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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Epic and Romance, by W. P. Ker
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Epic and Romance
+ Essays on Medieval Literature
+
+
+Author: W. P. Ker
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 20, 2007 [eBook #20406]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EPIC AND ROMANCE***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Ted Garvin, Linda Cantoni, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/c/)
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+ This text employs some Anglo-Saxon characters, such as the
+ eth (Đ or đ, equivalent of "th") and the thorn (Ţ or ţ, also
+ equivalent of "th"). These characters should display properly
+ in most text viewers. The Anglo-Saxon yogh (equivalent of
+ "y," "g," or "gh") will display properly only if the user has
+ the proper font. To maximize accessibility, the character "3"
+ is used in this e-text to represent the yogh, e.g., "3ong"
+ (yong).
+
+
+
+
+
+EPIC AND ROMANCE
+
+Essays on Medieval Literature
+
+by
+
+W. P. KER
+
+Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
+Professor of English Literature in University College
+London
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MacMillan and Co., Limited
+St. Martin's Street, London
+1931
+Copyright
+First Edition (8vo) 1896
+Second Edition (Eversley Series) 1908
+Reprinted (Crown 8vo) 1922, 1926, 1931
+
+Printed in Great Britain
+By R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+These essays are intended as a general description of some of the
+principal forms of narrative literature in the Middle Ages, and as a
+review of some of the more interesting works in each period. It is
+hardly necessary to say that the conclusion is one "in which nothing
+is concluded," and that whole tracts of literature have been barely
+touched on--the English metrical romances, the Middle High German
+poems, the ballads, Northern and Southern--which would require to be
+considered in any systematic treatment of this part of history.
+
+Many serious difficulties have been evaded (in _Finnesburh_, more
+particularly), and many things have been taken for granted, too
+easily. My apology must be that there seemed to be certain results
+available for criticism, apart from the more strict and scientific
+procedure which is required to solve the more difficult problems of
+_Beowulf_, or of the old Northern or the old French poetry. It is
+hoped that something may be gained by a less minute and exacting
+consideration of the whole field, and by an attempt to bring the more
+distant and dissociated parts of the subject into relation with one
+another, in one view.
+
+Some of these notes have been already used, in a course of three
+lectures at the Royal Institution, in March 1892, on "the Progress of
+Romance in the Middle Ages," and in lectures given at University
+College and elsewhere. The plot of the Dutch romance of _Walewein_ was
+discussed in a paper submitted to the Folk-Lore Society two years ago,
+and published in the journal of the Society (_Folk-Lore_, vol. v. p.
+121).
+
+I am greatly indebted to my friend Mr. Paget Toynbee for his help in
+reading the proofs.
+
+I cannot put out on this venture without acknowledgment of my
+obligation to two scholars, who have had nothing to do with my
+employment of all that I have borrowed from them, the Oxford editors
+of the Old Northern Poetry, Dr. Gudbrand Vigfusson and Mr. York
+Powell. I have still to learn what Mr. York Powell thinks of these
+discourses. What Gudbrand Vigfusson would have thought I cannot guess,
+but I am glad to remember the wise goodwill which he was always ready
+to give, with so much else from the resources of his learning and his
+judgment, to those who applied to him for advice.
+
+W. P. KER.
+
+LONDON, _4th November 1896_.
+
+
+
+
+POSTSCRIPT
+
+
+This book is now reprinted without addition or change, except in a few
+small details. If it had to be written over again, many things, no
+doubt, would be expressed in a different way. For example, after some
+time happily spent in reading the Danish and other ballads, I am
+inclined to make rather less of the interval between the ballads and
+the earlier heroic poems, and I have learned (especially from Dr. Axel
+Olrik) that the Danish ballads do not belong originally to simple
+rustic people, but to the Danish gentry in the Middle Ages. Also the
+comparison of Sturla's Icelandic and Norwegian histories, though it
+still seems to me right in the main, is driven a little too far; it
+hardly does enough justice to the beauty of the _Life of Hacon_
+(_Hákonar Saga_), especially in the part dealing with the rivalry of
+the King and his father-in-law Duke Skule. The critical problems with
+regard to the writings of Sturla are more difficult than I imagined,
+and I am glad to have this opportunity of referring, with admiration,
+to the work of my friend Dr. Björn Magnússon Olsen on the _Sturlunga
+Saga_ (in _Safn til Sögu Islands_, iii. pp. 193-510, Copenhagen,
+1897). Though I am unable to go further into that debatable ground, I
+must not pass over Dr. Olsen's argument showing that the life of the
+original Sturla of Hvamm (_v. inf._ pp. 253-256) was written by Snorri
+himself; the story of the alarm and pursuit (p. 255) came from the
+recollections of Gudny, Snorri's mother.
+
+In the _Chansons de Geste_ a great discovery has been made since my
+essay was written; the _Chançun de Willame_, an earlier and ruder
+version of the epic of _Aliscans_, has been printed by the unknown
+possessor of the manuscript, and generously given to a number of
+students who have good reason to be grateful to him for his
+liberality. There are some notes on the poem in _Romania_ (vols.
