While he was thinking it over, and not making much of it, there

appeared an old, bent, ragged man, with a flapping hat and a

pikestaff; this was Ufeig, his father, to whom he had never spoken

since he left his house. Ufeig now is the principal personage in the

story. He asks his son about the case and pretends to be surprised at

his failure. "Impossible! it is not like a gentleman to try to take in

an old man like me; how could you be beaten?" Finally, after Odd had

been made to go over all the several points of his humiliation, he is

reduced to trust the whole thing to his father, who goes away with the

comforting remark that Odd, by leaving the court when he did, before

the case was finished, had made one good move in the game, though he

did not know it. Ufeig gets a purse full of money from his son; goes

back to the court, where (as the case is not yet closed) he makes an

eloquent speech on the iniquity of such a plea as has been raised. "To

let a man-slayer escape, gentlemen! where are your oaths that you

swore? Will you prefer a paltry legal quibble to the plain open

justice of the case?" and so on, impressively and emotionally, in the

name of Equity, while all the time (equity + _x_) he plays with the

purse under his cloak, and gets the eyes of the judges fixed upon it.

Late in the day, Odd is brought back to hear the close of the case,

and Uspak is outlawed.

Then the jealousy of the great men comes to a head, and a compact is

formed among eight of them to make an end of Odd's brand-new

prosperity. These eight are the Confederates from whom the Saga is

named, and the story is the story of Ufeig's ingenuity and malice as

applied to these noble Pillars of Society. To tell it rightly would be

to repeat the Saga. The skill with which the humorist plays upon the

strongest motives, and gets the conspirators to betray one another, is

not less beautifully represented than the spite which the humorist

provokes among the subjects of his experiments. The details are

finished to the utmost; most curiously and subtly in some of the

indications of character and disposition in the eight persons of

quality. The details, however, are only the last perfection of a work

which is organic from the beginning. Ufeig, the humorist, is the

servant and deputy of the Comic Muse, and there can be no doubt of the

validity of his credentials, or of the soundness of his procedure. He

is the ironical critic and censor of the heroic age; his touch is

infallible, as unerring as that of Figaro, in bringing out and making

ridiculous the meanness of the nobility. The decline and fall of the

noble houses is recorded in _Sturlunga Saga_; the essence of that

history is preserved in the comedy of the _Banded Men_.

But, however the material of the heroic age may be handled in this

comedy, the form of heroic narrative comes out unscathed. There is

nothing for the comic spirit to fix upon in the form of the Sagas. The

Icelandic heroes may be vulnerable, but Comedy cannot take advantage

of them except by using the general form of heroic narrative in

Iceland, a form which proves itself equally capable of Tragedy and

Comedy. And as the more serious Icelandic histories are comprehensive

and varied, so also is this comic history. It is not an artificial

comedy, nor a comedy of humours, nor a purely satirical comedy. It is

no more exclusive or abstract in its contents than _Njála_; its strict

observance of limit and order is not the same thing as monotony; its

unity of action is consistent with diversities of motive. Along with,

and inseparable from, the satirical criticism of the great world, as

represented by the eight discomfited noble Confederates, there is the

even more satisfactory plot of the Nemesis of Respectability in the

case of Odd; while the successful malice and craft of Ufeig are

inseparable from the humanity, the constancy, and the imaginative

strength, which make him come out to help his prosaic son, and enable

him, the bent and thriftless old man, to see all round the frontiers

of his son's well-defined and uninteresting character. Also the

variety of the Saga appears in the variety of incident, and that

although the story is a short one. As the solemn histories admit of

comic passages, so conversely this comic history touches upon the

tragic. The death of Vali, slain by Uspak, is of a piece with the most

heroic scenes in Icelandic literature. Vali the friend of Odd goes

along with him to get satisfaction out of Uspak the mischief-maker.

Vali is all for peace; he is killed through his good nature, and

before his death forgives and helps his assailant.

And when with the spring the days of summons came on, Odd

rode out with twenty men, till he came near by the garth of

Svalastead. Then said Vali to Odd: "Now you shall stop here,

and I will ride on and see Uspak, and find out if he will

agree to settle the case now without more ado." So they

stopped, and Vali went up to the house. There was no one

outside; the doors were open and Vali went in. It was dark

within, and suddenly there leapt a man out of the side-room

and struck between the shoulders of Vali, so that he fell on

the spot. Said Vali: "Look out for yourself, poor wretch!

for Odd is coming, hard by, and means to have your life.

Send your wife to him; let her say that we have made it up;

and you have agreed to everything, and that I have gone on

about my own gear down the valley!" Then said Uspak: "This

is an ill piece of work; this was meant for Odd and not for

you."

This short heroic scene in the comedy has an effect corresponding to

that of the comic humours in the Icelandic tragedies; it redresses the

balance, it qualifies and diversifies what would otherwise be

monotonous. Simple and clear in outline as the best of the short

Icelandic stories are, they are not satisfied unless they have

introduced something, if only a suggestion, of worlds different from

their own immediate interests, a touch to show where their proper

story branches out into the history of other characters and fortunes.

This same story of the Confederates is wound up at the end, after the

reconciliation of the father and son, by a return to the adventures of

Uspak and to the subordinate tragic element in the comedy. The

poetical justice of the story leaves Uspak, the slayer of Vali, dead

in a cave of the hills; discovered there, alone, by shepherds going

their autumn rounds.

VI

THE ART OF NARRATIVE

The art of the Sagas will bear to be tested in every way: not that

every Saga or every part of one is flawless, far from it; but they all

have, though in different measure, the essentials of the fine art of

story-telling. Except analysis, it is hardly possible to require from

a story anything which will not be found supplied in some form or

other in the Sagas. The best of them have that sort of unity which can

hardly be described, except as a unity of life--the organic unity that

is felt in every particular detail. It is absurd to take separately

the details of a great work like _Njála_, or of less magnificent but

not less perfect achievements such as the story of Hrafnkel. There is

no story in the world that can surpass the _Bandamanna Saga_ in the

liveliness with which each particular reveals itself as a moment in

the whole story, inseparable from the whole, and yet in its own proper

space appearing to resume and absorb the life of the whole. Where the

work is elaborated in this way, where every particular is organic, it

is not possible to do much by way of illustration, or to exhibit

piecemeal what only exists as a complete thing, and can only be

understood as such. It is of some importance in the history of

literature that the rank and general character of these Icelandic

works should be asserted and understood. It would be equally laborious

and superfluous to follow each of them with an exposition of the value

of each stroke in the work. There are difficulties enough in the

language, and in the history, without any multiplication of

commentaries on the obvious; and there is little in the art of the

Sagas that is of doubtful import, however great may be the lasting

miracle that such things, of such excellence, should have been written

there and then.

There is one general quality or characteristic of the Sagas which has

not yet been noticed, one which admits of explanation and

illustration, while it represents very well the prevailing mode of

imagination in the Sagas. The imaginative life of the Sagas (in the

best of them) is intensely strong at each critical point of the story,

with the result that all abstract, makeshift explanations are driven

out; the light is too strong for them, and the events are made to

appear in the order of their appearance, with their meaning gradually

coming out as the tale rolls on. No imagination has ever been so

consistently intolerant of anything that might betray the author's

knowledge before the author's chosen time. That everything should

present itself first of all as appearance, before it becomes

appearance with a meaning, is a common rule of all good story-telling;

but no historians have followed this rule with so complete and sound

an instinct as the authors of the Sagas. No medieval writers, and few

of the modern, have understood the point of view as well as the

authors of the story of Njal or of Kjartan. The reserve of the

narrator in the most exciting passages of the Sagas is not dulness or

want of sensibility; it is a consistent mode of procedure, to allow

things to make their own impression; and the result is attained by

following the order of impressions in the mind of one of the actors,

or of a looker-on. "To see things as they are" is an equivocal

formula, which may be claimed as their own privilege by many schools

and many different degrees of intelligence. "To see things as they

become," the rule of Lessing's _Laocoon_, has not found so many

adherents, but it is more certain in meaning, and more pertinent to

the art of narrative. It is a fair description of the aim of the

Icelandic authors and of their peculiar gift. The story for them is

not a thing finished and done with; it is a series of pictures rising

in the mind, succeeding, displacing, and correcting one another; all

under the control of a steady imagination, which will not be hurried,

and will not tell the bearing of things till the right time comes. The

vivid effect of the Saga, if it be studied at all closely, will be

found to be due to this steadiness of imagination which gives first

the blurred and inaccurate impression, the possibility of danger, the

matter for surmises and suspicions, and then the clearing up. Stated

generally in this way, the rule is an elementary one, but it is

followed in the Sagas with a singular consistency and success, and

with something more than a compulsory obedience. That both the

narrators and their audience in that country had their whole lives

filled with momentous problems in the interpretation of appearances

may well be understood. To identify a band of riders in the distance,

or a single man seen hurrying on the other side of the valley, was a

problem which might be a matter of life or death any day; but so it

has been in many places where there is nothing like the narrative art

of Iceland. The Icelandic historian is like no other in putting into

his work the thrill of suspense at something indistinctly seen going

on in the distance--a crowd of men moving, not known whether friends

or enemies. So it was in _Thorgils Saga_ (one of the later more

authentic histories, of the Sturlung cycle), when Thorgils and his men

came down to the Althing, and Bard and Aron were sent on ahead to find

out if the way was clear from the northern passes across the plain of

the Thing. Bard and Aron, as they came down past Armannsfell, saw a

number of horses and men on the plain below just where Haflidi, the

enemy, might have been expected to block the way. They left some of

their band to wait behind while they themselves went on. From that

point a chapter and more is taken up with the confused impression and

report brought back by the scouts to the main body. They saw Bard and

Aron ride on to the other people, and saw the others get up to meet

them, carrying weapons; and then Bard and Aron went out of sight in

the crowd, but the bearers of the report had no doubt that they were

prisoners. And further, they thought they made out a well-known horse,

Dapplecheek, and a gold-mounted spear among the strangers, both of

which had belonged to Thorgils, and had been given away by him to one

of his friends. From which it is inferred that his friend has been

robbed of the horse and the spear.

