We find the poet in the humble white house at the corner of Franciskan
and Kloster streets in Lund, pacing the floor of his spacious
two-windowed study, murmuring and humming his verses to himself, and
now and then pausing before an open cabinet that serves him for a
desk, to write down his strophes as he completes them. In the room two
canary birds are warbling; accompanied by their song he is composing
his "Fridthjof." He is at this time about forty years old; neither
passion nor disease have as yet imprinted their traces on his visage
The furies are lurking on his threshold; but it almost seems as if they
purposed to await the completion of the main work of his life before
they crossed it, and seized upon him for their prey. His brow is clear
and arched; his gaze bright and free.
"Both earnest and profoundly true
Is every feature of his noble face,"
as he says of his Axel.
He has chosen his theme, or more correctly speaking, his theme has
emerged from the memories of his childhood and presented itself
so alluringly before him that he has designed the outlines of its
treatment, and commenced his work within them. He wishes to furnish
a picture of life in the ancient north. With full conviction he had
formerly joined the "Gothic" union; for he saw in the national historic
and poetic tendency of this society the true medium course between
the cosmopolitan rationalistic culture and the exaggerated Teutonic
enthusiasm of the "Phosphorists." He soon experienced the grief,
however, of seeing how his worthy and ardent ally, Pehr Henrik Ling,
who had taken a position in the intellectual life of Sweden similar to
that of Arndt and Jahn in Germany, drove the Swedish public in alarm
from the poetry of northern antiquity by his boasting language and his
colossal disregard of form. His awkward touch on harp strings made of
northern bear sinews destroyed the superb material which, in the hands
of Oehlenschläger, had won all hearts in Denmark. Tegnér concluded
to take one single saga as a central point about which to gather all
the most characteristic images of the ancient north: viking life and
brotherhood in arms, the wisdom of the Hávamál and the vows made on
Frey's boar at Yuletide, the heroic song and the election of kings at
the Thing, the self infliction of wounds with the point of the sword
and the runic stone, the poesy of life and of death in ancient times.
There must be a good, pure atmosphere in the poem; a sharp, fresh
breeze must blow through it; Scandinavians should feel at home in it;
but beyond all else there must be none of the icy temperature of the
old Norse poems of the worthy Ling! This saga was, of course, a love
story, and with the yearnings and sorrows of love the hard web of his
material must be permeated. The material was Norse, but the treatment
must be Swedish; Norway and Sweden which not long before had been
divided, must now be blended together in song. There was a rustling
in his mind's ear as of the clash of shields and the whizzing of a
shower of arrows, the rattling of quivers and the clinking of foaming
beakers, the stamping of fiery coursers and the restless flight of
hooded falcons, blows on the sword and strokes with the sword, and
through it all the long, languishing, cooing, dreamy nightingale note
and the still more thrilling call of the quail in the stillness of the
summer night. As regards the scenery he truly had no need to transplant
himself in fancy into its midst; he had become too thoroughly familiar
with it in his childhood and youth in the country to require any such
effort. He knew them well, these trees with white trunks and drooping
crowns; one of them bore two characters in its birch trunk: were these
the letters, "E" and "A," or was it an "F" and an "I" in runes? He
knew, between fir-overgrown coasts, this smooth icy path over which the
steel-footed warrior sped, while behind him came rushing the sledge in
which sat that fair young queen who would soon pass over her own name
on the ice.
"And many a rune, too, on the ice he engraves;
Fair Ing'borg drives o'er her own name on the waves."[11]
And when the springtime came, when the billows beckoned enticingly,
when the sea spoke aloud of deeds of valor, while the boats along the
coast seemed most urgent in their invitations to come on board and seek
a knowledge of the world, he was well aware what a viking must have
felt at such a moment.