+xxxii. and xxxiv.) by M. Paul Meyer and Mr. Raymond Weeks, and it has
+been used by Mr. Andrew Lang in illustration of Homer and his age. It
+is the sort of thing that the Greeks willingly let die; a rough
+draught of an epic poem, in many ways more barbarous than the other
+extant _chansons de geste_, but full of vigour, and notable (like _le
+Roi Gormond_, another of the older epics) for its refrain and other
+lyrical passages, very like the manner of the ballads. The _Chançun de
+Willame_, it may be observed, is not very different from _Aliscans_
+with regard to Rainouart, the humorous gigantic helper of William of
+Orange. One would not have been surprised if it had been otherwise, if
+Rainouart had been first introduced by the later composer, with a view
+to "comic relief" or some such additional variety for his tale. But it
+is not so; Rainouart, it appears, has a good right to his place by
+the side of William. The grotesque element in French epic is found
+very early, _e.g._ in the _Pilgrimage of Charlemagne_, and is not to
+be reckoned among the signs of decadence.
+
+There ought to be a reference, on p. 298 below, to M. Joseph Bédier's
+papers in the _Revue Historique_ (xcv. and xcvii.) on _Raoul de
+Cambrai_. M. Bédier's _Légendes épiques_, not yet published at this
+time of writing, will soon be in the hands of his expectant readers.
+
+I am deeply indebted to many friends--first of all to York Powell--for
+innumerable good things spoken and written about these studies. My
+reviewers, in spite of all differences of opinion, have put me under
+strong obligations to them for their fairness and consideration.
+Particularly, I have to offer my most sincere acknowledgments to Dr.
+Andreas Heusler of Berlin for the honour he has done my book in his
+_Lied und Epos_ (1905), and not less for the help that he has given,
+in this and other of his writings, towards the better understanding of
+the old poems and their history.
+
+W. P. K.
+
+OXFORD, _25th Jan. 1908_.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+I
+
+THE HEROIC AGE
+ PAGE
+
+Epic and Romance: the two great orders of medieval narrative 3
+
+_Epic_, of the "heroic age," preceding _Romance_ of the "age
+of chivalry" 4
+
+The heroic age represented in three kinds of literature--Teutonic
+Epic, French Epic, and the Icelandic Sagas 6
+
+Conditions of Life in an "heroic age" 7
+
+Homer and the Northern poets 9
+
+Homeric passages in _Beowulf_ 10
+ and in the _Song of Maldon_ 11
+
+Progress of poetry in the heroic age 13
+
+Growth of Epic, distinct in character, but generally incomplete,
+among the Teutonic nations 14
+
+II
+
+EPIC AND ROMANCE
+
+The complex nature of Epic 16
+
+No kind or aspect of life that may not be included 16
+
+This freedom due to the dramatic quality of true (_e.g._
+Homeric) Epic 17
+ as explained by Aristotle 17
+
+Epic does not require a magnificent ideal subject 18
+ such as those of the artificial epic (_Aeneid_, _Gerusalemme
+ Liberata_, _Paradise Lost_) 18
+
+The _Iliad_ unlike these poems in its treatment of "ideal"
+motives (patriotism, etc.) 19
+
+True Epic begins with a dramatic plot and characters 20
+
+The Epic of the Northern heroic age is sound in its dramatic
+conception 20
+ and does not depend on impersonal ideals (with exceptions,
+ in the _Chansons de geste_) 21
+
+The German heroes in history and epic (Ermanaric, Attila,
+Theodoric) 21
+
+Relations of Epic to historical fact 22
+
+The epic poet is free in the conduct of his story 23
+ but his story and personages must belong to his own
+ people 26
+
+Nature of Epic brought out by contrast with secondary narrative
+poems, where the subject is not national 27
+
+This secondary kind of poem may be excellent, but is always
+different in character from native Epic 28
+
+Disputes of academic critics about the "Epic Poem" 30
+
+Tasso's defence of Romance. Pedantic attempts to restrict
+the compass of Epic 30
+
+Bossu on Phaeacia 31
+
+Epic, as the most comprehensive kind of poetry, includes
+Romance as one of its elements 32
+ but needs a strong dramatic imagination to keep Romance
+ under control 33
+
+III
+
+ROMANTIC MYTHOLOGY
+
+Mythology not required in the greatest scenes in Homer 35
+
+Myths and popular fancies may be a hindrance to the epic
+poet, but he is compelled to make some use of them 36
+
+He criticises and selects, and allows the characters of the gods
+to be modified in relation to the human characters 37
+
+Early humanism and reflexion on myth--two processes: (1)
+rejection of the grosser myths; (2) refinement of myth
+through poetry 40
+
+Two ways of refining myth in poetry--(1) by turning it into
+mere fancy, and the more ludicrous things into comedy;
+(2) by finding an imaginative or an ethical meaning in it 40
+
+Instances in Icelandic literature--_Lokasenna_ 41
+
+Snorri Sturluson, his ironical method in the _Edda_ 42
+
+The old gods rescued from clerical persecution 43
+
+Imaginative treatment of the graver myths--the death of
+Balder; the Doom of the Gods 43
+
+Difficulties in the attainment of poetical self-command 44
+
+Medieval confusion and distraction 45
+
+Premature "culture" 46
+
+Depreciation of native work in comparison with ancient
+literature and with theology 47
+
+An Icelandic gentleman's library 47
+
+The whalebone casket 48
+
+Epic not wholly stifled by "useful knowledge" 49
+
+IV
+
+THE THREE SCHOOLS--TEUTONIC EPIC--FRENCH EPIC--THE
+ICELANDIC HISTORIES
+
+Early failure of Epic among the Continental Germans 50
+
+Old English Epic invaded by Romance (Lives of Saints, etc.) 50
+
+Old Northern (Icelandic) poetry full of romantic mythology 51
+
+French Epic and Romance contrasted 51
+
+Feudalism in the old French Epic (_Chansons de Geste_) not
+unlike the prefeudal "heroic age" 52
+
+But the _Chansons de Geste_ are in many ways "romantic" 53
+
+Comparison of the English _Song of Byrhtnoth_ (_Maldon_, A.D.