The use of all this, which turns out to be all made up of true

eyesight and wrong judgment, is partly to bring out Thorgils; for his

decision, against the wish of his companions, is to ride on in any

event, so that the author gets a chapter of courage out of the

mistake. Apart from that, there is something curiously spirited and

attractive in the placing of the different views, with the near view

last of all. In the play between them, between the apprehension of

danger, the first report of an enemy in the way, the appearance of an

indistinct crowd, the false inference, and the final truth of the

matter, the Saga is faithful to its vital principle of variety and

comprehensiveness; no one appearance, not even the truest, must be

allowed too much room to itself.

This indirect description is really the most vivid of all narrative

forms, because it gives the point of view that is wanting in an

ordinary continuous history. It brings down the story-teller from his

abstract and discursive freedom, and makes him limit himself to one

thing at a time, with the greatest advantage to himself and all the

rest of his story. In that way the important things of the story may

be made to come with the stroke and flash of present reality, instead

of being prosed away by the historian and his good grammar.

There is a very remarkable instance of the use of this method in the

Book of Kings. Of Jehoram, son of Ahab, king of Israel, it is told

formally that "he wrought evil in the sight of the Lord," with the

qualification that his evil was not like that of Ahab and Jezebel.

This is impressive in its formal and summary way. It is quite another

mode of narrative, and it is one in which the spectator is introduced

to vouch for the matter, that presents the king of Israel, once for

all, in a sublime and tragic protest against the sentence of the

historian himself, among the horrors of the famine of Samaria.

So we boiled my son, and did eat him: and I said unto her on

the next day, Give thy son, that we may eat him; and she

hath hid her son.

And it came to pass, when the king heard the words of the

woman, that he rent his clothes; and he passed by upon the

wall, and the people looked, and, behold, he had sackcloth

within upon his flesh.

No more than this is told of the unavailing penance of Jehoram the

son of Ahab. There is no preparation; all the tragedy lies in this

notice of something casually seen, and left without a commentary, for

any one to make his own story about, if he chooses. There is perhaps

nothing anywhere in narrative quite so sudden as this. The Northern

writers, however, carry out consistently the same kind of principles,

putting their facts or impressions forward in a right order and

leaving them to take care of themselves; while in the presentation of

events the spectator within the story has a good deal given him to do.

Naturally, where the author does not make use of analysis and where he

trusts to the reader's intellect to interpret things aright, the

"facts" must be fairly given; in a lucid order, with a progressive

clearness, from the point of view of those who are engaged in the

action.

There is another and somewhat different function of the spectator in

the Sagas. In some cases, where there is no problem, where the action

is straightforward, the spectator and his evidence are introduced

merely to give breadth and freedom to the presentment, to get a

foreground for the scene. This is effected best of all, as it happens,

in a passage that called for nothing less than the best of the

author's power and wit; namely, the chapter of the death of Kjartan in

_Laxdæla_.

And with this talk of Gudrun, Bolli was made to magnify his

ill-will and his grievance against Kjartan; and took his

weapons and went along with the others. They were nine

altogether; five sons of Osvifr, that is to say, Ospak and

Helgi, Vandrad, Torrad, and Thorolf; Bolli was the sixth,

Gunnlaug the seventh, sister's son of Osvifr, a comely man;

the other two were Odd and Stein, sons of Thorhalla the

talkative. They rode to Svinadal and stopped at the gully

called Hafragil; there they tied their horses and sat down.

Bolli was silent all the day, and laid him down at the edge

of the gully, above.

Kjartan and his companions had come south over the pass, and

the dale was opening out, when Kjartan said that it was time

for Thorkell and his brother to turn back. Thorkell said

they would ride with him to the foot of the dale. And when

they were come south as far as the bothies called the North

Sheilings, Kjartan said to the brothers that they were not

to ride further.

"Thorolf, the thief, shall not have this to laugh at, that I

was afraid to ride on my way without a host of men."

Thorkell Whelp makes answer: "We will give in to you and

ride no further; but sorry shall we be if we are not there

and you are in want of men this day."

Then said Kjartan: "Bolli my kinsman will not try to have my

life, and for the sons of Osvifr, if they lie in wait for

me, it remains to be seen which of us shall tell the tale

afterwards, for all that there may be odds against me."

After that the brothers and their men rode west again.

Now Kjartan rides southward down the valley, he and the two

others, An the Swart and Thorarinn. At Hafratindr in

Svinadal lived a man called Thorkell. There is no house

there now. He had gone to look after his horses that day,

and his shepherd along with him. They had a view of both

companies; the sons of Osvifr lying in wait, and Kjartan's

band of three coming down along the dale. Then said the herd

lad that they should go and meet Kjartan; it would be great

luck if they could clear away the mischief that was waiting

for them.

"Hold your tongue," said Thorkell; "does the fool think he

can give life to a man when his doom is set? It is but

little I grudge them their good pleasure, though they choose

to hurt one another to their hearts' content. No! but you

and I, we will get to a place where there will be no risk,

where we can see all their meeting and have good sport out

of their play. They all say that Kjartan has more fighting

in him than any man; maybe he will need it all, for you and

I can see that the odds are something."

And so it had to be as Thorkell wished.

The tragic encounter that follows, the last meeting of the two

friends, Kjartan throwing away his weapons when he sees Bolli coming

against him, Bolli's repentance when he has killed his friend, when he

sits with his knee under Kjartan's head,--all this is told as well as

may be; it is one of the finest passages in all the Sagas. But even

this passage has something to gain from the episode of the churl and

his more generous servant who looked on at the fight. The scene opens

out; the spaces of the valley are shown as they appear to a looker-on;

the story, just before the critical moment, takes us aside from the

two rival bands and gives us the relation between them, the

gradually-increasing danger as the hero and his companions come down

out of the distance and nearer to the ambush.

In this piece of composition, also, there goes along with the

pictorial vividness of the right point of view a further advantage to

the narrative in the character of the spectator. Two of the most

notable peculiarities of the Icelandic workmanship are thus brought

together,--the habit of presenting actions and events as they happen,

from the point of view of an immediate witness; and the habit of

correcting the heroic ideal by the ironical suggestion of the other

side. Nothing is so deeply and essentially part of the nature of the

Icelandic story, as its inability to give a limited or abstract

rendering of life. It is from this glorious incapacity that there are

derived both the habit of looking at events as appearances, before

they are interpreted, and the habit of checking heroics by means of

unheroic details, or, as here, by a suggestion of the way it strikes a

vulgar contemporary. Without this average man and his commentary the

story of the death of Kjartan would lose much. There is first of all

the comic value of the meanness and envy in the mind of the boor, his

complacency at the quarrels and mutual destruction of the magnificent

people. His intrusion on the scene, his judgment of the situation, is

proof of the variety of the life from which the Saga is drawn. More

than that, there is here a rather cruel test of the heroics of

_Laxdæla_, of the story itself; the notable thing about this spectator

and critic is that his boorish judgment is partly right, as the

judgment of Thersites is partly right--"too much blood and too little

brains." He is vulgar common sense in the presence of heroism. In his

own way a critic of the heroic ideals, his appearance in Svinadal as a

negative and depreciatory chorus in the tragedy of Kjartan is a touch

of something like the mood of _Bandamanna Saga_ in its criticism of

the nobles and their rivalries; although the author of _Laxdæla_ is

careful not to let this dangerous spirit penetrate too far. It is only

enough to increase the sense of the tragic vanity of human wishes in

the life and death of Kjartan Olafsson.

Everything in the Sagas tends to the same end; the preservation of the

balance and completeness of the history, as far as it goes; the

impartiality of the record. The different sides are not represented as

fully as in _Clarissa Harlowe_ or _The Ring and the Book_, but they

are allowed their chance, according to the rules, which are not those

of analytical psychology. The Icelandic imagination is content if the

character is briefly indicated in a few dramatic speeches. The brevity

and externality of the Saga method might easily provoke from admirers

of Richardson a condemnation like that of Dr. Johnson on those who

know the dial-plate only and not the works. The psychology of the

Sagas, however, brief and superficial as it may be, is yet of the sort

that may be tested; the dials keep time, though the works are not

exposed. It may be doubtful at any moment how Skarphedinn will act,

but when his history is in progress, and when it is finished, the

reader knows that Skarphedinn is rightly rendered, and furthermore

that it is impossible to deal with him except as an individual

character, impressing the mind through a variety of qualities and

circumstances that are inexplicably consistent. It is impossible to

take his character to pieces. The rendering is in one sense

superficial, and open to the censures of the moralist--"from without

inwards"--like the characters of Scott. But as in this latter case,

the superficiality and slightness of the work are deceptive. The

character is given in a few strokes and without elaboration, but it is

given inevitably and indescribably; the various appearances of

Skarphedinn, different at different times, are all consistent with one

another in the unity of imagination, and have no need of psychological

analysis to explain them.

The characters in the best of the Sagas grow upon the mind with each

successive appearance, until they are known and recognised at a hint.