"Ellide, too, now has no sport on the sea;
Now ceaseless her cable she jerks to get free."[12]
But it was not possible to journey forth into the world. At the
foster-father's house, at Hilding's,--at Myhrman's, on the Rämen
estate,--dwelt the fairest of the fair, the beloved one whom it was
impossible to forsake. And all the memories of youth, sweet and
childlike, overpower him at this thought. He remembers how it was his
wont to carry to Anna the first anemone that blossomed and the first
strawberry,
"The first pale flow'r that spring had shed,
The strawberry sweet that first grew red."[13]
And he dreams of so many good times when he and she (or was it
Fridthjof and Ingeborg?) paused in their wanderings by the rustling
waters of the forest streamlet, and there was no other way for Ingeborg
to cross than to let him bear her over in his arms, and smiling he
wrote,
"So pleasant feels, when foam-rush 'larms,
The gentle ding of small white arms!"[14]
And unconsciously there blends with these memories another erotic
enthusiasm of a more recent date, another form, that of the fully
matured Ingeborg--not Anna Myhrman, whose footsteps are heard in the
adjoining room. The footsteps of the excellent housewife who is now in
the meridian of life do not reach his ear; no, it is a younger, more
attractive face, a slenderer form, another, more musical voice; he dare
not love this woman, it were contrary to divine and human law; she is
married to King Ring, to Fridthjof's friend, whose confidence in him is
unbounded. Fridthjof must away, far out to sea, to deaden his yearning
with deeds of valor and victories. But one day--late though it may
be, one day will come the hour of atonement, and the stormy heart of
Fridthjof will find repose.
The old Norse Fridthjof's Saga is a narrative written in Iceland
about the year 1300; it is assumed that the historic portions of the
incidents took place about the year 800. Fridthjof, the son of a
bonde, who was brought up with the king's daughter Ingeborg, sues for
her hand and is rejected. In order to be revenged on her brothers, he
refuses to give them his powerful aid in the war against King Ring,
and avails himself of their absence to enter into a betrothal with
Ingeborg, who has been shut up by her brothers in Baldershage a place
consecrated to Balder, where it was forbidden man to embrace a woman,
for it was supposed that Fridthjof would not dare seek a rendez-vous
in that sacred spot. But Fridthjof defies the gods, visits Ingeborg,
and violates the temple. Meanwhile peace is concluded with Ring on
condition that the brothers give the aged king their sister to wife.
Of Fridthjof they demand that he go forth on their errand to collect
tribute from Angantyr, on the Orkney Islands. During his absence they
set fire to the home of his fathers. Fridthjof returns, finds the
king sacrificing in Baldershage, and casts the purse of silver he has
brought with him into Helge's face with such force that Helge falls
down in a swoon. Through an accident Balder's image is cast into the
fire, and the whole house becomes wreathed in flames. Fridthjof flees,
returns, visits King Ring, saves the life of the old king, and, when
finally the latter dies, marries Ingeborg.
In this plot Tegnér's poetic eye detects the main features of an object
of universal human interest, and susceptible of generalizing symbolism.
Fridthjof struggles for his love with reckless defiance; in spite of
all the powers that be, he is determined to conquer his happiness amid
storm.
"His good sword pointing to the norn's fair bosom,
Thou shalt,' saith he, 'thou shalt give way!"'[15]
He refuses to obey a royal mandate. In the prime of his manhood he
becomes, first a violator of the temple, then a temple burner, then
the outlawed, proscribed "Wolf in the Sanctuary" (_varg i veum_). He
flees and does penance, renounces and is purified, and receives at last
the hand of the beloved object of his affections as a reward, not for
his struggle, but for his persistent fidelity. Not the maiden but the
widow, not happiness itself but the pale reflection of happiness, he
embraces as his bride. Was not this in itself a symbol of human life?
One step more and the symbol stands completed in all its radiance.
There was a central point to the saga which, beneath the poet's gaze,
must necessarily become transformed to a fruitful germ. This was the
sanctuary of Balder. About a Balder's temple everything revolves; here
Ingeborg is imprisoned; here Ingeborg and Fridthjof meet; here the
kings offer sacrifice. The temple was honored; it was violated; it was
burned to the ground.