+991) with the _Chanson de Roland_ 54
+
+Severity and restraint of _Byrhtnoth_ 55
+
+Mystery and pathos of _Roland_ 56
+
+Iceland and the German heroic age 57
+
+The Icelandic paradox--old-fashioned politics together with
+clear understanding 58
+
+Icelandic prose literature--its subject, the anarchy of the
+heroic age; its methods, clear and positive 59
+
+The Icelandic histories, in prose, complete the development
+of the early Teutonic Epic poetry 60
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE TEUTONIC EPIC
+
+I
+
+THE TRAGIC CONCEPTION
+
+Early German poetry 65
+
+One of the first things certain about it is that it knew the
+meaning of tragic situations 66
+
+The _Death of Ermanaric_ in Jordanes 66
+
+The story of _Alboin_ in Paulus Diaconus 66
+
+Tragic plots in the extant poems 69
+
+The _Death of Ermanaric_ in the "Poetic Edda" (_Hamđismál_) 70
+
+Some of the Northern poems show the tragic conception
+modified by romantic motives, yet without loss of the
+tragic purport--_Helgi and Sigrun_ 72
+
+Similar harmony of motives in the _Waking of Angantyr_ 73
+
+Whatever may be wanting, the heroic poetry had no want of
+tragic plots--the "fables" are sound 74
+
+Value of the abstract plot (Aristotle) 74
+
+II
+
+SCALE OF THE POEMS
+
+List of extant poems and fragments in one or other of
+the older Teutonic languages (German, English, and
+Northern) in unrhymed alliterative verse 76
+
+Small amount of the extant poetry 78
+
+Supplemented in various ways 79
+
+1. THE WESTERN GROUP (German and English) 79
+
+Amount of story contained in the several poems, and scale
+of treatment 79
+
+_Hildebrand_, a short story 80
+
+_Finnesburh_, (1) the Lambeth fragment (Hickes); and (2)
+the abstract of the story in _Beowulf_ 81
+
+_Finnesburh_, a story of (1) wrong and (2) vengeance, like the
+story of the death of Attila, or of the betrayal of Roland 82
+
+Uncertainty as to the compass of the _Finnesburh_ poem
+(Lambeth) in its original complete form 84
+
+_Waldere_, two fragments: the story of Walter of Aquitaine
+preserved in the Latin _Waltharius_ 84
+
+Plot of _Waltharius_ 84
+
+Place of the _Waldere_ fragments in the story, and probable
+compass of the whole poem 86
+
+Scale of _Maldon_ 88
+ and of _Beowulf_ 89
+
+General resemblance in the themes of these poems--unity of
+action 89
+
+Development of style, and not neglect of unity nor multiplication
+of contents, accounts for the difference of length
+between earlier and later poems 91
+
+Progress of Epic in England--unlike the history of Icelandic
+poetry 92
+
+2. THE NORTHERN GROUP 93
+
+The contents of the so-called "Elder Edda" (_i.e._ _Codex
+Regius_ 2365, 4to _Havn_.) 93
+ to what extent _Epic_ 93
+
+Notes on the contents of the poems, to show their scale; the
+_Lay of Weland_ 94
+
+Different plan in the _Lays of Thor_, _Ţrymskviđa_ and _Hymiskviđa_ 95
+
+The _Helgi_ Poems--complications of the text 95
+
+Three separate stories--_Helgi Hundingsbane and Sigrun_ 95
+
+_Helgi Hiorvardsson and Swava_ 98
+
+_Helgi and Kara_ (lost) 99
+
+The story of the Volsungs--the long _Lay of Brynhild_ 100
+ contains the whole story in abstract 100
+ giving the chief place to the character of _Brynhild_ 101
+
+The _Hell-ride of Brynhild_ 102
+
+The fragmentary _Lay of Brynhild_ (_Brot af Sigurđarkviđu_) 103
+
+Poems on the death of Attila--the _Lay of Attila_ (_Atlakviđa_),
+and the Greenland _Poem of Attila_ (_Atlamál_) 105
+
+Proportions of the story 105
+
+A third version of the story in the _Lament of Oddrun_
+(_Oddrúnargrátr_) 107
+
+The _Death of Ermanaric_ (_Hamđismál_) 109
+
+The Northern idylls of the heroines (Oddrun, Gudrun)--the
+_Old Lay of Gudrun_, or Gudrun's story to Theodoric 109
+
+The _Lay of Gudrun_ (_Guđrúnarkviđa_)--Gudrun's sorrow for
+Sigurd 111
+
+The refrain 111
+
+Gudrun's _Chain of Woe_ (_Tregrof Guđrúnar_) 111
+
+The _Ordeal of Gudrun_, an episodic lay 111
+
+Poems in dialogue, without narrative--
+ (1) Dialogues in the common epic measure--_Balder's
+ Doom_, Dialogues of _Sigurd_, _Angantyr_--explanations in
+ prose, between the dialogues 112
+ (2) Dialogues in the gnomic or elegiac measure:
+ (_a_) vituperative debates--_Lokasenna_,
+ _Harbarzlióđ_ (in irregular verse), _Atli and Rimgerd_ 112
+ (_b_) Dialogues implying action--_The Wooing of Frey_
+ (_Skírnismál_) 114
+
+_Svipdag and Menglad_ (_Grógaldr_, _Fiölsvinnsmál_) 114
+
+The _Volsung_ dialogues 115
+
+The Western and Northern poems compared, with respect
+to their scale 116
+
+The old English poems (_Beowulf_, _Waldere_), in scale, midway
+between the Northern poems and Homer 117
+
+Many of the Teutonic epic remains may look like the "short
+lays" of the agglutinative epic theory; but this is illusion 117
+
+Two kinds of story in Teutonic Epic--(1) episodic, _i.e._
