This tale is founded upon two sagas, which have been translated
literally and without attempt to accord their discrepancies by York
Powell and Vigfussen in their invaluable _Origines Icelandicae_. As
well as those versions I have had another authority to help me, in
Laing's _Sea-Kings of Norway_. I have blent the two accounts into one,
and put forward the result with this word of explanation, which I hope
will justify me in the treatment I have given them.
I don't forget that a "saga" is history, and that these sagas in
particular furnish an account of the first discovery of America, no
less a thing. Nevertheless, while I have been scrupulous in leaving
the related facts as I found them, I have not hesitated to dwell upon
the humanity in the tales, and to develop that as seemed fitting. I
don't think that I have put anything into the relation which is not
implied in the few words accorded me by the text. I believe that
everything I give Gudrid and Freydis, Karlsefne and Leif and Eric Red
to say or to do can be made out from hints, which I have made it my
business to interpret. Character makes plot in life as well as in
fiction, and a novelist is not worthy of his hire who can't weave a
tale out of one or two people to whom he has been able to give life.
All romantic invention proceeds from people or from atmosphere.
Therefore, while I have shown, I hope, due respect to the exploration
of America, I admit that my tale turns essentially upon the explorers
of it. My business as a writer of tales has been to explore them
rather than Wineland the Good. I have been more interested in Gudrid's
husbands and babies than I had need to be as an historian. I am sure
the tale is none the worse for it--and anyhow I can't help it. If I
read of a woman called Gudrid, and a handsome woman at that, I am bound
to know pretty soon what colour her hair was, and how she twisted it
up. If I hear that she had three husbands and outlived them all I
cannot rest until I know how she liked them, how they treated her; what
feelings she had, what feelings they had. So I get to know them as
well as I know her--and so it goes on. Wineland does not fail of
getting discovered, but meantime some new people have been born into
the world who do the business of discovering while doing their own
human business of love and marriage and childbirth.
All this, I say, is implicit in the saga-history. So it is, but it has
to be looked for. The saga listeners, I gather, took character very
much for granted, as probably Homer's audience did. Odysseus was full
of wiles, Achilles was terrible, Paris "a woman-haunting cheat," Gunnar
of Lithend a poet and born fighter, Nial a sage, and so on. The poet
gave them more than that, of course. Poetry apart, he did not disdain
psychology. There is plenty psychology in both _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_--less in the sagas, but still it is there. And when you come
to know the persons of these great inventions there is as much
psychology as any one can need, or may choose to put there--as much as
there is in _Hamlet_, as much as there is in _La Guerre et La Paix_.
In Kormak's Saga, for instance, which I put forward some years ago as
_A Lover's Tale_, is there no psychology? It is no way out of it to
put down Kormak's tergiversations to sorcery. I doubt if that was good
enough for the men who first heard the tale; it is certainly no good to
us. In the strange barbaric recesses of the tale of Gunnar Helming and
Frey's wife, what are we to make of it all unless we reckon with the
states of poor Sigrid's soul, married to a gog-eyed wooden god? How
came Halgerd to betray Gunnar to his foes, how came Nial to be burned
in his bed? Can one read _Laxdale_ and not desire to read through it
into the proud heart of Gudrun?
And having once begun with them one could go on, I believe, until the
hearts of all those fine, straight-dealing people were as plain to us
as those of our superfine, sophisticated moderns. For Nature is still
our mother and mistress, no less now than she ever was--and that's a
good thing for the story-reader as well as for the story-teller.
Out of the Saga of Thorgils, which is a tale of Greenland's
exploration, I hope that I drew a portrait of a good Icelander. Out of
Eric's Saga and Karlsefne's Saga combined I believe there is a no less
faithful picture of a good Icelandish woman. Gudrid was wise as well
as fair, if I have read her truly; she was a good woman, wife and
mother. The discovery of Wineland is to my own feelings quite beside
the mark where she is involved; but I have put it all in, and wish
there had been more of it. Psychology and romantic imagination will
not help us much there. We want the facts, and they fail us. All that
can be made out is that Karlsefne sailed up the Hudson. His Scraelings
were Esquimaux. But who was the black-kirtled woman who appeared to
Gudrid and gave herself the same name? And where was the Maggoty Sea?
And what goaded Freydis to her dreadful deeds? I admire Freydis
myself; I think she was a _femme incomprise_. I have taken pains with
Freydis, though personally I had rather been Gudrid's fourth husband
than Freydis's first.
I am not afraid of the accusation of vulgarising the classics. It is
good that they should be loved, and if simplification and amplification
humanise them I can stand the charge with philosophy. Of all classics
known to me the sagas are the most unapproachable in their naked
strength. Their frugality freezes the soul; they are laconic to
baldness. I admire strength with anybody, but the starkness of the
sagas shocks me. When Nial lies down by his old wife's side with the
timbers roaring and crackling over his head, and Skarphedin, his son,
says, "Our father goes early to bed, but that was to be expected, as he
is an old man," Professor Ker, exulting in his strength, finds it
admirable. I say it is inadequate, and not justified to us by what
else the saga tells us of the speaker. I am sure that Skarphedin had
more to say, or that if he had not the poet could have expressed him
better. It recalls the humorous callousness of our soldiers, which,
nakedly rendered, is often shocking. This is, however, not really the
point. Terseness may be dramatic--it often is, as in "Cover her
face--mine eyes dazzle--She died young"--but in narrative it may check
instead of provoke the imagination. But if it provoke, is it not
reasonable to let the imagination go to work upon it? If Skarphedin
indeed took his father's death in that manner, is one not justified in
going to work with Skarphedin, to find out what manner of man he was
who could so express himself in supreme crisis? I trace a great deal
of our soldiers' crude jesting at death to their Scandinavian blood;
and nothing more intensely and painfully interesting has ever been
given to the imagination to work upon than their conduct in the face of
horror and sin of late, so dauntless, so blithe and so grim as it is.
Where heroism has been so shown on all sides of us in these three
dreadful years, it is no longer possible to pick and choose heroic
nations. One might otherwise have said that no such heroes were ever
given to the world as the heroes of Iceland. That they are not
accepted as such on all hands is no fault of the literature which
presents them; for that literature, like all great art, makes demands
upon its readers. It hands over the key, but if the lock is stiff it
will not give you oil for the wards. That you must find for yourself.
Oil for the wards is all I can pretend to here; and if I may say that I
have humanised a tale of endurance, and clothed demigods and shadows in
flesh and blood, I shall feel that I have done useful work, and bear
charges of vulgarisation with a philosophy which assures me that the
two terms are much of a muchness.
The great gestures, the large-scale maps, the grand manner are for
history and epic, but genre for the novel--and what _genre_ is so
momentous to it as the human? Let Homer describe the wrath of Achilles
and the passion of Hektor and Andromache. The novelist will want to
know what Briseïs felt when she was handed from hero to hero, will pore
upon the matronly charity of Theano, the agony of the two young men
Achilles slew by Skamander, and find the psychology of these pawns in
the great game as enthralling as that of the high movers. I confess
that to me Gudrid, the many times a wife and the always sweet and
reserved, is more absorbing a tale than the discovery of Wineland. I
like the two running Scots better than their country, would barter all
Greenland for the tale of the winter sickness in Thorstan Black's
house. So much apology I feel moved to offer for having put down
Exploration from the chief place in the tale, and put up a wife and
mother.
As for the verse--Gudrid's Wardlock chant is adapted from the Lay of
Swipday and Merglad in _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_, I, 92 _seq_., and
Thorstan's Song of Helgi and Sigrun is a partial version of that epic
(_ibid_. 131).