In some cases it looks almost as if the author's dramatic imagination

were stronger and more just than his deliberate moral opinions; as if

his characters had taken the matter into their own hands, against his

will. Or is it art, and art of the subtlest order, which in Kjartan

Olafsson, the glorious hero, still leaves something of lightness, of

fickleness, as compared both with the intensity of the passion of

Gudrun and the dogged resolution of Bolli? There is another Saga in

which a hero of the likeness of Kjartan is contrasted with a dark,

malevolent, not ignoble figure,--the story of the Faroes, of Sigmund

Brestisson and Thrond of Gata. There, at the end of the story, when

Thrond of Gata has taken vengeance for the murder of his old enemy, it

is not Sigmund, the glorious champion of King Olaf, who is most

thought of, but Thrond the dark old man, his opponent and avenger. The

character of Thrond is too strong to be suppressed, and breaks through

the praise and blame of the chronicler, as, in another history, the

character of Saul asserts itself against the party of David. The

charge of superficiality or externality falls away to nothing in the

mind of any one who knows by what slight touches of imagination a

character may be brought home to an audience, if the character is

there to begin with. It is not by elaborate, continuous analysis, but

by a gesture here and a sentence there, that characters are expressed.

The Sagas give the look of things and persons at the critical moments,

getting as close as they can, by all devices, to the vividness of

things as they appear, as they happen; brief and reserved in their

phrasing, but the reverse of abstract or limited in their regard for

the different modes and aspects of life, impartial in their

acknowledgment of the claims of individual character, and unhesitating

in their rejection of conventional ideals, of the conventional

romantic hero as well as the conventional righteous man. The Sagas are

more solid and more philosophical than any romance or legend.

VII

EPIC AND HISTORY

In the close of the heroic literature of Iceland a number of general

causes are to be found at work. The period of the Sagas comes to an

end partly by a natural progress, culmination, and exhaustion of a

definite form of literary activity, partly through external influences

by which the decline is hastened. After the material of the early

heroic traditions had been all used up, after the writers of the

thirteenth century had given their present shapes to the stories of

the tenth and the eleventh centuries, two courses were open, and both

courses were taken. On the one hand the form of the Saga was applied

to historical matter near the writer's own time, or actually

contemporary, on the other hand it was turned to pure fiction. The

literature divides into history and romance. The authentic history,

the Sturlung cycle in particular, is the true heir and successor of

the heroic Saga. The romantic Sagas are less intimately related to the

histories of Njal or Gisli, though those also are representative of

some part of the essence of the Saga, and continue in a shadowy way

something of its original life. The Northern literatures in the

thirteenth century were invaded from abroad by the same romantic

forces as had put an end to the epic literature of France;

translations of French romances became popular, and helped to change

the popular taste in Norway and Iceland. At the same time the victory

of Romance was not entirely due to these foreigners; they found allies

in the more fanciful parts of the native literature. The schools of

Northern prose romance, which took the place of the older Sagas, were

indebted almost as much to the older native literature as to Tristram

or Perceval; they are the product of something that had all along been

part, though hardly the most essential part, of the heroic Sagas. The

romantic story of Frithiof and the others like it have disengaged from

the complexity of the older Sagas an element which contributes not a

little, though by no means everything, to the charm of _Njála_ and

_Laxdæla_.

The historical work contained in the _Sturlunga Saga_ is a more

comprehensive and thorough modification of the old form. Instead of

detaching one of the elements and using it in separation from the

rest, as was done by the author of _Frithiof_, for example, the

historian of the Sturlungs kept everything that he was not compelled

to drop by the exigencies of his subject. The biographical and

historical work belonging to the _Sturlunga Saga_ falls outside the

order to which _Njal_ and _Gisli_ belong; it is epic, only in the

sense that a history may be called epic. Nevertheless it is true that

this historical work shows, even better than the heroic Sagas

themselves, what the nature of the heroic literature really is. In

dealing with a more stubborn and less profitable subject it brings out

the virtues of the Icelandic form of narrative.

The relation of the Saga to authentic history had always been close.

The first attempt to give shape, in writing, to the traditions of the

heroic age was made by Ari Thorgilsson (_ob._ 1148), especially in

his _Landnámabók_, a history exact and positive, a record in detail of

all the first settlers of the island, with notes of the substance of

the popular stories by which their fame was transmitted. This exact

history, this positive work, precedes the freer and more imaginative

stories, and supplies some of them with a good deal of their matter,

which they work up in their own way. The fashion of writing, the

example of a written form of narrative, was set by Ari; though the

example was not followed closely nor in all points by the writers of

the Sagas: his form is too strict for them.

It was too strict for his greatest successor in historical writing in

Iceland. Snorri Sturluson is the author of _Lives of the Kings of

Norway_, apparently founded upon Ari's _Book of Kings_, which has been

lost as an independent work. Snorri's _Lives_ themselves are extant in

a shape very far from authentic; one has to choose between the

abridged and inconvenient shape of _Heimskringla_, in which Snorri's

work appears to have been cut down and trimmed, and the looser form

presented by such compilations as the longer Saga of Olaf Tryggvason,

where more of Snorri appears to have been retained than in

_Heimskringla_, though it has to be extricated from all sorts of

irrelevant additions and interpolations. But whatever problems may

still remain unsolved, it is certain enough that Snorri worked on his

historical material with no intention of keeping to the positive lines

of Ari, and with the fullest intention of giving to his history of

Norway all the imaginative force of which he was capable. This was

considerable, as is proved by the stories of the gods in his _Edda_;

and in the histories of Olaf Tryggvason and of Saint Olaf, kings of

Norway, he has given companions to the very noblest of the Sagas

dealing with the Icelandic chiefs. Between the more scientific work of

Ari and the more imaginative work of Snorri comes, half-way, the _Life

of King Sverre_ (_ob._ 1202), written at the king's own dictation by

the Abbot Karl of Thingeyri.

Ari collected the historical materials, both for Iceland and Norway,

and put them together in the extant _Landnámabók_ and the lost _Kings'

Lives_. Snorri Sturluson treated the _Kings' Lives_ in the spirit of

the greater Icelandic Sagas; his _Lives_ belong to heroic literature,

if there is any meaning in that name. The _Life of Sverre_ is not so

glorious as the _Life_ of either Olaf. Abbot Karl had not the same

interests or the same genius as Snorri, and his range was determined,

in most of the work, by the king himself. King Sverre, though he could

quote poetry to good effect when he liked, was mainly practical in his

ideas.

The Sturlung history, which is the close of the heroic literature of

Iceland, has resemblances to the work of all three of the historians

just named. It is like Ari in its minuteness and accuracy; like

_Sverris Saga_, it has a contemporary subject to treat of; and it

shares with Snorri his spirit of vivid narrative and his sympathy with

the methods of the greater Sagas of Iceland. If authors were to be

judged by the difficulty of their undertakings, then Sturla, the

writer of the Sturlung history, would certainly come out as the

greatest of them all. For he was limited by known facts as much, or

even more than Ari; while he has given to his record of factions,

feuds, and anarchy almost as much spirit as Snorri gave to his lives

of the heroic kings, and more than Abbot Karl could give to the

history of Sverre and his political success. At the same time,

however, the difficulty of Sturla's work had been a good deal reduced

in the gradual progress of Icelandic literature. He had to represent

modern history, the history of his own time, in the form and with the

vividness of the imaginative Sagas. In undertaking this he was helped

by some examples of the same sort of thing, in Sagas written before

his time, and forming an intermediate stage between the group of which

_Njála_ is the head, and Sturla's history of his own family. The

biographies of Icelanders in the twelfth century, like that of

Thorgils and Haflidi quoted above, which form an introduction to the

Sturlung history, are something more authentic than the heroic Sagas,

but not much less spirited. It is difficult to draw a decided line

anywhere between the different classes; or, except by the date of its

subject, to mark off the story of the heroic age from the story of the

rather less heroic age that followed it. There was apparently an

accommodation of the Saga form to modern subjects, effected through a

number of experiments, with a result, complete and admirable, in

Sturla's history of the Sturlung fortunes.

It may be said, also, that something of the work was done ready to the

author's hand; there was a natural fitness and correspondence between

the Icelandic reality, even when looked at closely by contemporary

eyes in the broad daylight, and the Icelandic form of representation.

The statue was already part shapen in the block, and led the hand of

the artist as he worked upon it. It is dangerous, no doubt, to say

after the work has been done, after the artist has conquered his

material and finished off his subject, that there was a natural

affinity between the subject and the author's mind. In the case of

Iceland, however, this pre-existent harmony is capable of being

proved. The conditions of life in Iceland were, and still are, such as

to exclude a number of the things that in other countries prevent the

historian from writing epic. There were none of the large, abstract

considerations and problems that turn the history into a dissertation

on political forces, on monarchy, on democracy, on diplomacy; there

were none of the large, vague multitudes of the people that impose

themselves on the historian's attention, to the detriment of his

individual characters. The public history of Iceland lies all in the

lives of private characters; it is the life of a municipality, very

much spread out, it is true, but much more like the life of a country

town or a group of country neighbours, than the society of a complex

state of any kind that has ever existed in Europe. Private interests

and the lives of individual men were what they had to think about and

talk about; and just in so far as they were involved in gossip, they

were debarred from the achievements of political history, and equally

inclined to that sort of record in which individual lives are

everything. If their histories were to have any life at all, it must

be the life of the drama or the dramatic narrative, and not that of

the philosophical history, or even of those medieval chronicles,

which, however unphilosophical, are still obliged by the greatness of

their subject to dwarf the individual actors in comparison with the

greatness of Kingdoms, Church, and Empire. Of those great

impersonalities there was little known in Iceland; and if the story of

Iceland was not to be (what it afterwards became) a mere string of

trivial annals, it must be by a deepening of the personal interest, by

making the personages act and talk, and by following intently the

various threads of their individual lives.

So far the work was prepared for authors like Sturla, who had to

enliven the contemporary record of life in Iceland; it was prepared to

this extent, that any other kind of work was unpromising or even

hopeless. The present life in Sturla's time was, like the life of the

heroic age, a perpetual conflict of private wills, with occasional and

provisional reconciliations. The mode of narrative that was suitable

for the heroic stories could hardly fail to be the proper mode for the

contemporary factions of chiefs, heroic more or less, and so it was

proved by Sturla.

