story is a true romance, in that the scene is far removed

from the present day, and the atmosphere is very different from our own.

This story is a true picture of life, in that it sets forth the doings

of men and women in the power of the master passion. And so for the

purposes of literature this poem is not Norse, or rather, it is more

than Norse, it is universal. Now and then, to be sure, the displaced

Norse ideals are set forth in the poem, but in such wise that we almost

regret that the old order has passed away. The Wanderer who tells the

tale assures his listeners of the truth of it in these last words of the

interlude between "The Story of Rhodope" and "The Lovers of Gudrun":

Know withal that we

Have ever deemed this tale as true to be,

As though those very Dwellers in Laxdale,

Risen from the dead had told us their own tale;

Who for the rest while yet they dwelt on earth

Wearied no God with prayers for more of mirth

Than dying men have; nor were ill-content

Because no God beside their sorrow went

Turning to flowery sward the rock-strewn way,

Weakness to strength, or darkness into day.

Therefore, no marvels hath my tale to tell,

But deals with such things as men know too well;

All that I have herein your hearts to move,

Is but the seed and fruit of bitter love.

It is aside from our purpose to tell this story here. The more we study

this marvelous work, the more it is impressed upon us that in the reign

of love all men and all literatures are one. To the Englishman this

description of an Iceland maiden is no stranger than it was to the men

who sat about the spluttering fire in the Icelander's hall. It is the

form of Gudrun that is here described:

That spring was she just come to her full height,

Low-bosomed yet she was, and slim and light,

Yet scarce might she grow fairer from that day;

Gold were the locks wherewith the wind did play,

Finer than silk, waved softly like the sea

After a three days' calm, and to her knee

Wellnigh they reached; fair were the white hands laid

Upon the door posts where the dragons played;

Her brow was smooth now, and a smile began

To cross her delicate mouth, the snare of man.

(_Earthly Paradise_, Vol. II, p. 247.)

Not less accustomed are we to such heroes as Kiartan:

And now in every mouth was Kiartan's name,

And daily now must Gudrun's dull ears bear

Tales of the prowess of his youth to hear,

While in his cairn forgotten lay her love.

For this man, said they, all men's hearts did move,

Nor yet might envy cling to such an one,

So far beyond all dwellers 'neath the sun;

Great was he, yet so fair of face and limb

That all folk wondered much, beholding him,

How such a man could be; no fear he knew,

And all in manly deeds he could outdo;

Fleet-foot, a swimmer strong, an archer good,

Keen-eyed to know the dark waves' changing mood;

Sure on the crag, and with the sword so skilled,

That when he played therewith the air seemed filled

With light of gleaming blades; therewith was he

Of noble speech, though says not certainly

My tale, that aught of his he left behind

With rhyme and measure deftly intertwined.

(P. 266.)

The Old Norse touch here is in the last three lines which intimate that

the warrior was often a bard; but be it remembered that the Elizabethan

warrior could turn a sonnet, too.

We have said that the _Laxdæla Saga_ is famous for its portrayal of

character. This English version falls not at all below the original in

this quality. The lines already quoted show Gudrun and Kiartan as to

exterior. But this is a drama of flesh and blood creations, and they are

men and women that move through it, not puppets. Souls are laid bare

here, in quivering, pulsating agony. The tremendous figure of this story

is not Kiartan, nor Gudrun, nor Refna, but Bodli, and certainly English

narrative poetry has no second creation like to him. The mind reverts to

Shakespeare to find fit companionship for Bodli in poetry, and to George

Eliot and Thomas Hardy in prose. The suggestion of Shakespearean

qualities in George Eliot has been made by several great critics, among

them Edmond Scherer;[31] in Hardy and Morris, here, we find the same

soul-searching powers. These writers have created sufferers of titanic

greatness, and in the presence of their tragedies we are dumb.

An English artist has made Napoleon's voyage on H.M.S. _Bellerophon_ to

his prison-isle a picture that the memory refuses to forget. The picture

of Bodli as he sails back to Iceland, which, though his home, is to be

his prison and his death, is no less impressive:

Fair goes the ship that beareth out Christ's truth

Mingled of hope, of sorrow, and of ruth,

And on the prow Bodli the Christian stands,

Sunk deep in thought of all the many lands

The world holds, and the folk that dwell therein,

And wondering why that grief and rage and sin

Was ever wrought; but wondering most of all

Why such wild passion on his heart should fall.

(P. 294.)