+representing a single action (_Hildebrand_, etc.); (2) summary,
+_i.e._ giving the whole of a long story in abstract,
+with details of one part of it (_Weland_, etc.) 118
+
+The second class is unfit for agglutination 119
+
+Also the first, when it is looked into 121
+
+The Teutonic Lays are too individual to be conveniently
+fused into larger masses of narrative 122
+
+III
+
+EPIC AND BALLAD POETRY
+
+Many of the old epic lays are on the scale of popular ballads 123
+
+Their style is different 124
+
+As may be proved where later ballads have taken up the epic
+subjects 125
+
+The Danish ballads of _Ungen Sveidal_ (_Svipdag and Menglad_) 126
+ and of _Sivard_ (_Sigurd and Brynhild_) 127
+
+The early epic poetry, unlike the ballads, was ambitious and
+capable of progress 129
+
+IV
+
+THE STYLE OF THE POEMS
+
+Rhetorical art of the alliterative verse 133
+
+English and Norse 134
+
+Different besetting temptations in England and the North 136
+
+English tameness; Norse emphasis and false wit (the Scaldic
+poetry) 137
+
+Narrative poetry undeveloped in the North; unable to compete
+with the lyrical forms 137
+
+Lyrical element in Norse narrative 138
+
+_Volospá_, the greatest of all the Northern poems 139
+
+False heroics; _Krákumál_ (_Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrok_) 140
+
+A fresh start, in prose, with no rhetorical encumbrances 141
+
+V
+
+THE PROGRESS OF EPIC
+
+Various renderings of the same story due (1) to accidents of
+tradition and impersonal causes; (2) to calculation and
+selection of motives by poets, and intentional modification
+of traditional matter 144
+
+The three versions of the death of Gunnar and Hogni
+compared--_Atlakviđa_, _Atlamál_, _Oddrúnargrátr_ 147
+
+Agreement of the three poems in ignoring the German theory
+of Kriemhild's revenge 149
+
+The incidents of the death of Hogni clear in _Atlakviđa_,
+apparently confused and ill recollected in the other two
+poems 150
+
+But it turns out that these two poems had each a view of its
+own which made it impossible to use the original story 152
+
+_Atlamál_, the work of a critical author, making his selection
+of incidents from heroic tradition 153
+ the largest epic work in Northern poetry, and the last of
+ its school 155
+
+The "Poetic Edda," a collection of deliberate experiments
+in poetry and not of casual popular variants 156
+
+VI
+
+_BEOWULF_
+
+_Beowulf_ claims to be a single complete work 158
+
+Want of unity: a story and a sequel 159
+
+More unity in _Beowulf_ than in some Greek epics. The first
+2200 lines form a complete story, not ill composed 160
+
+Homeric method of episodes and allusions in _Beowulf_ 162
+ and _Waldere_ 163
+
+Triviality of the main plot in both parts of _Beowulf_--tragic
+significance in some of the allusions 165
+
+The characters in _Beowulf_ abstract types 165
+
+The adventures and sentiments commonplace, especially in
+the fight with the dragon 168
+
+Adventure of Grendel not pure fantasy 169
+
+Grendel's mother more romantic 172
+
+_Beowulf_ is able to give epic dignity to a commonplace set of
+romantic adventures 173
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE ICELANDIC SAGAS
+
+I
+
+ICELAND AND THE HEROIC AGE
+
+The close of Teutonic Epic--in Germany the old forms were
+lost, but not the old stories, in the later Middle Ages 179
+
+England kept the alliterative verse through the Middle
+Ages 180
+
+Heroic themes in Danish ballads, and elsewhere 181
+
+Place of Iceland in the heroic tradition--a new heroic literature
+in prose 182
+
+II
+
+MATTER AND FORM
+
+The Sagas are not pure fiction 184
+
+Difficulty of giving form to genealogical details 185
+
+Miscellaneous incidents 186
+
+Literary value of the historical basis--the characters well
+known and recognisable 187
+
+The coherent Sagas--the tragic motive 189
+
+Plan of _Njála_ 190
+ of _Laxdćla_ 191
+ of _Egils Saga_ 192
+
+_Vápnfirđinga Saga_, a story of two generations 193
+
+_Víga-Glúms Saga_, a biography without tragedy 193
+
+_Reykdćla Saga_ 194
+
+_Grettis Saga_ and _Gísla Saga_ clearly worked out 195
+
+Passages of romance in these histories 196
+
+_Hrafnkels Saga Freysgođa_, a tragic idyll, well proportioned 198
+
+Great differences of scale among the Sagas--analogies with
+the heroic poems 198
+
+III
+
+THE HEROIC IDEAL
+
+Unheroic matters of fact in the Sagas 200
+
+Heroic characters 201
+
+Heroic rhetoric 203
+
+Danger of exaggeration--Kjartan in _Laxdćla_ 204
+
+The heroic ideal not made too explicit or formal 206
+
+IV
+
+TRAGIC IMAGINATION
+
+Tragic contradictions in the Sagas--_Gisli_, _Njal_ 207
+
+Fantasy 208
+
+_Laxdćla_, a reduction of the story of Sigurd and Brynhild to
+the terms of common life 209
+