_Sturlunga Saga_ contains some of the finest passages of narrative in

the whole of Icelandic literature. The biographical Sagas, with which

it is introduced or supported, are as good as all but the best of the

heroic Sagas, while they are not out of all comparison even with

_Njála_ or _Gísla_, with _Hrafnkels Saga_ or _Bandamanna_, in the

qualities in which these excel.

The story of Thorgils and Haflidi has already been referred to in

illustration of the Icelandic method of narrative at its best. It is a

good story, well told, with the unities well preserved. The plot is

one that is known to the heroic Sagas--the growth of mischief and

ill-will between two honourable gentlemen, out of the villainy of a

worthless beast who gets them into his quarrels. Haflidi has an

ill-conditioned nephew whom, for his brother's sake, he is loth to

cast off. Thorgils takes up one of many cases in which this nephew is

concerned, and so is brought into disagreement with Haflidi. The end

is reconciliation, effected by the intervention of Bishop Thorlak

Runolfsson and Ketill the priest, aided by the good sense of the

rivals at a point where the game may be handsomely drawn, with no

dishonour to either side. The details are given with great liveliness.

One of the best scenes is that which has already been referred to (p.

238); another may be quoted of a rather different sort from an earlier

year. In the year 1120 at the Althing, Thorgils was with difficulty

dissuaded from breaking the peace as they stood, both parties, by the

door of the Thingvalla church on St. Peter's Day. Thorgils' friend

Bodvar had to use both arguments and unction to make him respect the

sanctity of the Althing, of the Church, and of the Saint to whom the

day belonged. Afterwards Thorgils said to his friend, "You are more

pious than people think."

Bodvar answered: "I saw that we were penned between two

bands of them at the church door, and that if it broke into

a fight we should be cut to pieces. But for that I should

not have cared though Haflidi had been killed in spite of

the peace of Church and Parliament."

The intervention at the end is very well given, particularly Ketill

the priest's story of his own enemy.

_Sturlu Saga_, the story of the founder of the great Sturlung house,

the father of the three great Sturlung brothers, of whom Snorri the

historian was one, is longer and more important than the story of

Thorgils and Haflidi. The plot is a simple one: the rivalry between

Sturla and Einar, son of Thorgils. The contest is more deadly and more

complicated than that of Thorgils himself against Haflidi; that was

mainly a case of the point of honour, and the opponents were both of

them honourable men, while in this contest Sturla is politic and

unscrupulous, and his adversary "a ruffian by habit and repute." There

is a considerable likeness between the characters of Sturla and of

Snorri the priest, as that is presented in _Eyrbyggja_ and elsewhere.

A comparison of the rise of Snorri, as told in _Eyrbyggja_, with the

life of Sturla will bring out the unaltered persistence of the old

ways and the old standards, while the advantage lies with the later

subject in regard to concentration of interest. The _Life of Sturla_

is not so varied as _Eyrbyggja_, but it is a more orderly piece of

writing, and at the same time more lively, through the unity of its

plot. Nor are the details spoiled by any tameness. Notable is the

company of rogues maintained by Einar; they and their ways are well

described. There was Geir the thief, son of Thorgerda the liar; he was

hanged by the priest Helgi. There was Vidcuth, son of stumpy Lina

(these gentry have no father's name to them); he was a short man and a

nimble. The third was Thorir the warlock, a little man from the North

country. This introduction serves to bring on the story of a moonlight

encounter with the robbers in snow; and in this sort of thing the

history of Sturla is as good as the best. It is worth while to look at

the account of the last decisive match with Einar--another snow piece.

It may be discovered there that the closer adhesion to facts, and the

nearer acquaintance with the persons, were no hindrance to the

Icelandic author who knew his business. It was not the multitude and

confusion of real details that could prevent him from making a good

thing out of his subject, if only his subject contained some

opportunity for passion and conflict, which it generally did.

In this scene of the midnight raid in which the position of the two

rivals is decided, there is nothing at all heightened or exaggerated,

yet the proportions are such, the relations of the incidents are given

in such a way, as could not be bettered by any modern author dealing

with a critical point in a drama of private life. The style is that of

the best kind of subdued and sober narrative in which the excitement

of the situations is not spent in rhetoric.

It fell at Hvamm in the winter nights (about Hallowmass) of the year

1171 that a man passed through, an old retainer of Sturla's; and

Sturla did not like his manner. As it turned out, this man went west

to Stadarhol, the house of Sturla's enemy, and told Einar all the

state of Sturla's house, how there were few men there.

There was dancing at Hvamm that night, and it was kept up late. The

night was still, and every now and then some would look out and

listen, but they could hear no one stirring.

The night after that Einar set out. He avoided Hvamm, but came down on

another steading, the house of Sturla's son-in-law Ingjald, and drove

off the cows and sheep, without any alarm; it was not till the morning

that one of the women got up and found the beasts gone. The news was

brought at once to Hvamm. Sturla had risen at daybreak and was looking

to his haystacks; it was north wind, and freezing. Ingjald came up,

and, "Now he is coming to ask me to buy his wethers," says Sturla; for

Sturla had warned him that he was in danger of being raided, and had

tried to get Ingjald to part with his sheep. Ingjald told him of the

robbery. Sturla said nothing, but went in and took down his axe and

shield. Gudny his wife was wakened, and asked what the news was.

"Nothing so far; only Einar has driven all Ingjald's beasts." Then

Gudny sprang up and shouted to the men: "Up, lads! Sturla is out, and

his weapons with him, and Ingjald's gear is gone!"

Then follows the pursuit over the snow, and the fight, in which

Ingjald is killed, and Einar wounded and driven to beg for quarter.

After which it was the common saying that Einar's strength had gone

over to Sturla.

It is a piece of clean and exact description, and particularly of the

succession of scenes and moods in life. The revels go on through the

calm night with an accompaniment of suspense and anxiety. There is no

better note in any chronicle of the anxieties of a lawless time, and

the steady flow of common pleasures in spite of the troubles; all the

manners of an heroic or a lawless time are summed up in the account of

the dance and its intermittent listening for the sound of enemies.

Sturla in the early light sees his son-in-law coming to him, and

thinks he knows what his errand is,--the author here, as usual,

putting the mistaken appearance first, and the true interpretation

second. In the beginning of the pursuit there is the silence and the

repression of a man in a rage, and the vehement call of his wife who

knows what he is about, and finds words for his anger and his purpose.

The weather of the whole story is just enough to play into the human

life--the quiet night, the north wind, and the frosty, sunless

morning. The snow is not all one surface; the drifts on the

hill-sides, the hanging cornice over a gully, these have their place

in the story, just enough to make the movements clear and

intelligible. This is the way history was written when the themes were

later by two centuries than those of the heroic Sagas. There is not

much difference, except in the "soothfastness"; the author is closer

to his subject, his imagination is confronted with something very near

reality, and is not helped, as in the older stories, by traditional

imaginative modifications of his subject.

It is the same kind of excellence that is found in the other

subsidiary parts of _Sturlunga_, hardly less than in the main body of

that work. There is no reason for depressing these histories below the

level of any but the strongest work in the heroic Sagas. The history

of Bishop Gudmund and the separate lives of his two friends, Hrafn

and Aron, are not less vivid than the stories of the men of Eyre or

the men of Vatzdal. The wanderings of Aron round Iceland are all but

as thrilling as those of the outlaw Gisli or Grettir, whose adventures

and difficulties are so like his own. It is not easy to specify any

element in the one that is not in the other, while the handling of the

more authentic stories is not weak or faltering in comparison with the

others. No single incident in any of the Sagas is much better in its

way, and few are more humane than the scene in which Eyjolf Karsson

gets Aron to save himself, while he, Eyjolf, goes back into

danger.[61]

[Footnote 61: Translated in Appendix, Note C.]

The _Islendinga_ or _Sturlunga Saga_ of Sturla Thordarson, which is

the greatest of the pure historical works, is in some things inferior

to stories like those of the older Sturla, or of Hrafn and Aron. There

is no hero; perhaps least of all that hero, namely the nation itself,

which gives something like unity to the Shakespearean plays of the

Wars of the Roses. Historically there is much resemblance between the

Wars of the Roses and the faction fights in Iceland in which the old

constitution went to pieces and the old spirit was exhausted. But the

Icelandic tragedy had no reconciliation at the end, and there was no

national strength underneath the disorder, fit to be called out by a

peacemaker or a "saviour of society" like Henry VII. There was nothing

but the family interests of the great houses, and the _Sturlunga Saga_

leaves it impossible to sympathise with either side in a contest that

has no principles and no great reformer to distinguish it. The anarchy

is worse than in the old days of the Northern rovers; the men are more

formal and more vain. Yet the history of these tumults is not without

its brightness of character. The generous and lawless Bishop Gudmund

belongs to the story; so do his champions Eyjolf, Hrafn, and Aron.

The figure of Snorri Sturluson is there, though he is rather

disappointing in his nephew's view of him. His enemy, Gizur the earl,

is a strong man, whose strength is felt in the course of the history;

and there are others.

The beauty of _Sturlunga_ is that it gives a more detailed and more

rational account than is to be found elsewhere in the world of the

heroic age going to the bad, without a hero. The kind of thing

represented may be found in countless other places, but not Froissart

has rendered it so fully or with such truth, nor the _Paston Letters_

with more intimate knowledge and experience. It is a history and not

an epic; the title of epic which may be claimed for _Njála_ and

_Laxdæla_, and even in a sense transferred to the later biographies,

does not rightly belong to Sturla's history of Iceland. It is a record

from year to year; it covers two generations; there is nothing in it

but faction. But it is descended from the epic school; it has the gift

of narrative and of vision. It represents, as no prosaic historian

can, the suspense and the shock of events, the alarm in the night, the

confusion of a house attacked, the encounter of enemies in the open,

the demeanour of men going to their death. The scenes are epic at

least, though the work as a whole is merely historical.