Here we have the poet's conception--and the sagaman's--of Bodli--a man

in the grip of terrible Fate, who can no more swerve from the paths she

marks out for him than he can add a cubit to his stature. The Greek

tragedy embodies this idea, and Old Norse literature is full of it.

Thomas Hardy gives it later in his contemporary novels. We sympathize

with Bodli's fate because his agony is so terrible, and we call him the

most striking figure in this story. But the others suffer, too, Gudrun,

Kiartan, Refna; they make a stand against their woe, and utter brave

words in the face of it. Only Bodli floats downward with the tide,

unresisting. Guest prophesies bitter things for Gudrun, but adds:

Be merry yet! these things shall not be all

That unto thee in this thy life shall fall.

(P. 254.)

And Gudrun takes heart. When Thurid tells her brother Kiartan that

Gudrun has married another, his joy is shivered into atoms before him.

But he can say, even then:

Now is this world clean changed for me

In this last minute, yet indeed I see

That still it will go on for all my pain;

Come then, my sister, let us back again;

I must meet folk, and face the life beyond,

And, as I may, walk 'neath the dreadful bond

Of ugly pain--such men our fathers were,

Not lightly bowed by any weight of care.

(P. 311.)

And Kiartan does his work in the world. Poor Refna, when she has married

Kiartan hears women talking of the love that still is between Gudrun and

Kiartan. She goes to Kiartan with the story, beginning with words whose

pathos must conquer the most stoical of readers:

Indeed of all thy grief I knew,

But deemed if still thou saw'st me kind and true,

Not asking too much, yet not failing aught

To show that not far off need love be sought,

If thou shouldst need love--if thou sawest all this,

Thou wouldst not grudge to show me what a bliss

Thy whole love was, by giving unto me

As unto one who loved thee silently,

Now and again the broken crumbs thereof:

Alas! I, having then no part in love,

Knew not how naught, naught can allay the soul

Of that sad thirst, but love untouched and whole!

Kinder than e'er I durst have hoped thou art,

Forgive me then, that yet my craving heart

Is so unsatisfied; I know that thou

Art fain to dream that I am happy now,

And for that seeming ever do I strive;

Thy half-love, dearest, keeps me still alive

To love thee; and I bless it--but at whiles,--

(P. 343)

And thus she gains strength to live her life.

Here, then, in Bodli, is another of the great tragic figures in

literature--a sick man. There are many of them, even in the highest rank

of literary creations, Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeth! Wrong-headed,

defective as they are, we would not have them otherwise. The pearl of

greatest price is the result of an abnormal or morbid process.

Bodli comes to us from Icelandic literature, and in that fact we note

the solidarity of poetic geniuses. Not only is the great figure of Bodli

proof of this solidarity, but many other features of this poem prove it.

"Lively feeling for a situation and power to express it constitute the

poet," said Goethe. There are dramatic situations in "The Lovers of

Gudrun" which hold the reader in a breathless state till the last word

is said, and then leave him marveling at the imagination that could

conceive the scene, and the power that could express it. There are

gentler scenes, too, in the poem, where beauty and grace are conceived

as fair as ever poet dreamed, and the workmanship is thoroughly

adequate. As an example of the first, take the scene of Bodli's mourning

over Kiartan's dead body. It is here that we get that knowledge of

Bodli's woe that robs us of a cause against him. What agony is that

which can speak thus over the body of the dead rival!

... Didst thou quite

Know all the value of that dear delight

As I did? Kiartan, she is changed to thee;

Yea, and since hope is dead changed too to me,

What shall we do, if, each of each forgiven,

We three shall meet at last in that fair heaven

The new faith tells of? Thee and God I pray

Impute it not for sin to me to-day,

If no thought I can shape thereof but this:

O friend, O friend, when thee I meet in bliss,

Wilt thou not give my love Gudrun to me,

Since now indeed thine eyes made clear can see

That I of all the world must love her most?

(P. 368.)

Examples of the gentler scenes are scattered lavishly throughout the

poem and it is not necessary to enumerate.

One other sign that the Icelandic sagaman's art was kin to the English

poet's. The last line of this poem is given thus by Morris:

I did the worst to him I loved the most.

These are the very words of Gudrun in the saga, and summing up as they

do her opinion of Kiartan, they stand as a model of that compression

which is so admired in our poetry. Many such _multum in parvo_ lines are

found in Morris' poem, and at times they have a beauty that is

marvelous. Joined with this quality is the special merit of

Morris--picturesqueness, and so the reader often feels, when he has

finished a book by Morris, like the Cook tourist after he has "done" a

country of Europe--it must be done again and again to give it its due.