+Compare Ibsen's _Warriors in Helgeland_ 209
+
+The Sagas are a late stage in the progress of heroic literature 210
+
+The Northern rationalism 212
+
+Self-restraint and irony 213
+
+The elegiac mood infrequent 215
+
+The story of Howard of Icefirth--ironical pathos 216
+
+The conventional Viking 218
+
+The harmonies of _Njála_ 219
+ and of _Laxdćla_ 222
+
+The two speeches of Gudrun 223
+
+V
+
+COMEDY
+
+The Sagas not bound by solemn conventions 225
+
+Comic humours 226
+
+Bjorn and his wife in _Njála_ 228
+
+_Bandamanna Saga_: "The Confederates," a comedy 229
+
+Satirical criticism of the "heroic age" 231
+
+Tragic incidents in _Bandamanna Saga_ 233
+
+Neither the comedy nor tragedy of the Sagas is monotonous
+or abstract 234
+
+VI
+
+THE ART OF NARRATIVE
+
+Organic unity of the best Sagas 235
+
+Method of representing occurrences as they appear at the
+time 236
+
+Instance from _Ţorgils Saga_ 238
+
+Another method--the death of Kjartan as it appeared to a
+churl 240
+
+Psychology (not analytical) 244
+
+Impartiality--justice to the hero's adversaries (_Fćreyinga
+Saga_) 245
+
+VII
+
+EPIC AND HISTORY
+
+Form of Saga used for contemporary history in the thirteenth
+century 246
+
+The historians, Ari (1067-1148) and Snorri (1178-1241) 248
+
+The _Life of King Sverre_, by Abbot Karl Jónsson 249
+
+Sturla (_c._ 1214-1284), his history of Iceland in his own time
+(_Islendinga_ or _Sturlunga Saga_) 249
+
+The matter ready to his hand 250
+
+Biographies incorporated in _Sturlunga_: Thorgils and Haflidi 252
+
+_Sturlu Saga_ 253
+
+The midnight raid (A.D. 1171) 254
+
+Lives of Bishop Gudmund, Hrafn, and Aron 256
+
+Sturla's own work (_Islendinga Saga_) 257
+
+The burning of Flugumyri 259
+
+Traces of the heroic manner 264
+
+The character of this history brought out by contrast with
+Sturla's other work, the _Life of King Hacon of Norway_ 267
+
+Norwegian and Icelandic politics in the thirteenth century 267
+
+Norway more fortunate than Iceland--the history less
+interesting 267
+
+Sturla and Joinville contemporaries 269
+
+Their methods of narrative compared 270
+
+VIII
+
+THE NORTHERN PROSE ROMANCES
+
+Romantic interpolations in the Sagas--the ornamental
+version of _Fóstbrćđra Saga_ 275
+
+The secondary romantic Sagas--_Frithiof_ 277
+
+French romance imported (_Strengleikar_, _Tristram's Saga_,
+etc.) 278
+
+Romantic Sagas made out of heroic poems (_Volsunga Saga_,
+etc.) 279
+ and out of authentic Sagas by repetition of common forms
+ and motives 280
+
+Romantic conventions in the original Sagas 280
+
+_Laxdćla_ and _Gunnlaug's Saga_--_Thorstein the White_ 281
+
+_Thorstein Staffsmitten_ 282
+
+Sagas turned into rhyming romances (_Rímur_) 283
+ and into ballads in the Faroes 284
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE OLD FRENCH EPIC
+
+(_CHANSONS DE GESTE_)
+
+Lateness of the extant versions 287
+
+Competition of Epic and Romance in the twelfth century 288
+
+Widespread influence of the _Chansons de geste_--a contrast to
+the Sagas 289
+
+Narrative style 290
+
+No obscurities of diction 291
+
+The "heroic age" imperfectly represented 292
+ but not ignored 293
+
+_Roland_--heroic idealism--France and Christendom 293
+
+William of Orange--_Aliscans_ 296
+
+Rainouart--exaggeration of heroism 296
+
+Another class of stories in the _Chansons de geste_, more like
+the Sagas 297
+
+_Raoul de Cambrai_ 298
+
+Barbarism of style 299
+
+_Garin le Loherain_--style clarified 300
+
+Problems of character--Fromont 301
+
+The story of the death of Begon 302
+ unlike contemporary work of the Romantic School 304
+
+The lament for Begon 307
+
+_Raoul_ and _Garin_ contrasted with _Roland_ 308
+
+Comedy in French Epic--"humours" in _Garin_ 310
+ in the _Coronemenz Looďs_, etc. 311
+
+Romantic additions to heroic cycles--_la Prise d'Orange_ 313
+
+_Huon de Bordeaux_--the original story grave and tragic 314
+ converted to Romance 314
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+ROMANCE AND THE OLD FRENCH ROMANTIC
+SCHOOLS
+
+Romance an element in Epic and Tragedy apart from all
+"romantic schools" 321
+
+The literary movements of the twelfth century 322
+
+A new beginning 323
+
+The Romantic School unromantic in its methods 324
+
+Professional Romance 325
+
+Characteristics of the school--courteous sentiment 328
+
+Decorative passages--descriptions--pedantry 329
+
+Instances from _Roman de Troie_ 330
+ and from _Ider_, etc. 331
+
+Romantic adventures--the "matter of Rome" and the
+"matter of Britain" 334
+
+Blending of classical and Celtic influences--_e.g._ in Benoit's
+_Medea_ 334
+
+Methods of narrative--simple, as in the _Lay of Guingamor_;
+overloaded, as in _Walewein_ 337
+
+_Guingamor_ 338
+
+_Walewein_, a popular tale disguised as a chivalrous romance 340
+