Balder was a peculiar god; in him paganism, as the contemporaries
imagined it, was brought into contact with the Christianity many
would gladly have adapted to it. Balder represented paganism without
fierceness, Christianity without dogmatism. The Jesus in whom Tegnér
believed, like him whom Oehlenschläger acknowledged, had more of the
nature of a Balder than of a Christ. And it was the temple of Balder
that Fridthjof, in his youthful arrogance, had burned. This burning of
the temple must necessarily be made the main catastrophe of the saga;
it determined, with overwhelming force, a highly spiritual conclusion.
Fridthjof must necessarily end by rebuilding the temple which he had
burned to ashes.
For is not youthful vigor in its uncurbed impetuosity always a violator
of the temple, and do we not all end in our years of maturity with an
honest effort to atone for the profanation committed in the heat of
youthful passion? Do we not all, to the best of our ability, build the
temple larger, stronger, more beautiful than we found it? As it was
with that emperor who found a metropolis of wood and left behind him
one of marble, so it will be at all times with energetic and earnest
natures who discover their surroundings to be swayed by a hallowed
temple of poor wood; they will bum it to ashes, and leave behind them
another Balder's temple, and the strongest among them one like that of
Fridthjof.
"Of granite blocks enormous, joined with curious care
And daring art, the massy pile was built, and there
(A giant work intended
To last till time was ended)
It rose like Upsal's temple, where the North
Saw Valhal's halls fair imag'd here on earth."[16]
Thus conceived, the poem grouped itself about a grand, simple,
fundamental thought, and with this before his eyes Tegnér proceeded,
first of all, to plan the final romance.
Of course, every feature of the old narrative could not be used. But
of the changes he undertakes, only those have psychologic interest in
which his poetic character is to be recognized.
First of all, he removes everything that from an erotic point of view
could give offence to a reader, above all, to a lady reader of his
day. For this reason all family bookcases were thrown open to his
poem. According to Tegnér's own confession, he gained the idea for
his "Fridthjof" from Oehlenschläger's "Helge," and in Denmark people
have never been quite able to comprehend how it was that the imitation
attained so much greater fame than the vigorous original; but how
was it possible that a poem which, like that of Oehlenschläger, from
beginning to end treated of a northern Vendetta, of fratricide, arson,
drunkenness, rape, tarring, and incest, could ever vie for public
favor with a poetic work like "Fridthjofs Saga," which was made, as
it were, for a birthday or a Christmas present, and which, in fact,
for more than twenty years, has been a standing confirmation gift
for young girls in Germany? To be sure, Tegnér keeps up an incessant
play (with a relish, too, that to me personally is very distasteful)
on words and expressions, with which, according to accepted literary
standards, the idea of something sensual is connected; he compares
Ingeborg's bosom to "budding roses" and other protuberances, which a
female bosom is as wholly unlike as it is possible to be; but in this
harmless dalliance of the poet is exhausted all tendency to sensuality
in the poem. His Scandinavians of old love like a well-bred couple
of affianced lovers in modern Sweden. Yet, while they do not for one
instant forget themselves, the poet is less strict, and we sometimes
feel his eye fixed on Ingeborg's white neck. It would certainly have
been better had the poet's eye been more chaste and had Fridthjof been
more human. From the way in which the sexual element of this love story
is treated, we are strongly reminded that the poet is not only invested
with an academician but with a priestly office, and is about to mount
to a still higher one. Plainly enough Tegnér has wished to make the
poem conform thoroughly to modern views of heroic virtue and female
chastity. Therefore, although he allows Fridthjof to pass the night
with Ingeborg in Baldershage, it is done in all propriety and honor,
and he has Fridthjof, when accused in the Thing, solemnly declare
that he had not broken Balder's peace. Thus Tegnér does not hesitate
to rob his poem of its actual ideal centre of gravity, the conscious
and defiantly executed desecration, if by so doing he succeeds in
preserving the decorum of his narrative. Fridthjof declares that his
love belongs rather to heaven than to earth; at his rendez-vous with
Ingeborg he wishes that he were dead, and, with the pale maid in his
arms, could wander to Valhal--certainly a most unnatural thought for
an impassioned lover in the hour of his bliss.