There is a return in this to the original nature of the Saga, in some

respects. It was in the telling of adventures that the Sagas began,

separate adventures attaching to great names of the early days. The

separate adventures of Gisli were known and were told about before his

history was brought into the form and unity which it now possesses,

where the end is foreknown from the beginning. Many of the heroic

Sagas have remained in what must be very like their old oral form--a

string of episodes. _Eyrbyggja_, _Vatnsdæla_, _Flóamanna_,

_Svarfdæla_, are of this sort. _Sturlunga_, has not more unity than

_Eyrbyggja_, perhaps not as much, unless the rise of Gizur may be

reckoned to do for it what is done for the older story by the rise of

Snorri the Priest. But while the scenes thus fall apart in

_Sturlunga_, they are more vivid than in any other Icelandic book. In

no other is the art of description so nearly perfect.

The scenes of _Sturlunga_ come into rivalry with the best of those in

the heroic Sagas. No one will ever be able to say, much less to

convince any one else, whether the burning of Njal's house or the

burning of Flugumyri is the better told or the more impressive. There

is no comparison between the personages in the two stories. But in

pure art of language and in the certainty of its effect the story of

Flugumyri is not less notable than the story of Bergthorsknoll. It may

be repeated here, to stand as the last words of the great Icelandic

school; the school which went out and had no successor till all its

methods were invented again, independently, by the great novelists,

after ages of fumbling and helpless experiments, after all the

weariness of pedantic chronicles and the inflation of heroic romance.

Sturla had given his daughter Ingibjorg in marriage to Hall, son of

Gizur, and had come to the wedding at Flugumyri, Gizur's house at the

foot of the hills of Skagafjord, with steep slopes behind and the

broad open valley in front, a place with no exceptional defences, no

fortress. It was here, just after the bridal, and after the bride's

father had gone away, that Gizur's enemy, Eyjolf, came upon him, as he

had threatened openly in men's hearing. Sturla, who had left the house

just before, tells the story with the details that came to him from

the eye-witnesses, with exact particular descriptions. But there is no

drag in the story, and nothing mean in the style, whatever may have

been the brutal reality. It is, once again, the great scene of Epic

poetry repeated, the defence of a man's life and of his own people

against surrounding enemies; it is the drama of Gunnar or of Njal

played out again at the very end of the Northern heroic age, and the

prose history is quick to recognise the claims upon it.

This is the end of the wedding at Flugumyri, in October of the year

1253, as told by Sturla:--

THE BURNING OF FLUGUMYRI

Eyjolf saw that the attack was beginning to flag, and grew

afraid that the countryside might be raised upon them; so

they brought up the fire. John of Bakki had a tar-pin with

him; they took the sheepskins from the frames that stood

outside there, and tarred them and set them on fire. Some

took hay and stuffed it into the windows and put fire to it;

and soon there was a great smoke in the house and a choking

heat. Gizur lay down in the hall by one of the rows of

pillars, and kept his nose on the floor. Groa his wife was

near him. Thorbjorn Neb was lying there too, and he and

Gizur had their heads close together. Thorbjorn could hear

Gizur praying to God in many ways and fervently, and thought

he had never before heard praying like it. As for himself,

he could not have opened his mouth for the smoke. After that

Gizur stood up and Groa supported him, and he went to the

south porch. He was much distressed by the smoke and heat,

and thought to make his way out rather than be choked

inside. Gizur Glad was standing at the door, talking to

Kolbein Grön, and Kolbein was offering him quarter, for

there was a pact between them, that if ever it came to that,

they should give quarter to one another, whichever of them

had it in his power. Gizur stood behind Gizur Glad, his

namesake while they were talking, and got some coolness the

while. Gizur Glad said to Kolbein, "I will take quarter for

myself, if I may bring out another man along with me."

Kolbein agreed to this at once, excepting only Gizur and his

sons.

Then Ingibjorg, Sturla's daughter, came to Groa at the door;

she was in her nightgown, and barefoot. She was then in her

fourteenth year, and tall and comely to see. Her silver belt

had tangled round her feet as she came from her bedroom.

There was on it a purse with many gold rings of hers in it;

she had it there with her. Groa was very glad to see her,

and said that there should be one lot for both of them,

whatever might befall.

When Gizur had got himself cooled a little, he gave up his

thought of dashing out of the house. He was in linen

clothes, with a mail-coat over them, and a steel cap on his

head, and his sword _Corselet-biter_ in his hand. Groa was

in her nightgown only. Gizur went to Groa and took two gold

rings out of his girdle-pocket and put them into her hand,

because he thought that she would live through it, but not

he himself. One ring had belonged to Bishop Magnus his

uncle, and the other to his father Thorvald.

"I wish my friends to have the good of these," he says, "if

things go as I would have them."

Gizur saw that Groa took their parting much to heart.

Then he felt his way through the house, and with him went

Gudmund the Headstrong, his kinsman, who did not wish to

lose sight of him. They came to the doors of the ladies'

room; and Gizur was going to make his way out there. Then he

heard outside the voices of men cursing and swearing, and

turned back from there.

Now in the meantime Groa and Ingibjorg had gone to the door.

Groa asked for freedom for Ingibjorg. Kolbein heard that,

her kinsman, and asked Ingibjorg to come out to him. She

would not, unless she got leave to take some one out along

with her. Kolbein said that was too much to ask. Groa

besought her to go.

"I have to look after the lad Thorlak, my sister's son,"

says she.

Thorlak was a boy of ten, the son of Thorleif the Noisy. He

had jumped out of the house before this, and his linen

clothes were all ablaze when he came down to the ground: he

got safe to the church. Some men say that Thorstein Genja

pushed Groa back into the fire; she was found in the porch

afterwards. Kolbein dashed into the fire for Ingibjorg, and

carried her out to the church.

Then the house began to blaze up. A little after, Hall

Gizur's son [the bridegroom] came to the south door, and

Arni the Bitter, his henchman, with him. They were both very

hard put to it, and distressed by the heat. There was a

board across the doorway, half-way up. Hall did not stop to

look, but jumped straight out over the hatch. He had a sword

in one hand, and no weapon besides. Einar Thorgrimsson was

posted near where he leapt out, and hewed at his head with a

sword, and that was his death-wound. As he fell, another man

cut at his right leg below the knee and slashed it nearly

off. Thorleif the monk from Thverá, the brewer, had got out

before, and was in the yard; he took a sheepskin and put it

under Hall when Einar and the others went away; then he

rolled all together, Hall and the sheepskin, along to the

church when they were not looking. Hall was lightly clad,

and the cold struck deep into his wounds. The monk was

barefoot, and his feet were frostbitten, but he brought

himself and Hall to the church at last.

Arni leapt out straight after Hall; he struck his foot on

the hatch (he was turning old) and fell as he came out. They

asked who that might be, coming in such a hurry.

"Arni the Bitter is here," says he; "and I will not ask for

quarter. I see one lying not far away makes me like it well

enough if I travel the same road with him."

Then said Kolbein: "Is there no man here remembers Snorri

Sturluson?"[62]

[Footnote 62: Arni Beiskr (the Bitter) in company with Gizur

murdered Snorri Sturluson the historian at his house of

Reykholt, 22nd September 1241.]

They both had a stroke at him, Kolbein and Ari Ingimund's

son, and more of them besides hewed at him, and he came by

his death there.

Then the hall fell in, beginning from the north side into

the loft above the hall. Now all the buildings began to

flare up, except that the guest-house did not burn, nor the

ladies' room, nor the dairy.

Now to go back to Gizur: he made his way through the house

to the dairy, with Gudmund, his kinsman, after him. Gizur

asked him to go away, and said that one man might find a way

of escape, if fate would have it so, that would not do for

two. Then Parson John Haldorsson came up; and Gizur asked

them both to leave him. He took off his coat of mail and his

morion, but kept his sword in his hand. Parson John and

Gudmund made their way from the dairy to the south door, and

got quarter. Gizur went into the dairy and found a curd-tub

standing on stocks; there he thrust the sword into the curds

down over the hilts. He saw close by a vat sunk in the earth

with whey in it, and the curd-tub stood over it and nearly

hid the sunken vat altogether. There was room for Gizur to

get into it, and he sat down in the whey in his linen

clothes and nothing else, and the whey came up to his

breast. It was cold in the whey. He had not been long there

when he heard voices, and their talk went thus, that three

men were meant to have the hewing of him; each man his

stroke, and no hurry about it, so as to see how he took it.

The three appointed were Hrani and Kolbein and Ari. And now

they came into the dairy with a light, and searched about

everywhere. They came to the vat that Gizur was in, and

thrust into it three or four times with spears. Then there

was a wrangle among them; some said there was something in

the vat, and others said no. Gizur kept his hand over his

belly, moving gently, so that they might be as long as

possible in finding out that there was anything there. He

had grazes on his hands, and all down to his knees skin

wounds, little and many. Gizur said afterwards that before

they came in he was shaking with cold, so that it rippled in

the vat, but after they came in he did not shiver at all.

They made two searches through the dairy, and the second

time was like the first. After that they went out and made

ready to ride away. Those men that still had life in them

were spared, to wit, Gudmund Falkason, Thord the Deacon, and

Olaf, who was afterwards called Guest, whose life Einar

Thorgrimsson had attempted before. By that time it was dawn.