Of the other two Old Norse poems in _The Earthly Paradise_ not much need

be said. "The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon" is a fairy

tale, in the strain of Morris' prose romances. It was suggested by

Thorpe's _Yule-tide Stories_, the tale coming from the _Völundar Saga_.

There is a witchery about it that makes it pleasant reading in a dreamy

hour, but except the names and a few scenes about the farmstead, there

is nothing Icelandic about it. The virile element of the best Icelandic

literature is wanting here, and the hero's excuse for leaving weapons at

home when he goes to his watch is not at all natural:

Withal I shall not see

Men-folk belike, but faërie,

And all the arms within the seas

Should help me naught to deal with these;

Rather of such love were I fain

As fell to Sigurd Fafnir's-bane

When of the dragon's heart he ate.

(Vol. II, p. 33.)

This passage is nominally in the same meter as the opening lines of the

poem:

In this your land there once did dwell

A certain carle who lived full well,

And lacked few things to make him glad;

And three fair sons this goodman had.

According to old time English prosody, it is the same, too, as the meter

of Scott's Marmion!

In the passages quoted from "The Lovers of Gudrun" we see a measure

called the same as that of Pope's _Essay on Man_! Not seldom in "The

Lovers" do we forget that the lines are rhymed in twos; indeed, often we

do not note the rhyme at all. We are sometimes tempted to think that in

this piece, if not in "The Land East of the Sun," rhyme might have been

dispensed with altogether, since it often forces archaic words and

expressions into use. But it is to be said generally of Morris's

management of the meter in the Old Norse pieces, that it was adequate to

gain his end always, whether that end was to tell an Old Norse story in

English, or to carry over an Old Norse spirit into English. Of this

second achievement we shall speak further in considering _Sigurd the

Volsung_.

There is one more tale in _The Earthly Paradise_ which originated in

Norse legend. "The Fostering of Aslaug" is drawn from Thorpe's _Northern

Mythology_, which epitomizes older sources. Aslaug is the daughter of

Iceland's great hero, Sigurd, and Iceland's great heroine, Brynhild, and

her life is set down in this poem most beautifully. Again we note that

the added touches of later poets fail to leave the sense of the

strenuous in the picture. Aslaug is like a favorite representation of

Brynhild that we have seen, a lily-maid in aspect, or a Marguerite. Her

mother's masculinity is gone, and with it the Old Norse flavor. It is

the privilege of our age to enjoy both the virility of the Old Norse and

the delicacy of the mediæval conceptions, and William Morris has caught

both.

3.

In the opening lines of "The Fostering of Aslaug," our poet wrote his

doubts about his ability to sing the life of Sigurd in be-fitting

manner. At that time he said:

But now have I no heart to raise

That mighty sorrow laid asleep,

That love so sweet, so strong and deep,

That as ye hear the wonder told

In those few strenuous words of old,

The whole world seems to rend apart

When heart is torn away from heart.

(Vol. III, p. 28.)

It is a common complaint against the poetry of William Morris that it is

too long-winded. Each to his taste in this matter, but we beg to call

attention to one line in the above passage:

In those few strenuous words of old.

Whatever may have been Morris' tendency when he wrote his own poetry, he

knew when concision was a virtue in the poetry of others. There is no

better description of the _Völsunga Saga_ than the above line, and

William Morris gave the English people a literal version of the saga, if

mayhap that strenuous paucity might translate the old spirit. But, as if

he knew that many readers would fail to make much of this version, he

tried again on a larger scale, and the great volume _Sigurd the

Volsung_, epic in character and proportions, was the result. Of these

two we shall now speak.

The _Völsunga Saga_ was published in 1870, only two years after Morris

had begun to study Icelandic with Eirikr Magnusson. The latter's name is

on the title page as the first of the two co-translators. The _Saga_ was

supplemented by certain songs from the _Elder Edda_ which were

introduced by the translators at points where they would come naturally

in the story. The work, both in prose and verse, is well done, and the

attempt was successful to make, as the preface proposes, the "rendering

close and accurate, and, if it might be so, at the same time, not over

prosaic." The last two paragraphs of this preface are particularly

interesting to one who is tracing the influence of Old Norse literature

on English literature, because they are words with power, that have

stirred men and will stir men to learn more about a wonderful land and

its lore. We copy them entire:

"As to the literary quality of this work we might say much, but we think

we may well trust the reader of poetic insight to break through whatever

entanglement of strange manners or unused element may at first trouble

him, and to meet the nature and beauty with which it is filled: we

cannot doubt that such a reader will be intensely touched by finding,

amidst all its wildness and remoteness, such startling realism, such

subtilty, such close sympathy with all the passions that may move

himself to-day.