"To that far heaven my love belongeth,
More than this earth,--receive it then;
In heav'n 'twas nurtured, and it longeth
To reach its starry home again."[17]
Strange words from the lips of a poet who, moreover, was never weary
of pursuing Platonic love with mockery, and with pretty sharp mockery
too. His own was a fiery, passionate temperament. Notwithstanding
his marriage, his years, and his office, he was an ardent and, as
rumor declared, frequently a successful adorer of the fair sex. His
conversational tone with ladies was often so loose as to scandalize
people; and in letters, aphorisms, and poems published after his death,
he made no concealment of his realistic conception of love. He does not
even pay homage to the spiritualistic presentation of the relation of
the sexes in poetry. He writes, for instance:--
"_Aeneadum genitrix, hominum divumque voluptas_ is not only poetized
by the ancients, but deified as well. Our sentimental, nervous
contemplation of love is by no means the only one, still less the most
vigorous. How pale and weak, even from a purely poetic point of view,
are most of the modern erotics with their water-colored tintings when
compared to the eternal fresco paintings of the ancients!" And yet I
should hesitate to believe that Tegnér would allow himself to be guided
in this point exclusively by conventional motives. He was educated in
far too idealistic doctrines ever to draw, with full consciousness,
from a model, nor has he had a defined model for Ingeborg, as can
plainly be detected in the poem itself, which on that account lost
in individual realistic life what it gained in typical grandeur. Yet
wholly without a model no artist can paint, and entirely without
remodelling the dispositions and impressions of real life no poet can
compose, least of all so subjective a poet as Tegnér. In the beginning
of the poem he was inspired by the memories of his intercourse with
his betrothed bride on the country estate of her parents; the idyllic
element of Fridthjofs love undoubtedly arises from these memories,
but not its dreamily enthusiastic pathos. Numerous indications point
to the fact that Tegnér, who, like most poets, was always half in
love, was thoroughly enamored during the years when he was writing his
"Fridthjofs Saga."
At the time when the canto in which Fridthjofs love attains its highest
lyric expression was written (1824), Tegnér's affections may perchance
have still been in a state of ecstatic, half-unconscious frenzy, now
intersected with budding desire, now with that languishing for death,
which sometimes accompanies even prosperous love, when an excess of
passionate yearning, filling and torturing the soul, calls forth the
wish that the heart might break:--
"How bless'd were he already yonder!
How bless'd who now with thee could die,--
And, conqu'ring, 'mong the gods could wander,
Embracing his pale maid on high."[18]
Perhaps he was simply not in a condition to carry into poetic practice
his own poetics of love. As there are, undoubtedly, poets who, with
full justice, can take for their motto the line,--
"_Vita verecunda est, Musa jocosa mihi,"_
so, too, there are poets who, especially at the time when romantic
idealism governed poetry, have felt themselves constrained by an inner
impulse to realize the formula of the opposing ranks.
The second modification of his materials--in which Tegnér's literary
individuality vigorously betrayed itself--is the removal of all that
might strike us as burlesque in the ancient narrative. The burlesque
features appeared to the idealistic poet simply disturbing and odious.
I choose a prominent example.
The ninth chapter of the old saga, in which Fridthjof brings the
tribute to the sacrifice-offering kings, represents Balder-worship
in the following vivid manner: "Then Fridthjof went in and saw that
there were but a few people in the hall of the dises; the kings were
there at the time sacrificing, and sat drinking. Fire was burning on
the floor, and the wives of the kings sat at the fires and warmed the
gods, whereas other women were anointing the gods and wiping them with
napkins. Fridthjof went before King Helge, and said, 'Here you have
the tribute.' Herewith he swung the purse wherein was the silver, and
threw it at his nose so violently that two teeth were broken out of his
mouth, and he fell into a swoon in his high seat; but Half-dan caught
him, so that he did not fall into the fire.... But as Fridthjof walked
over the floor toward the door, he saw that goodly ring (which he had
given Ingeborg) on the hand of Helge's wife while she was warming
Balder at the fire. Fridthjof took after the ring, but it stuck fast to
her hand, and so he dragged her along the floor toward the door, and
then Balder fell into the fire. But when Half-dan's wife caught after
him quickly, the god that she had been warming also fell into the fire.