There is one passage in the story of Flugumyri, before the scene of

the burning, in which the narrative is heightened a little, as if the

author were conscious that his subject was related to the matter of

heroic poetry, or as if it had at once, like the battle of Maldon,

begun to be magnified by the popular memory into the likeness of

heroic battles. It is in the description of the defence of the hall

(_skáli_) at Flugumyri, before the assailants were driven back and had

to take to fire, as is told above.

Eyjolf and his companions made a hard assault on the hall.

Now was there battle joined, and sharp onset, for the

defence was of the stoutest. They kept at it far into the

night, and struck so hard (say the men who were there) that

fire flew, as it seemed, when the weapons came together.

Thorstein Gudmund's son said afterwards that he had never

been where men made a braver stand; and all are agreed to

praise the defence of Flugumyri, both friends and enemies.

The fire of the swords which is here referred to by the way, and with

something like an apology for exaggeration, is in the poem of

_Finnesburh_ brought out with emphasis, as a proper part of the

composition:--

swurdléoma stód,

Swylce eall Finnesburh fýrenu wáere.

The sword-light rose, as though all Finnsburgh were aflame.

It is characteristic of the Icelandic work that it should frequently

seem to reflect the incidents of epic poetry in a modified way. The

Sagas follow the outlines of heroic poetry, but they have to reduce

the epic magnificence, or rather it would be truer to say that they

present in plain language, and without extravagance, some of the

favourite passages of experience that have been at different times

selected and magnified by epic poets. Thus the death of Skarphedinn is

like a prose rendering of the death of Roland; instead of the last

stroke of the hero in his agony, cleaving the rock with Durendal, it

is noted simply that Skarphedinn had driven his axe into the beam

before him, in the place where he was penned in, and there the axe was

found when they came to look for him after the burning. The moderation

of the language here does not conceal the intention of the writer that

Skarphedinn's last stroke is to be remembered. It is by touches such

as these that the heroic nature of the Sagas is revealed. In spite of

the common details and the prose statement, it is impossible to

mistake their essential character. They are something loftier than

history, and their authors knew it. When history came to be written as

it was written by Sturla, it still retained this distinction. It is

history governed by an heroic spirit; and while it is closely bound to

the facts, it is at the same time controlled and directed by the

forms of an imaginative literature that had grown up in greater

freedom and at a greater distance from its historical matter. Sturla

uses, for contemporary history, a kind of narrative created and

perfected for another purpose, namely for the imaginative

reconstruction and representation of tradition, in the stories of

Njal, Grettir, and Gisli.

There is no distortion or perversion in this choice and use of his

instrument, any more than in Fielding's adaptation of the method of

_Joseph Andrews_ to the matter of the _Voyage to Lisbon_. In the first

place, the imaginative form of narrative obliges the author to take

his subject seriously and treat it with dignity; he cannot leave it

crude and unformed. In the second place, there is a real affinity, in

Iceland, between the subject-matters of the true history and the

heroic Saga; the events are of the same kind, the personages are not

unlike.

The imaginative treatment of the stories of Njal and Gisli had been

founded on real knowledge of life; in _Sturlunga_ the history of real

life is repaid for its loan. In Sturla's book, the contemporary alarms

and excursions, the midnight raids, the perils and escapes, the death

of the strong man, the painful ending of the poor-spirited, all the

shocks and accidents of his own time, are comprehended by the author

in the light of the traditional heroics, and of similar situations in

the imaginative Sagas; and so these matters of real life, and of the

writer's own experience, or near it, come to be co-ordinated,

represented, and made intelligible through imagination. _Sturlunga_ is

something more than a bare diary, or a series of pieces of evidence.

It has an author, and the author understands and appreciates the

matter in hand, because it is illuminated for him by the example of

the heroic literature. He carries an imaginative narrative design in

his head, and things as they happen fall into the general scheme of

his story as if he had invented them.

How much this imaginative kind of true history is bound and indebted

to its native land, how little capable of transportation, is proved in

a very striking and interesting way by Sturla's other work, his essay

in foreign history, the _Life of King Hacon of Norway_. The _Hákonar

Saga_, as compared with _Sturlunga_, is thin, grey, and abstract. It

is a masterly book in its own kind; fluent and clear, and written in

the inimitable Icelandic prose. The story is parallel to the history

of Iceland, contemporary with _Sturlunga_. It tells of the agonies of

Norway, a confusion no less violent and cruel than the anarchy of

Iceland in the same sixty years; while the Norwegian history has the

advantage that it comes to an end in remedy, not in exhaustion. There

was no one in Iceland like King Hacon to break the heads of the

disorderly great men, and thus make peace in an effective way.

_Sturlunga_, in Iceland, is made up of mere anarchy; _Hákonar Saga_ is

the counterpart of _Sturlunga_, exhibiting the cure of anarchy in

Norway under an active king. But while the political import of

Sturla's _Hacon_ is thus greater, the literary force is much less, in

comparison with the strong work of _Sturlunga_. There is great

dexterity in the management of the narrative, great lucidity; but the

vivid imagination shown in the story of Flugumyri, and hardly less in

other passages of _Sturlunga_, is replaced in the life of Hacon by a

methodical exposition of facts, good enough as history, but seldom

giving any hint of the author's reserve of imaginative force. It is

not that Sturla does not understand his subject. The tragedy of Duke

Skule does not escape him; he recognises the contradiction in the

life of Hacon's greatest rival, between Skule's own nobility and

generosity of temper, and the hopelessness of the old scrambling

misrule of which he is the representative. But the tragedy of the

_Rival Kings_ (_Kongsemnerne_) is left for Ibsen to work out in full;

the portraits of Skule and Hacon are only given in outline. In the

part describing Hacon's childhood among the veterans of the Old Guard

(Sverre's men, the "ancient Birchlegs"), and in a few other places,

there is a lapse into the proper Icelandic manner. Elsewhere, and in

the more important parts of the history especially, it would seem as

if the author had gone out of his way to find a sober and colourless

pattern of work, instead of the full and vivid sort of story that came

natural to him.

After Sturla, and after the fall of the Commonwealth of Iceland,

although there were still some interesting biographies to be

written--the _Life of Bishop Arne_, the _Life of Bishop Laurence_--it

may be reckoned that the heroic strain is exhausted. After that, it is

a new world for Iceland, or rather it is the common medieval world,

and not the peculiar Icelandic version of an heroic age. After the

fourteenth century the historical schools die out into meagre annals;

and even the glorious figure of Jón Arason, and the tragic end of the

Catholic bishop, the poet, the ruler, who along with his sons was

beheaded in the interests of the Reformed Religion and its adherents,

must go without the honours that were freely paid in the thirteenth

century to bishops and lords no more heroic, no more vehement and

self-willed. The history of Jón Arason has to be made out and put

together from documents; his Saga was left unwritten, though the facts

of his life and death may seem to prove that the old spirit lived

long after the failure of the old literature.

The thirteenth century, the century of Snorri Sturluson and of Sturla

his nephew, is also the age of Villehardouin and Joinville. That is to

say, the finished historical work of the Icelandic School is

contemporary with the splendid improvisations and first essays of

French historical prose. The fates of the two languages are an

instance of "the way that things are shared" in this world, and may

raise some grudges against the dispensing fortune that has ordered the

_Life of St. Louis_ to be praised, not beyond its deserts, by century

after century, while the Northern masterpieces are left pretty much to

their own island and to the antiquarian students of the Northern

tongues. This, however, is a consideration which does not touch the

merits of either side. It is part of the fate of Icelandic literature

that it should not be influential in the great world, that it should

fall out of time, and be neglected, in the march of the great nations.

It is in this seclusion that its perfection is acquired, and there is

nothing to complain of.

A comparison of the two contemporaries, Sturla and Joinville, brings

out the difference between two admirable varieties of history, dealing

with like subjects. The scenery of the _Life of St. Louis_ is

different from that of _Sturlunga_, but there is some resemblance in

parts of their themes, in so far as both narrate the adventures of

brave men in difficult places, and both are told by authors who were

on the spot themselves, and saw with their own eyes, or heard directly

from those who had seen. As a subject for literature there is not much

to choose between St. Louis in Egypt in 1250 and the burning of

Flugumyri three years later, though the one adventure had all the eyes

of the world upon it, and the other was of no more practical interest

to the world than floods or landslips or the grinding of rocks and

stones in an undiscovered valley. Nor is there much to choose between

the results of the two methods; neither Sturla nor Joinville has

anything to fear from a comparison between them.

Sometimes, in details, there is a very close approximation of the

French and the Icelandic methods. Joinville's story, for example, of

the moonlight adventure of the clerk of Paris and the three robbers

might go straight into Icelandic. Only, the seneschal's opening of the

story is too personal, and does not agree with the Icelandic manner of

telling a story:--

As I went along I met with a wagon carrying three dead men

that a clerk had slain, and I was told they were being

brought for the king to see. When I heard this I sent my

squire after them, to know how it had fallen out.

The difference between the two kinds is that Joinville, being mainly

experimental and without much regard for the older precedents and

models of historical writing, tells his story in his own way, as

memoirs, in the order of events as they come within his view,

revealing his own sentiments and policy, and keeping a distinction

between the things he himself saw and the things he did not see.

Whereas Sturla goes on the lines that had been laid down before him,

and does not require to invent his own narrative scheme; and further,

the scheme he receives from his masters is the opposite of Joinville's

personal memories. Though Sturla in great part of his work is as near

the reality as Joinville, he is obliged by the Icelandic custom to

keep himself out of the story, except when he is necessary; and then

he only appears in the third person on the same terms as the other

actors, with nothing except perhaps a greater particularity in

description to show that the author is there himself in the thick of

it. To let the story take care of itself is the first rule of the

Icelandic authors. If they have any emotion or sentiment of their own,

it must go into the story impersonally; it must inform or enliven the

characters and their speeches; it must quicken the style

unobtrusively, or else it must be suppressed. The parts of the Sagas

that are most touching, such as the death of Njal, and the parting of

Grettir and his mother, though they give evidence of the author's

sensibility, never allow him a word for himself. The method is the

method of Homer--[Greek: dolôi d' ho ge dakrya keuthen]--"he would not

confess that he wept."