"In conclusion, we must again say how strange it seems to us, that this

Volsung Tale, which is in fact an unversified poem, should never before

have been translated into English. For this is the Great Story of the

North, which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the

Greeks--to all our race first, and afterwards, when the change of the

world has made our race nothing more than a name of what has been--a

story too--then should it be to those that come after us no less than

the Tale of Troy has been to us."

Morris wrote a prologue in verse for this volume, and it is an exquisite

poem, such as only he seemed able to indite. So often does the reader of

Morris come upon gems like this, that one is tempted to rail against the

common ignorance about him:

O hearken, ye who speak the English Tongue,

How in a waste land ages long ago,

The very heart of the North bloomed into song

After long brooding o'er this tale of woe!

. . . . . . . . .

Yea, in the first gray dawning of our race,

This ruth-crowned tangle to sad hearts was dear.

. . . . . . . . .

So draw ye round and hearken, English Folk,

Unto the best tale pity ever wrought!

Of how from dark to dark bright Sigurd broke,

Of Brynhild's glorious soul with love distraught,

Of Gudrun's weary wandering unto naught,

Of utter love defeated utterly,

Of Grief too strong to give Love time to die!

4.

Six years later, in 1877 (English edition), Morris published the long

poem, _The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and The Fall of the Niblungs_,

and in it gave the peerless crown of all English poems springing from

Old Norse sources. The poet considered this his most important work, and

he was prouder of it than of any other literary work that he did. One

who studies it can understand this pride, but he cannot understand the

neglect by the reading public of this remarkable poem. The history of

book-selling in the last decade shows strange revivals of interest in

authors long dead; it will be safe to prophesy such a revival for

William Morris, because valuable treasures will not always remain

hidden. In his case, however, it will not be a revival, because there

has not been an awakening yet. That awakening must come, and thousands

will see that William Morris was a great poet who have not yet heard of

his name. Let us look at his greatest work with some degree of

minuteness.

The opening lines are a good model of the meter, and we find it

different from any that we have considered so far. There are certain

peculiarities about it that make it seem a perfect medium for

translating the Old Norse spirit. Most of these peculiarities are in the

opening lines, and so we may transfer them to this page:[32]

There was a dwelling of Kings ere the world was waxen old;

Dukes were the door-wards there, and the roofs were thatched with gold;

Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed its doors;

Earls' wives were the weaving-women, queens' daughters strewed its

floors,

And the masters of its song-craft were the mightiest men that cast

The sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast.

Everybody knows that alliteration was a principle of Icelandic verse. It

strikes the ear that hears Icelandic poetry for the first time--or the

eye that sees it, since most of us read it silently--as unpleasantly

insistent, but on fuller acquaintance, we lose this sense of

obtrusiveness. Morris, in this poem, uses alliteration, but so skilfully

that only the reader that seeks it discovers it. A less superb artist

would have made it stick out in every line, so that the device would be

a hindrance to the story-telling. As it is, nowhere in the more than

nine thousand lines of _Sigurd the Volsung_ is this alliteration an

excrescence, but everywhere it is woven into the grand design of a

fabric which is the richer for its foreign workmanship.

Notice that _duke_ and _battle_ and _master_ are the only words not

thoroughly Teutonic. This overwhelming predominance of the Anglo-Saxon

element over the French is in keeping with the original of the story. Of

course it is an accident that so small a proportion of Latin derivatives

is found in these six lines, but the fact remains that Morris set

himself to tell a Teutonic story in Teutonic idiom. That idiom is not

very strange to present-day readers, indeed we may say it has but a

fillip of strangeness. Archaisms are characteristic of poetic diction,

and those found in this poem that are not common to other poetry are

used to gain an Old Norse flavor. The following words taken from Book I

of the poem are the only unfamiliar ones: _benight_, meaning "at night";

"so _win_ the long years over"; _eel-grig_; _sackless_; _bursten_, a

participle. The compounds _door-ward_ and _song-craft_ are

representative of others that are sprinkled in fair number through the

poem. They are the best that our language can do to reproduce the fine

combinations that the Icelandic language formed so readily. English

lends itself well to this device, as the many compounds show that Morris

took from common usage. Such words as _roof-tree_, _song-craft_,

_empty-handed_, _grave-mound_, _store-house_, taken at random from the

pages of this poem, show that the genius of our language permits such

formations. When Morris carries the practice a little further, and makes

for his poem such words as _door-ward_, _chance-hap_, _slumber-tide_,

_troth-word_, _God-home_, and a thousand others, he is not taking

liberties with the language, and he is using a powerful aid in

translating the Old Norse spirit.