+The different versions of _Libeaux Desconus_--one of them is
+sophisticated 343
+
+_Tristram_--the Anglo-Norman poems comparatively simple
+and ingenuous 344
+
+French Romance and Provençal Lyric 345
+
+Ovid in the Middle Ages--the _Art of Love_ 346
+
+The Heroines 347
+
+Benoit's _Medea_ again 348
+
+Chrestien of Troyes, his place at the beginning of modern
+literature 349
+
+'Enlightenment' in the Romantic School 350
+
+The sophists of Romance--the rhetoric of sentiment and
+passion 351
+
+The progress of Romance from medieval to modern literature 352
+
+Chrestien of Troyes, his inconsistencies--nature and convention 352
+
+Departure from conventional romance; Chrestien's _Enid_ 355
+
+Chrestien's _Cliges_--"sensibility" 357
+
+_Flamenca_, a Provençal story of the thirteenth century--the
+author a follower of Chrestien 359
+
+His acquaintance with romantic literature 360
+ and rejection of the "machinery" of adventures 360
+
+_Flamenca_, an appropriation of Ovid--disappearance of
+romantic mythology 361
+
+The _Lady of Vergi_, a short tragic story without false rhetoric 362
+
+Use of medieval themes by the great poets of the fourteenth
+century 363
+
+Boccaccio and Chaucer--the _Teseide_ and the _Knight's Tale_ 364
+
+Variety of Chaucer's methods 364
+
+Want of art in the _Man of Law's Tale_ 365
+
+The abstract point of honour (_Clerk's Tale_, _Franklin's Tale_) 366
+
+Pathos in the _Legend of Good Women_ 366
+
+Romantic method perfect in the _Knight's Tale_ 366
+
+_Anelida_, the abstract form of romance 367
+
+In _Troilus and Criseyde_ the form of medieval romance is
+filled out with strong dramatic imagination 367
+
+Romance obtains the freedom of Epic, without the old local
+and national limitations of Epic 368
+
+Conclusion 370
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+Note A--Rhetoric of the Alliterative Poetry 373
+
+Note B--Kjartan and Olaf Tryggvason 375
+
+Note C--Eyjolf Karsson 381
+
+Note D--Two Catalogues of Romances 384
+
+
+INDEX 391
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+I
+
+THE HEROIC AGE
+
+The title of Epic, or of "heroic poem," is claimed by historians for a
+number of works belonging to the earlier Middle Ages, and to the
+medieval origins of modern literature. "Epic" is a term freely applied
+to the old school of Germanic narrative poetry, which in different
+dialects is represented by the poems of Hildebrand, of Beowulf, of
+Sigurd and Brynhild. "Epic" is the name for the body of old French
+poems which is headed by the _Chanson de Roland_. The rank of Epic is
+assigned by many to the _Nibelungenlied_, not to speak of other Middle
+High German poems on themes of German tradition. The title of prose
+Epic has been claimed for the Sagas of Iceland.
+
+By an equally common consent the name Romance is given to a number of
+kinds of medieval narrative by which the Epic is succeeded and
+displaced; most notably in France, but also in other countries which
+were led, mainly by the example and influence of France, to give up
+their own "epic" forms and subjects in favour of new manners.
+
+This literary classification corresponds in general history to the
+difference between the earlier "heroic" age and the age of chivalry.
+The "epics" of Hildebrand and Beowulf belong, if not wholly to German
+heathendom, at any rate to the earlier and prefeudal stage of German
+civilisation. The French epics, in their extant form, belong for the
+most part in spirit, if not always in date, to an order of things
+unmodified by the great changes of the twelfth century. While among
+the products of the twelfth century one of the most remarkable is the
+new school of French romance, the brilliant and frequently
+vainglorious exponent of the modern ideas of that age, and of all its
+chivalrous and courtly fashions of thought and sentiment. The
+difference of the two orders of literature is as plain as the
+difference in the art of war between the two sides of the battle of
+Hastings, which indeed is another form of the same thing; for the
+victory of the Norman knights over the English axemen has more than a
+fanciful or superficial analogy to the victory of the new literature
+of chivalry over the older forms of heroic narrative. The history of
+those two orders of literature, of the earlier Epic kinds, followed by
+the various types of medieval Romance, is parallel to the general
+political history of the earlier and the later Middle Ages, and may do
+something to illustrate the general progress of the nations. The
+passage from the earlier "heroic" civilisation to the age of chivalry
+was not made without some contemporary record of the "form and
+pressure" of the times in the changing fashions of literature, and in
+successive experiments of the imagination.