In Joinville, on the contrary, all the epic matter of the story is

surveyed and represented not as a drama for any one to come and look

at, and make his own judgment about it, but as the life of himself,

the Sire de Joinville, Seneschal of Champagne, known and interpreted

to himself first of all. It is barely possible to conceive the _Life

of St. Louis_ transposed into the mood of the _Odyssey_ or of _Njála_.

It is hard to see who would be a gainer thereby--certainly not St.

Louis himself. He would be deprived, for instance, of what is at once

the most heroic and the most trifling of all the passages in his

story, which belongs altogether to Joinville, and is worth nothing

except as he tells it, and because he tells it. The story of

Joinville's misunderstanding of the king, and the king's way of taking

it, on occasion of the Council at Acre and the question whether to

return or to stay and recover the prisoners from the Saracens, is not

only the whole _Life of St. Louis_ summed up and put into one chapter,

but it is also one of those rarest passages of true history in which a

character whom we thought we knew is presented with all his qualities

intensified in a momentary act or speech. It is as if the dulness of

custom were magically broken, and the familiar character stood out,

not different from himself, but with a new expression. In this great

scene the Barons were for returning home, and put forward Guy

Malvoisin their foreman to state their opinion. Joinville took the

other side, remembering the warning of a kinsman of his own not to

return in a hurry and forget the Lord's poor servants (_le peuple menu

Nostre Signour_). There was no one there but had friends in prison

among the Saracens, "so they did not rebuke me," says Joinville; but

only two ventured to speak on his side, and one of these was shouted

at (_mout felonessement_) by his uncle, the good knight Sir Jehan de

Beaumont, for so doing. The king adjourned the Council for a week.

What follows is a kind of narrative impossible under the Homeric or

the Icelandic conditions--no impersonal story, but a record of

Joinville's own changes of mind as he was played upon by the mind of

the king; an heroic incident, but represented in a way quite different

from any epic manner. Joinville describes the breaking up of the

Council, and how he was baited by them all: "The king is a fool, Sire

de Joinville, if he does not take your advice against all the council

of the realm of France"; how he sat beside the king at dinner, but the

king did not speak to him; how he, Joinville, thought the king was

displeased; and how he got up when the king was hearing grace, and

went to a window in a recess and stuck his arms out through the bars,

and leant there gazing out and brooding over the whole matter, making

up his mind to stay, whatever happened to all the rest; till some one

came behind him and put his hands on his head at the window and held

him there, and Joinville thought it was one of the other side

beginning to bother him again (_et je cuidai que ce fust mes sires

Phelippes d'Anemos, qui trop d'ennui m'avoit fait le jour pour le

consoil que je li avoie donnei_), till as he was trying to get free he

saw, by a ring on the hand, that it was the king. Then the king asked

him how it was that he, a young man, had been bold enough to set his

opinion against all the wisdom of France; and before their talk ended,

let him see that he was of the same mind as Joinville.

This personal kind of story, in which an heroic scene is rendered

through its effect on one particular mind, is quite contrary to the

principles of the Icelandic history, except that both kinds are

heroic, and both are alive.

Joinville gives the succession of his own emotions; the Icelandic

narrators give the succession of events, either as they might appear

to an impartial spectator, or (on occasion) as they are viewed by some

one in the story, but never as they merely affect the writer himself,

though he may be as important a personage as Sturla was in the events

of which he wrote the Chronicle. The subject-matter of the Icelandic

historian (whether his own experience or not) is displayed as

something in which he is not more nearly concerned than other people;

his business is to render the successive moments of the history so

that any one may form a judgment about them such as he might have

formed if he had been there. Joinville, while giving his own changes

of mind very clearly, is not as careful as the Icelandic writers are

about the proper order of events. Thus an Icelander would not have

written, as Joinville does, "the king came and put his hands on my

head"; he would have said, "John found that his head was being held";

and the discovery by means of the ring would have been the first

direct intimation who it was. The story as told by Joinville, though

it is so much more intimate than any of the Sagas, is not as true to

the natural order of impressions. He follows out his own train of

sentiment; he is less careful of the order of perception, which the

Icelanders generally observe, and sometimes with extraordinary effect.

Joinville's history is not one of a class, and there is nothing equal

to it; but some of the qualities of his history are characteristic of

the second medieval period, the age of romance. His prose, as compared

with that of Iceland, is unstudied and simple, an apparently

unreserved confession. The Icelandic prose, with its richness of

contents and its capability of different moods, is by comparison

resolute, secure, and impartial; its authors are among those who do

not give their own opinion about their stories. Joinville, for all his

exceptional genius in narrative, is yet like all the host of medieval

writers except the Icelandic school, in his readiness to give his

opinion, to improve the occasion, and to add to his plain story

something like the intonation of the preacher. Inimitable as he is, to

come from the Icelandic books to Joinville is to discover that he is

"medieval" in a sense that does not apply to those; that his work,

with all its sobriety and solidity, has also the incalculable and

elusive touch of fantasy, of exaltation, that seems to claim in a

special way the name of Romance.

VIII

THE NORTHERN PROSE ROMANCES

The history of the Sturlungs is the last great work of the classical

age of Icelandic literature, and after it the end comes pretty

sharply, as far as masterpieces are concerned. There is, however, a

continuation of the old literature in a lower degree and in degenerate

forms, which if not intrinsically valuable, are yet significant, as

bringing out by exaggeration some of the features and qualities of the

older school, and also as showing in a peculiar way the encroachments

of new "romantic" ideas and formulas.

One of the extant versions of the _Foster-brothers' Story_ is

remarkable for its patches of euphuistic rhetoric, which often appear

suddenly in the course of plain, straightforward narrative. These

ornamental additions are not all of the same kind. Some of them are of

the alliterative antithetical kind which is frequently found in the

old Northern ecclesiastical prose,[63] and which has an English

counterpart in the alliterative prose of Ælfric. Others are more

unusual; they are borrowed not from the Latin ecclesiastical school of

prose, but from the terms of the Northern poetry, and their effect is

often very curious. For instance, on page 13 there is a sudden break

from the common, unemphatic narrative of a storm at sea ("they were

drenched through, and their clothes froze on them") into the

incongruous statement that "the daughters of Ran (the sea-goddess)

came and wooed them and offered them rest in their embraces,"--a

conceit which might possibly be mistaken by a modern reader for the

fancy of Hans Andersen, but which is really something quite different,

not "pathetic fallacy," but an irruption of metaphorical rhetoric from

the poetical dictionary. There is another metaphorical flare-up on the

next page, equally amazing, in its plain context:--

She gave orders to take their clothes and have them thawed.

After that they had supper and were shown to bed. They were

not long in falling asleep. Snow and frost held all the

night through; _all that night the Dog (devourer) of the

elder-tree howled with unwearying jaws and worried the earth

with grim fangs of cold_. And when it began to grow light

towards daybreak, a man got up to look out, and when he came

in Thorgeir asked what sort of weather it was outside;

and so on in the ordinary sober way. It is not surprising that an

editor should have been found to touch up the plain text of a Saga

with a few ornamental phrases here and there. Considering the amount

of bad taste and false wit in the contemporary poetry, the wonder is

that there should be such a consistent exclusion of all such things

from the prose of the Sagas. The _Fóstbræðra_ variations show the

beginning of a process of decay, in which the lines of separation

between prose and poetry are cut through.

[Footnote 63: _Fóstbr._ (1852) p. 8: "Því at ekki var hjarta hans seen

fóarn í fugli: ekki var þat blóðfullt svá at þat skylfi af hræzlu,

heldr var þat herdt af enum hæsta höfuðsmið í öllum hvatleik." ("His

heart was not fashioned like the crop in a fowl: it was not gorged

with blood that it should flutter with fear, but was tempered by the

High Headsmith in all alacrity.")]

Except, however, as an indication of a general decline of taste, these

diversions in _Fóstbræðra Saga_ do not represent the later and

secondary schools of Icelandic narrative. They remain as exceptional

results of a common degeneracy of literature; the prevailing forms are

not exactly of this special kind. Instead of embroidering poetical

diction over the plain text of the old Sagas, the later authors

preferred to invent new stories of their own, and to use in them the

machinery and vocabulary of the old Sagas. Hence arose various orders

of romantic Saga, cut off from the original sources of vitality, and

imitating the old forms very much as a modern romanticist might

intimate them. One of the best, and one of the most famous, of these

romantic Sagas is the story of Frithiof the Bold, which was chosen by

Tegnér as the groundwork of his elegant romantic poem, a brilliant

example of one particular kind of modern medievalism. The significance

of Tegnér's choice is that he went for his story to the secondary

order of Sagas. The original _Frithiof_ is almost as remote as Tegnér

himself from the true heroic tradition; and, like Tegnér's poem, makes

up for this want of a pedigree by a study and imitation of the great

manner, and by a selection and combination of heroic traits from the

older authentic literature. Hence Tegnér's work, an ingenious

rhetorical adaptation of all the old heroic motives, is already half

done for him by the earlier romanticist; the original prose Frithiof

is the same romantic hero as in the Swedish poem, and no more like the

men of the Icelandic histories than Raoul de Bragelonne is like

D'Artagnan. At the same time, it is easy to see how the authentic

histories have supplied materials for the romance; as has been shown

already, there are passages in the older Sagas that contain some

suggestions for the later kind of stories, and the fictitious hero is

put together out of reminiscences of Gunnar and Kjartan.