One more peculiar characteristic of Icelandic is admirably exhibited in

this poem. We have seen that Warton recognized in the "Runic poets" a

warmth of fancy which expressed itself in "circumlocution and

comparisons, not as a matter of necessity, but of choice and skill."

Certainly Morris in using these circumlocutions in _Sigurd the Volsung_,

has exercised remarkable skill in weaving them into his story. Like the

alliterations, they are part of an harmonious design. Examples abound,

like:

Adown unto the swan-bath the Volsung Children ride;

and this other for the same thing, the sea:

While sleepeth the fields of the fishes amidst the summer-tide.

Still others for the water are _swan-mead_, and "bed-gear of the swan."

"The serpent of death" and _war-flame_, for sword; _earth-bone_, for

rock; _fight-sheaves_, for armed hosts; _seaburg_, for boats, are other

striking examples.

So much for the mechanical details of this poem. Its literary features

are so exceptional that we must examine them at length.

Book I is entitled "Sigmund" and the description is set at the head of

it. "In this book is told of the earlier days of the Volsungs, and of

Sigmund the father of Sigurd, and of his deeds, and of how he died while

Sigurd was yet unborn in his mother's womb."

There are many departures from the _Völsunga Saga_ in this poetic

version, and all seem to be accounted for by a desire to impress

present-day readers with this story. The poem begins with Volsung,

omitting, therefore, the marvelous birth of that king and the oath of

the unborn child to "flee in fear from neither fire nor the sword." The

saga makes the wolf kill one of Volsung's sons every night; the poem

changes the number to two. A magnificent scene is invented by Morris in

the midnight visit of Signy to the wood where her brothers had been

slain. She speaks to the brother that is left, desiring to know what he

is doing:

O yea, I am living indeed, and this labor of mine hand

Is to bury the bones of the Volsungs; and lo, it is well nigh done.

So draw near, Volsung's daughter, and pile we many a stone

Where lie the gray wolf s gleanings of what was once so good.

(P. 23.)

The dialogue of brother and sister is a mighty conception, and surely

the old Icelanders would have called Morris a rare singer. Sigmund tells

the story of the deaths of his brothers, adding:

But now was I wroth with the Gods, that had made the Volsungs for

nought;

And I said: in the Day of their Doom a man's help shall they miss.

(P. 24.)

But Signy is reconciled to the workings of Fate:

I am nothing so wroth as thou art with the ways of death and hell,

For thereof had I a deeming when all things were seeming well.

The day to come shall set their woes right:

There as thou drawest thy sword, thou shall think of the days that were

And the foul shall still seem foul, and the fair shall still seem fair;

But thy wit shall then be awakened, and thou shalt know indeed

Why the brave man's spear is broken, and his war shield fails at need;

Why the loving is unbeloved; why the just man falls from his state;

Why the liar gains in a day what the soothfast strives for late.

Yea, and thy deeds shalt thou know, and great shall thy gladness be;

As a picture all of gold thy life-days shalt thou see,

And know that thou wert a God to abide through the hurry and haste;

A God in the golden hall, a God in the rain-swept waste,

A God in the battle triumphant, a God on the heap of the slain:

And thine hope shall arise and blossom, and thy love shall be quickened

again:

And then shalt thou see before thee the face of all earthly ill;

Thou shalt drink of the cup of awakening that thine hand hath holpen to

fill;

By the side of the sons of Odin shalt thou fashion a tale to be told

In the hall of the happy Baldur.

(P. 25.)

In this wise one Christian might hearten another to accept the dealings

of Providence to-day. While we do not think that a worshipper of Odin

would have spoken all these words, they are not an undue exaggeration of

the noblest traits of the old Icelandic religion.

The poem does not record the death of Siggeir's and Signy's son, though

the saga does. Morris adds a touch when he makes the imprisoned men

exult over the sword that Signy drops into their grave, and he also puts

into the mouth of Siggeir in the burning hall words that the saga does

not contain. The poem says that the women of the Gothfolk were permitted

to retire from the burning hall, but the saga has no such statement. The

war of foul words between Granmar and Sinfjötli is left in the saga, and

the cause of Gudrod's death is changed from rivalry over a woman to

anger over a division of war booty. In Sigmund's lament over his

childlessness we have another of the poet's additions, and certainly we

find no fault with the liberty:

The tree was stalwart, but its boughs are old and worn.