+
+Whatever Epic may mean, it implies some weight and solidity; Romance
+means nothing, if it does not convey some notion of mystery and
+fantasy. A general distinction of this kind, whatever names may be
+used to render it, can be shown, in medieval literature, to hold good
+of the two large groups of narrative belonging to the earlier and the
+later Middle Ages respectively. Beowulf might stand for the one side,
+Lancelot or Gawain for the other. It is a difference not confined to
+literature. The two groups are distinguished from one another, as the
+respectable piratical gentleman of the North Sea coast in the ninth or
+tenth century differs from one of the companions of St. Louis. The
+latter has something fantastic in his ideas which the other has not.
+The Crusader may indeed be natural and brutal enough in most of his
+ways, but he has lost the sobriety and simplicity of the earlier type
+of rover. If nothing else, his way of fighting--the undisciplined
+cavalry charge--would convict him of extravagance as compared with men
+of business, like the settlers of Iceland for example.
+
+The two great kinds of narrative literature in the Middle Ages might
+be distinguished by their favourite incidents and commonplaces of
+adventure. No kind of adventure is so common or better told in the
+earlier heroic manner than the defence of a narrow place against odds.
+Such are the stories of Hamther and Sorli in the hall of Ermanaric, of
+the Niblung kings in the hall of Attila, of the Fight of Finnesburh,
+of Walter at the Wasgenstein, of Byrhtnoth at Maldon, of Roland in the
+Pyrenees. Such are some of the finest passages in the Icelandic Sagas:
+the death of Gunnar, the burning of Njal's house, the burning of
+Flugumyri (an authentic record), the last fight of Kjartan in
+Svinadal, and of Grettir at Drangey. The story of Cynewulf and
+Cyneheard in the English Chronicle may well have come from a poem in
+which an attack and defence of this sort were narrated.
+
+The favourite adventure of medieval romance is something different,--a
+knight riding alone through a forest; another knight; a shock of
+lances; a fight on foot with swords, "racing, tracing, and foining
+like two wild boars"; then, perhaps, recognition--the two knights
+belong to the same household and are engaged in the same quest.
+
+ Et Guivrez vers lui esperone,
+ De rien nule ne l'areisone,
+ Ne Erec ne li sona mot.
+
+ _Erec_, l. 5007.
+
+This collision of blind forces, this tournament at random, takes the
+place, in the French romances, of the older kind of combat. In the
+older kind the parties have always good reasons of their own for
+fighting; they do not go into it with the same sort of readiness as
+the wandering champions of romance.
+
+The change of temper and fashion represented by the appearance and the
+vogue of the medieval French romances is a change involving the whole
+world, and going far beyond the compass of literature and literary
+history. It meant the final surrender of the old ideas, independent of
+Christendom, which had been enough for the Germanic nations in their
+earlier days; it was the close of their heroic age. What the "heroic
+age" of the modern nations really was, may be learned from what is
+left of their heroic literature, especially from three groups or
+classes,--the old Teutonic alliterative poems on native subjects; the
+French _Chansons de Geste_; and the Icelandic Sagas.
+
+All these three orders, whatever their faults may be, do something to
+represent a society which is "heroic" as the Greeks in Homer are
+heroic. There can be no mistake about the likeness. To compare the
+imaginations and the phrases of any of these barbarous works with the
+poetry of Homer may be futile, but their contents may be compared
+without reference to their poetical qualities; and there is no
+question that the life depicted has many things in common with Homeric
+life, and agrees with Homer in ignorance of the peculiar ideas of
+medieval chivalry.
+
+The form of society in an heroic age is aristocratic and magnificent.
+At the same time, this aristocracy differs from that of later and more
+specialised forms of civilisation. It does not make an insuperable
+difference between gentle and simple. There is not the extreme
+division of labour that produces the contempt of the lord for the
+villain. The nobles have not yet discovered for themselves any form of
+occupation or mode of thought in virtue of which they are widely
+severed from the commons, nor have they invented any such ideal of
+life or conventional system of conduct as involves an ignorance or
+depreciation of the common pursuits of those below them. They have no
+such elaborate theory of conduct as is found in the chivalrous society
+of the Middle Ages. The great man is the man who is best at the things
+with which every one is familiar. The epic hero may despise the
+churlish man, may, like Odysseus in the _Iliad_ (ii. 198), show little
+sympathy or patience with the bellowings of the multitude, but he may
+not ostentatiously refuse all community of ideas with simple people.
+His magnificence is not defended by scruples about everything low. It
+would not have mattered to Odysseus if he had been seen travelling in
+a cart, like Lancelot; though for Lancelot it was a great misfortune
+and anxiety. The art and pursuits of a gentleman in the heroic age are
+different from those of the churl, but not so far different as to keep
+them in different spheres. There is a community of prosaic interests.