The "romantic movement" in the old Northern literature was greatly

helped by foreign encouragement from the thirteenth century onward,

and particularly by a change of literary taste at the Court of Norway.

King Sverre at the end of the twelfth century quotes from the old

Volsung poem; he perhaps kept the Faroese memory for that kind of

poetry from the days of his youth in the islands. Hakon Hakonsson, two

generations later, had a different taste in literature and was fond of

French romances. It was in his day that the work of translation from

the French began; the results of which are still extant in

_Strengleikar_ (the Lays of Marie de France), in _Karlamagnus Saga_,

in the Norwegian versions of Tristram, Perceval, Iwain, and other

books of chivalry.[64] These cargoes of foreign romance found a ready

market in the North; first of all in Norway, but in Iceland also. They

came to Iceland just at the time when the native literature, or the

highest form of it at any rate, was failing; the failure of the native

literature let in these foreign competitors. The Norwegian

translations of French romances are not the chief agents in the

creation of the secondary Icelandic School, though they help. The

foreigners have contributed something to the story of Frithiof and the

story of Viglund. The phrase _náttúra amorsins_ (= _natura amoris_)

in the latter work shows the intrusion even of the Romance vocabulary

here, as under similar conditions in Germany and England. But while

the old Northern literature in its decline is affected by the vogue of

French romance, it still retains some independence. It went to the bad

in its own way; and the later kinds of story in the old Northern

tongue are not wholly spurious and surreptitious. They have some claim

upon _Njála_ and _Laxdæla_; there is a strain in them that

distinguishes them from the ordinary professional medieval romance in

French, English, or German.

[Footnote 64: "The first romantic Sagas"--_i.e._ Sagas derived from

French romance--"date from the reign of King Hakon Hakonsson

(1217-1263), when the longest and best were composed, and they appear

to cease at the death of King Hakon the Fifth (1319), who, we are

expressly told, commanded many translations to be made" (G. Vigfusson,

Prol. § 25).]

When the Icelandic prose began to fail, and the slighter forms of

Romance rose up in the place of Epic history, there were two modes in

which the older literature might be turned to profit. For one thing,

there was plenty of romantic stuff in the old heroic poetry, without

going to the French books. For another thing, the prose stories of the

old tradition had in them all kinds of romantic motives which were fit

to be used again. So there came into existence the highly-interesting

series of Mythical Romances on the themes of the old Northern mythical

and heroic poetry, and another series besides, which worked up in its

own way a number of themes and conventional motives from the older

prose books.

Mythical sagas had their beginning in the classical age of the North.

Snorri, with his stories of the adventures of the gods, is the leader

in the work of getting pure romance, for pure amusement, out of what

once was religious or heroic myth, mythological or heroic poetry. Even

Ari the Wise, his great predecessor, had done something of the same

sort, if the _Ynglinga Saga_ be his, an historical abstract of

Northern mythical history; though his aim, like that of Saxo

Grammaticus, is more purely scientific than is the case with Snorri.

The later mythical romances are of different kinds. The _Volsunga

Saga_ is the best known on account of its subject. The story of

Heidrek, instead of paraphrasing throughout like the Volsung book,

inserts the poems of Hervor and Angantyr, and of their descendants, in

a consecutive prose narrative. _Halfs Saga_ follows the same method.

The story of _Hrolf Kraki_, full of interest from its connexion with

the matter of _Beowulf_ and of Saxo Grammaticus, is more like

_Volsunga Saga_ in its procedure.[65]

[Footnote 65: The Mythical Sagas are described and discussed by

Vigfusson, Prol. § 34.]

The other class[66] contains the Sagas of _Frithiof_ and _Viglund_,

and all the fictitious stories which copy the style of the proper

Icelandic Sagas. Their matter is taken from the adventures of the

heroic age; their personages are idealised romantic heroes; romantic

formulas, without substance.

[Footnote 66: _Ibid._ § 11, "Spurious Icelandic Sagas"

(_Skrök-Sögur_). For _Frithiof_, see § 34.]

Among the original Sagas there are some that show the beginning of the

process by which the substance was eliminated, and the romantic

_eidolon_ left to walk about by itself. The introductions of many of

the older Sagas, of _Gisli_ and _Grettir_ for example, giving the

adventures of the hero's ancestors, are made up in this way; and the

best Sagas have many conventional passages--Viking exploits,

discomfiture of berserkers, etc.--which the reader learns to take for

granted, like the tournaments in the French books, and which have no

more effect than simple adjectives to say that the hero is brave or

strong. Besides these stock incidents, there are ethical passages (as

has already been seen) in which the hero is in some danger of turning

into a figure of romance. Grettir, Gisli, Kjartan, Gunnlaug the

Wormtongue, Gunnar of Lithend, are all in some degree and at some

point or other in danger of romantic exaggeration, while Kari has to

thank his humorous squire, more than anything in himself, for his

preservation. Also in the original Sagas there are conventions of the

main plot, as well as of the episodes, such as are repeated with more

deliberation and less skill in the romantic Sagas.

The love-adventures of Viglund are like those of Frithiof, and they

have a common likeness, except in their conclusion, to the adventures

of Kormak and Steingerd in _Kormaks Saga_. Kormak was too rude and

natural for romance, and the romancers had to make their heroes

better-looking, and to provide a happy ending. But the story of the

poet's unfortunate love had become a commonplace.

The plot of _Laxdæla_, the story of the _Lovers of Gudrun_, which is

the Volsung story born again, became a commonplace of the same sort.

It certainly had a good right to the favour it received. The plot of

_Laxdæla_ is repeated in the story of Gunnlaug and Helga, even to a

repetition of the course of events by which Kjartan is defrauded. The

true lover is left in Norway and comes back too late; the second

lover, the dull, persistent man, contrasted with a more brilliant but

less single-minded hero, keeps to his wooing and spreads false

reports, and wins his bride without her goodwill. Compared with the

story of Kjartan and Gudrun, the story of Gunnlaug and Helga is

shallow and sentimental; the likeness to _Frithiof_ is considerable.

The device of a false report, in order to carry off the bride of a man

absent in Norway, is used again in the story of _Thorstein the White_,

where the result is more summary and more in accordance with poetical

justice than in _Laxdæla_ or _Gunnlaug_. This is one of the best of

the Icelandic short stories, firmly drawn, with plenty of life and

variety in it. It is only in its use of what seems like a stock device

for producing agony that it resembles the more pretentious romantic

Sagas.

Another short story of the same class and the same family tradition

(Vopnafjord), the story of _Thorstein Staffsmitten_, looks like a

clever working-up of a stock theme--the quiet man roused.[67] The

combat in it is less like the ordinary Icelandic fighting than the

combats in the French poems, more especially that of Roland and Oliver

in _Girart de Viane_; and on the whole there is no particular reason,

except its use of well-known East-country names, to reckon this among

the family histories rather than the romances.

[Footnote 67: Translated by Mr. William Morris and Mr. E. Magnússon,

in the same volume as _Gunnlaug_, _Frithiof_, and _Viglund_ (_Three

Northern Love Stories_, etc., 1875).]

Romantic Sagas of different kinds have been composed in Iceland,

century after century, in a more or less mechanical way, by the

repetition of old adventures, situations, phrases, characters, or

pretences of character. What the worst of them are like may be seen by

a reference to Mr. Ward's Catalogue of MS. Romances in the British

Museum, which contains a number of specimens. There is fortunately no

need to say anything more of them here. They are among the dreariest

things ever made by human fancy. But the first and freshest of the

romantic Sagas have still some reason in them and some beauty; they

are at least the reflection of something living, either of the romance

of the old mythology, or of the romantic grace by which the epic

strength of _Njal_ and _Gisli_ is accompanied.

There are some other romantic transformations of the old heroic

matters to be noticed, before turning away from the Northern world and

its "twilight of the gods" to the countries in which the course of

modern literature first began to define itself as something distinct

from the older unsuccessful fashions, Teutonic or Celtic.

The fictitious Sagas were not the most popular kind of literature in

Iceland in the later Middle Ages. The successors of the old Sagas, as

far as popularity goes, are to be found in the _Rímur_, narrative

poems, of any length, in rhyming verse; not the ballad measures of

Denmark, nor the short couplets of the French School such as were used

in Denmark and Sweden, in England, and in High and Low Germany, but

rhyming verse derived from the medieval Latin rhymes of the type best

known from the works of Bishop Golias.[68] This rhyming poetry was

very industrious, and turned out all kinds of stories; the native

Sagas went through the mill in company with the more popular romances

of chivalry.

[Footnote 68: Vigfusson, Prol. p. cxxxviii. _C.P.B._, ii. 392. The

forms of verse used in the _Rímur_ are analysed in the preface to

_Riddara Rímur_, by Theodor Wisén (1881).]

They were transformed also in another way. The Icelandic Sagas went

along with other books to feed the imagination of the ballad-singers

of the Faroes. Those islands, where the singing of ballads has always

had a larger share of importance among the literary and intellectual

tastes of the people than anywhere else in the world, have relied

comparatively little on their own traditions or inventions for their

ballad themes. Natural and popular as it is, the ballad poetry of the

Faroes is derived from Icelandic literary traditions. Even Sigmund

Brestisson, the hero of the islands, might have been forgotten but

for the _Færeyinga Saga_; and Icelandic books, possibly near relations

of _Codex Regius_, have provided the islanders with what they sing of

the exploits of Sigurd and his horse Grani, as other writings brought

them the story of Roncesvalles. From Iceland also there passed to the

Faroes, along with the older legends, the stories of Gunnar and of

Kjartan; they have been turned into ballad measures, together with

_Roland_ and _Tristram_, in that refuge of the old songs of the

world.