Where now are the children departed, that amidst my life were born?

I know not the men about me, and they know not of my ways:

I am nought but a picture of battle, and a song for the people to

praise.

I must strive with the deeds of my kingship, and yet when mine hour is

come

It shall meet me as glad as the goodman when he bringeth the last load

home.

(P. 56.)

When the great hero dies, Morris puts into his mouth another of the

magnificent speeches that are the glory of this poem. Four lines from it

must suffice:

When the gods for one deed asked me I ever gave them twain;

Spendthrift of glory I was, and great was my life-day's gain.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Our wisdom and valour have kissed, and thine eyes shall see the fruit,

And the joy for his days that shall be hath pierced my heart to the

root.

(P. 62.)

It appears from this study of Book I that _Sigurd the Volsung_ has

adapted the saga story to our civilization and our art, holding to the

best of the old and supplementing it by new that is ever in keeping with

the old. Other instances of this eclectic habit may be seen in the other

three books, but we shall quote from these for other purposes.

Book II is entitled "Regin." "Now this is the first book of the life and

death of Sigurd the Volsung, and therein is told of the birth of him,

and of his dealings with Regin the Master of Masters, and of his deeds

in the waste places of the earth."

Morris was deeply read in Old Norse literature, and out of his stores of

knowledge he brought vivifying details for this poem. Such, for

instance, is the description of Sigurd's eyes, not found just here in

the saga:

In the bed there lieth a man-child, and his eyes look straight on

the sun.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Yet they shrank in their rejoicing before the eyes of the child.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

In the naming of the child by an ancient name, the meaning of that name

is indicated:

O _Sigurd_, Son of the Volsungs, O Victory yet to be!

The festivities over the birth of the child are wonderfully described

in the brief lines, and they are a picture out of another book than the

saga:

Earls think of marvellous stories, and along the golden strings

Flit words of banded brethren and names of war-fain Kings.

Over and over again in this poem Morris records the Icelanders' desire

"to leave a tale to tell," and here are Sigurd's words to Regin who has

been egging him on to deeds:

Yet I know that the world is wide, and filled with deeds unwrought;

And for e'en such work was I fashioned, lest the songcraft come to

nought,

When the harps of God-home tinkle, and the Gods are at stretch to

hearken:

Lest the hosts of the Gods be scanty when their day hath begun to

darken.

(P. 82.)

In Book II we have other great speeches that the poet has put into the

mouth of his characters with little or no justification in the original

saga. Chap. XIV of the saga contains Regin's tale of his brothers, and

of the gold called "Andvari's Hoard," and that tale is severely brief

and plain. The account in the poem is expanded greatly, and the

conception of Regin materially altered. In the saga he was not the

discontented youngest son of his father, prone to talk of his woes and

to lament his lot. In the poem he does this in so eloquent a fashion

that almost we are persuaded to sympathize with him. Certainly his lines

were hard, to have outlived his great deeds, and to hear his many

inventions ascribed to the gods. The speech of the released Odin to

Reidmar is modeled on Job's conception of omnipotence, and it is one of

the memorable parts of this book. Gripir's prophecy, too, is a majestic

work, and its original was three sentences in the saga and the poem

_Grípisspá_ in the heroic songs of the _Edda_. Here Morris rises to the

heights of Sigurd's greatness:

Sigurd, Sigurd! O great, O early born!

O hope of the Kings first fashioned! O blossom of the morn!

Short day and long remembrance, fair summer of the North!

One day shall the worn world wonder how first thou wentest forth!

(P. 111.)

Those who have read William Morris know that he is a master of nature

description. The "Glittering Heath" offered a fine opportunity for this

sort of work, and in this piece we have another departure from the saga,

Morris made hundreds of pictures in this poem, but the pages describing

the journey to the "Glittering Heath" are packed with them to an

extraordinary degree. Here is Iceland in very fact, all dust and ashes

to the eye:

More changeless than mid-ocean, as fruitless as its floor.