The flame now blazed up around both the gods, as they had previously
been anointed, and thence it ran up into the roof, so that the whole
house was wrapped in flames. Fridthjof got hold of the ring before he
went out."[19]
The objections that may be raised to the historic reliability of this
presentation are not unknown to me. But what a superb piece of prose
from an ethnographic and picturesque point of view! How plainly the
narrative brings the whole naïvely burlesque scene before the mind's
eye!
Whoever has beheld in the Berlin museum the little clay image of
an old Norse goddess, can form a vivid conception of these odious
little idols which the pious women hold on their laps, anointing them
and warming them by the fire. Everything is admirable here; the old
northern piety which leads the people to see a Balder in the puppet,
with the same burning faith that in our day leads men and women of the
people in the South to see the Queen of Heaven in another puppet, and
the surrounding scenery with the smoking wood-pile in the centre and
the drinking knights in the adjoining hall. A more modern poet with a
lively appreciation of the coloring of time and locality would not have
had the heart to alter the slightest trifle in such a scene; he would
have viewed it as a treasure-trove. I do not speak of the realists;
realists do not write romance cycles; I have in mind the great stylists
among the poets of the present day. It is a scene which might have been
introduced into Victor Hugo's "_La légende des siècles_" (The Legend
of the Centuries); but still better adapted would it have been for so
rigid an artist as Lecomte de Lisle, who might have interwoven it in
his "Poèmes barbares." To Tegnér, however, this scenery only seemed
rude, odious, wholly unavailable for poetic art. The sharp contrasts
between barbaric and Hellenic poetry did not exist for him; he strove
to the best of his endeavors to Hellenize his barbaric material. From
principle he refrained from mingling the wild burlesque element with
a pathetic or beautiful whole. Instead, he painted--and with profound
art--a night in which the midnight sun stands high in the heavens; in
which Balder's pyre, the symbol of the sun, bums on the consecrated
stone, while pale priests, with silvery white beards, stand with
flint-knives in their hands around the temple wall. The statue of
Balder towers up on a pedestal, with Fridthjofs ring entwined about
its arm, and the king, with his crown on his head, is busied about the
altar. This scenery is far more beautiful than that of the saga, but it
is abstract and much less individual.
Besides the scandalous and burlesque elements in his material, there is
a third thing which Tegnér recoils from and avoids. It is guilt.
It belongs to Tegnér's poetic system to shun all sharply pronounced
guilt, no less than all that is decidedly odious or quaint. His hero
is too benignly good to be carried to extremes of passing rage,
revenge, or fierceness. He makes an assault and controls himself at
once. He does not take revenge, as in the saga, for the mortification
and grief the kings have inflicted on him; he does not scuttle their
ship on his return home in order to punish them for the injustice they
have done him; his weapon-brothers sink the vessel later, in order to
facilitate Fridthjofs flight. We saw, furthermore, that Fridthjof,
in his relations to Ingeborg, according to Tegnér's treatment, was
guilty of no actual profanation of the temple. But most strikingly
does the poet's solicitude to avoid profound guilt reveal itself where
Fridthjofs relation to the burning of the temple is described. In
the saga Fridthjof always displays a haughty spirit towards Balder.
He declares that he rates the favor of Ingeborg of more account than
that of Balder. When the return of the kings compels him to give up
his nightly visits in Baldershage, he speaks with a certain irony
concerning Balder to Ingeborg, saying, "Well and handsomely have you
treated us, nor has the bonde Balder been angry with us."[20] And
finally, when through his heedlessness fire has arisen in Balder's
temple, in his destructive rage he flings a flaming firebrand at the
roof. Tegnér gives the scene quite differently. The state of mind of
his Fridthjof toward Balder is most pious; he kneels before him at
Ingeborg's side, and commends to his protection their mutual love; he
makes energetic efforts to extinguish the fire in the temple, and when
these fail, he moves away weeping and full of anguish.
Thus transformed, the character as a whole is more human and more
noble, although undeniably less primitive, but the idealizing and
modernizing process rendered it impossible to avoid a certain conflict
between the character as it was represented by the poet, and several
of the energetic traits that were attributed to it by the saga, and
that passed unaltered into the poem. During the completion of the work,
the poet must many times have queried within himself, whether it were
after all worth while to treat ancient materials, when the antiquarian
and the poetic elements could not be harmonized without incessant
and useless compromises. His letters are full of evidences of this
doubt; when the work was at length finished, after a struggle with the
materials that lasted fully five years, they criticise "Fridthjof"
most severely; they remind the admirers of the poem that poetry must
be a "growing and not a preserved fruit"; they ring continued changes
on the theme that "Fridthjof" is too much of an ancient saga to be a
modern poem, and is in too high a degree modern poetry to be an old
Norse saga; they declare that all poetry must be modern, "in the same
sense that flowers are so in the springtime," and they condemn all that
is archæological in the poem, as newly built ruins. Nevertheless, the
universal critical mood has not erred when it rather took umbrage at
the too modern than at the too antique element of the poem. A rigid
stylist would not have had Fridthjof forbid the presence of women on
board ship in his "Viking Code," with such a sentimental play of words
as the following:--
"For the dimple deceives on her cheek, and her tresses
Would net-like entrap thee above."[21]
Tegnér himself draws a parallel between his work and such studies as
Goethe's "Iphigenia" and Walter Scott's "The Lady of the Lake." The
last parallel has more truth than the first, although Tegnér himself
says, "the Scotch particularism in Scott, like the Judaical tone in
the Old Testament, limits and suppresses what might otherwise have
freer and higher flight." Tegnér finds himself in a literary-historic
station, which is half-way between the two extremes, Walter Scott and
Byron. Half a century of his life falls within the lifetime of Goethe,
and he witnessed the whole of Byron's life. From Goethe, whom it was
difficult for him to understand, he learned but little; he showed
himself most susceptible to his influence when it approached him
through Oehlenschläger; for the Byronic impression his temperament was
more open, yet he held himself bravely above all contamination, and
the effort to do so was facilitated in a higher degree by the romantic
idealistic vaccine with which he had early been inoculated. As a poet
he was too filled with his own _ego_ to comprehend the impersonal
element in the creative powers of Goethe; on the other hand, his
egotism was not sufficiently profound to enable him to follow Byron
on his voyages of discovery within subjectivity. Like Scott and
Oehlenschläger he is national, closely bound to his country, his people
and its heroic past; but there is in his nature a tendency against
distinctly marked personality: he approaches the Byronic type at a
certain remoteness.
As soon as the sixteenth to the nineteenth cantos of "Fridthjof"
appeared in the year 1820, a universal cry of admiration rang through
Sweden. Even the members of the romantic school, deeply moved,
extended their hands for reconciliation. Before the entire work was
completed (1825) Tegnér's fame had spread to the neighboring countries,
especially to Germany, where Tegnér's first translator, Frau Amalia
von Helwig, so well known as the friend of Goethe, made the aged poet
acquainted with fragments of "Fridthjof," and won for it his favor. He
called the attention of the German public to the poem, and although
what he wrote about Tegnér in the vigorless style of his old age
scarcely amounts to a dozen lines, it can readily be understood what
an event a recognition on the part of Goethe grew to be in a small
country like Sweden. Goethe's words read as follows: "We need not
enter into any detailed statement to prove to those readers already
friendly to the North, how admirable these cantos are. May the author
as speedily as possible complete the entire work, and may the excellent
translator continue to take pleasure in her labors that we may possess
this sea-epic complete in the same purport and tone as what has already
appeared! We would only add the brief remark that the vigorous,
gigantic, barbaric style of antique poetry, approaches us, in a manner
nearly incomprehensible to ourselves, with a new, musingly tender, yet
undisfigured and highly agreeable form." To this day the Swedes never
weary of referring to these words of praise. The admiration for Tegnér
in his fatherland increased with the growing popularity of the poem;
indeed, after his death it became so strong that it drowned almost
all criticism, and finally reached its climax in such exaggerations
as that of Mellin, who proclaimed Tegnér to be the "greatest poet of
the Teutonic race." That homage to the man, however, which is and will
always remain the best, is that which is at the same time homage to the
truth.