We confess that there is something in the scene that holds us, all shorn

of beauty though it is. We do not want to go the length of Thomas Hardy,

however, who, in that wonderful first chapter of _The Return of the

Native_ has a similar heath to describe. "The new vale of Tempe," says

he, "may be a gaunt waste in Thule: human souls may find themselves in

closer and closer harmony with external things wearing a sombreness

distasteful to our race when it was young.... The time seems near, if it

has not actually arrived, when the mournful sublimity of a moor, a sea,

or a mountain, will be all of nature that is absolutely consonant with

the moods of the more thinking among mankind. And ultimately, to the

commonest tourist, spots like Iceland may become what the vineyards and

myrtlegardens of South Europe are to him now." Is it not a suggestive

thought that England and the nineteenth century evolved a pessimism

which poor Iceland on its ash-heap never could conceive? William Morris

was an Icelander, not an Englishman, in his philosophy.

In this same scene, a notable deviation from the saga is the

conversation between Regin and Sigurd concerning the relations that

shall be between them after the slaying of Fafnir. Here Morris impresses

the lesson of Regin's greed, taking the un-Icelandic device of preaching

to serve his purpose:

Let it lead thee up to heaven, let it lead thee down to hell,

The deed shall be done tomorrow: thou shalt have that measureless Gold,

And devour the garnered wisdom that blessed thy realm of old,

That hath lain unspent and begrudged in the, very heart of hate:

With the blood and the might of thy brother thine hunger shalt thou

sate:

And this deed shall be mine and thine; but take heed for what followeth

then!

(P. 119.)

In still another place has Morris departed far from the saga story.

According to the poem, Sigurd meets each warning of Fafnir that the gold

will be the curse of its possessor with the assurance that he will cast

the gold abroad, and let none of it cling to his fingers. The saga,

however, has this very frank confession: "Home would I ride and lose all

that wealth, if I deemed that by the losing thereof I should never die;

but every brave and true man will fain have his hand on wealth till that

last day." Here, again, we see an adaptation of the story of the poem to

modern conceptions of nobility. It remains to be said that the ernes

move Sigurd to take the gold for the gladdening of the world, and they

assure him that a son of the Volsung had nought to fear from the Curse.

The seven-times-repeated "Bind the red rings, O Sigurd," is an admirable

poem, but it does not contain information concerning Brynhild, as do the

strophes of _Reginsmál_ which are the model for this lay.

Let us look at the art of Morris as it is shown in telling "How Sigurd

awoke Brynhild upon Hindfell." As in the saga, so in the English poem,

this incident has a setting most favorable to the display of its

remarkable beauties. It is a picture as pure and sweet as it has ever

entered into the mind of man to conceive. The conception belongs to the

poetic lore of many nations, and children are early introduced to the

story of "Sleeping Beauty." There are some features of the Old Norse

version that are especially charming, and first among them is the

address of the awakened Brynhild to the sun and the earth. We are told

that this maiden loved the radiant hero that here awoke her from her

age-long sleep, but not for him is her first greeting. A finer thrill

moves her than love for a man, and in Morris's poem, this feeling finds

singularly beautiful expression:

All hail O Day and thy Sons, and thy kin of the coloured things!

Hail, following Night, and thy Daughter that leadeth thy wavering

wings!

Look down with unangry eyes on us today alive,

And give us the hearts victorious, and the gain for which we strive!

All hail, ye Lords of God-home, and ye Queens of the House of Gold!

Hail thou dear Earth that bearest, and thou Wealth of field and fold!

Give us, your noble children, the glory of wisdom and speech,

And the hearts and the hands of healing, and the mouths and hands that

teach!

(P. 140.)

In order to see just what the art of Morris has done for this poem, let

us compare this address with the rendering of the _Sigrdrifumál_, which

tell the same story and which Morris and Magnusson have incorporated

into their translation of the _Völsunga Saga_. The verses are not in the

original saga:

Hail to the day come back!

Hail, sons of the daylight!

Hail to thee, dark night, and thy daughter!

Look with kind eyes a-down,

On us sitting here lonely,

And give unto us the gain that we long for.

Hail to the Æsir,

And the sweet Asyniur!

Hail to the fair earth fulfilled of plenty!

Fair words, wise hearts,

Would we win from you,

And healing hands while life we hold.

To get the full benefit of the comparison of the old and the new, let us

set in conjunction with these versions a severely literal translation of

the _Edda_ strophes themselves:

Hail, O Day,

Hail, O Sons of the Day,

Hail Night and kinswoman!

With unwroth eyes

look on us here

and give to us sitting ones victory.

Hail, O Gods,

Hail, O Goddesses,

Hail, O bounteous Earth!

Speech and wisdom

give to us, the excellent twain,

and healing hands during life.

These stages in the progress of the gold from mine to mint furnish their

own commentary. The finished product will pass current with the most

exacting of assayers, as well as gladden the hearts of the poor one

whose hand seldom touches gold.

If the skill of the poet in this case have merited resemblance to that

of the refiner of gold, what name less than alchemy can characterize his

achievement in the rest of this scene? From the first words of

Brynhild's life-story:

I am she that loveth; I was born of the earthly folk;

to the tender words that tell of the coming of another day:

And fresh and all abundant abode the deeds of Day,

there is a succession of beautiful scenes and glorious speeches such as

only a master of magic could have gotten out of the original story. The

Eddaic account of the Valkyr's disobedience to All-Father, pictures a

saucy and self-willed maiden. Sentence has been pronounced upon her, and

thus the story continues: "But I said I would vow a vow against it, and

marry no man that knew fear." The _Völsunga Saga_ gives exactly the same

account, but the poetic version of Morris saves the maiden for our

respect and admiration. It is not effrontery, but repentance that speaks

in the voice of Brynhild here:

The thoughts of my heart overcame me, and the pride of my wisdom and

speech,

And I scorned the earth-folk's Framer, and the Lord of the world I must

teach.

In the Icelandic version, Odin makes no speech at the dooming, but

Morris puts into his mouth this magnificent address:

And he cried: "Thou hast thought in thy folly that the Gods have

friends and foes,

That they wake, and the world wends onward, that they sleep, and

the world slips back,

That they laugh, and the world's weal waxeth, that they frown and

fashion the wrack:

Thou hast cast up the curse against me; it shall aback on thine head;

Go back to the sons of repentance, with the children of sorrow wed!

For the Gods are great unholpen, and their grief is seldom seen,

And the wrong that they will and must be is soon as it hath not been."

(P. 141.)

Morris has here again exercised the poet's privilege of adding to the

story that was the pride of an entire age, in order to serve his own the

better. If he was wise in these additions, he was no less wise in

subtractions and in preservations. The saga has a long address by

Brynhild, opening with mystical advice concerning the power of runes,

and closing grandly with wise words that sound like a page from the Old

Testament. The former find no place in _Sigurd the Volsung_, but the

latter are turned into mighty phrases that wonderfully preserve the

spirit of the original.

One passage more from Book II:

So they climb the burg of Hindfell, and hand in hand they fare,

Till all about and above them is nought but the sunlit air,

And there close they cling together rejoicing in their mirth;

For far away beneath them lie the kingdoms of the earth,

And the garths of men-folk's dwellings and the streams that water them,

And the rich and plenteous acres, and the silver ocean's hem,

And the woodland wastes and the mountains, and all that holdeth all;

The house and the ship and the island, the loom and the mine and the

stall,

The beds of bane and healing, the crafts that slay and save,

The temple of God and the Doom-ring, the cradle and the grave.

(P. 145.)

These ten lines serve to illustrate very well one of the most remarkable

powers of Morris. Just consider for a moment the number of details that

are crowded into this picture, and then notice how few are the strokes

required to put them there. For this rapid painting of a crowded canvas

Morris is second to none among English poets. This power to put a whole

landscape or a complex personality into a few lines is the direct

outcome of his study of Old Norse literature. Icelandic poetry is

characterized by this quality. One has but to compare the account of the

end of the world as it is found in the last strophes of _Völuspá_, or in

the _Prose Edda_, with the similar account in _Revelations_ to see how

much two languages may differ in this respect. It would seem as if the

short verses characteristic of Icelandic poetry forbade lengthy

descriptions. The effect must be produced by a number of quick strokes:

there is never time to go over a line once made. A simile is never

elaborated, a new one is made when the poet wishes to insist on the

figure. Take the second strophe of the "Ancient Lay of Gudrun" as an

example, in the translation by Morris and Magnusson:

Such was my Sigurd

Among the Sons of Giuki

As is the green leek

O'er the low grass waxen,

Or a hart high-limbed

Over hurrying deer,

Or gleed-red gold

Over grey silver.

That is the Icelandic fashion; William Morris has caught it in the

_Story of Sigurd_. Matthew Arnold has not seen fit to use it in his

"Balder Dead," as these lines show:

Him the blind Hoder met, as he came up

From the sea cityward, and knew his step;

Nor yet could Hermod see his brother's face,

For it grew dark; but Hermod touched his arm.

And as a spray of honeysuckle flowers

Brushes across a tired traveller's face

Who shuffles thro the deep-moistened dust,

On a May-evening, in the darkened lanes,

And starts him that he thinks a ghost went by--

So Hoder brushed by Hermod's side.

These are noble lines, but altogether foreign to Icelandic.