+The great man is a good judge of cattle; he sails his own ship.
+
+A gentleman adventurer on board his own ship, following out his own
+ideas, carrying his men with him by his own power of mind and temper,
+and not by means of any system of naval discipline to which he as well
+as they must be subordinate; surpassing his men in skill, knowledge,
+and ambition, but taking part with them and allowing them to take part
+in the enterprise, is a good representative of the heroic age. This
+relation between captain and men may be found, accidentally and
+exceptionally, in later and more sophisticated forms of society. In
+the heroic age a relation between a great man and his followers
+similar to that between an Elizabethan captain and his crew is found
+to be the most important and fundamental relation in society. In later
+times it is only by a special favour of circumstances, as for example
+by the isolation of shipboard from all larger monarchies, that the
+heroic relation between the leader and the followers can be repeated.
+As society becomes more complex and conventional, this relation
+ceases. The homeliness of conversation between Odysseus and his
+vassals, or between Njal and Thord Freedman's son, is discouraged by
+the rules of courtly behaviour as gentlefolk become more idle and
+ostentatious, and their vassals more sordid and dependent. The secrets
+also of political intrigue and dexterity made a difference between
+noble and villain, in later and more complex medieval politics, such
+as is unknown in the earlier days and the more homely forms of
+Society. An heroic age may be full of all kinds of nonsense and
+superstition, but its motives of action are mainly positive and
+sensible,--cattle, sheep, piracy, abduction, merchandise, recovery of
+stolen goods, revenge. The narrative poetry of an heroic age, whatever
+dignity it may obtain either by its dramatic force of imagination, or
+by the aid of its mythology, will keep its hold upon such common
+matters, simply because it cannot do without the essential practical
+interests, and has nothing to put in their place, if kings and chiefs
+are to be represented at all. The heroic age cannot dress up ideas or
+sentiments to play the part of characters. If its characters are not
+men they are nothing, not even thoughts or allegories; they cannot go
+on talking unless they have something to do; and so the whole business
+of life comes bodily into the epic poem.
+
+How much the matter of the Northern heroic literature resembles the
+Homeric, may be felt and recognised at every turn in a survey of the
+ground. In both there are the _ashen spears_; there are the _shepherds
+of the people_; the retainers bound by loyalty to the prince who gives
+them meat and drink; the great hall with its minstrelsy, its boasting
+and bickering; the battles which are a number of single combats, while
+"physiology supplies the author with images"[1] for the same; the
+heroic rule of conduct ([Greek: iomen])[2]; the eminence of the hero,
+and at the same time his community of occupation and interest with
+those who are less distinguished.
+
+[Footnote 1: Johnson on the Epic Poem (_Life of Milton_).]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Il._ xii. 328.]
+
+There are other resemblances also, but some of these are miraculous,
+and perhaps irrelevant. By what magic is it that the cry of Odysseus,
+wounded and hard bestead in his retreat before the Trojans, comes over
+us like the three blasts of the horn of Roland?
+
+ Thrice he shouted, as loud as the head of a man will bear;
+ and three times Menelaus heard the sound thereof, and
+ quickly he turned and spake to Ajax: "Ajax, there is come
+ about me the cry of Odysseus slow to yield; and it is like
+ as though the Trojans had come hard upon him by himself
+ alone, closing him round in the battle."[3]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Il._ xi. 462.]
+
+It is reported as a discovery made by Mephistopheles in Thessaly, in
+the classical _Walpurgisnacht_, that the company there was very much
+like his old acquaintances on the Brocken. A similar discovery, in
+regard to more honourable personages and other scenes, may be made by
+other Gothic travellers in a "south-eastward" journey to heroic
+Greece. The classical reader of the Northern heroics may be frequently
+disgusted by their failures; he may also be bribed, if not to applaud,
+at least to continue his study, by the glimmerings and "shadowy
+recollections," the affinities and correspondences between the Homeric
+and the Northern heroic world.
+
+Beowulf and his companions sail across the sea to Denmark on an errand
+of deliverance,--to cleanse the land of monsters. They are welcomed by
+Hrothgar, king of the Danes, and by his gentle queen, in a house less
+fortunate than the house of Alcinous, for it is exposed to the attacks
+of the lumpish ogre that Beowulf has to kill, but recalling in its
+splendour, in the manner of its entertainment, and the bearing of its
+gracious lord and lady, the house where Odysseus told his story.
+Beowulf, like Odysseus, is assailed by an envious person with
+discourteous words. Hunferth, the Danish courtier, is irritated by
+Beowulf's presence; "he could not endure that any one should be
+counted worthier than himself"; he speaks enviously, a biting
+speech--[Greek: thymodakęs gar mythos]--and is answered in the tone of
+Odysseus to Euryalus.[4] Beowulf has a story to tell of his former
+perils among the creatures of the sea. It is differently introduced
+from that of Odysseus, and has not the same importance, but it
+increases the likeness between the two adventurers.
+
+[Footnote 4: _Od._ viii. 165.]
+
+In the shadowy halls of the Danish king a minstrel sings of the
+famous deeds of men, and his song is given as an interlude in the main
+action. It is a poem on that same tragedy of Finnesburh, which is the
+theme of a separate poem in the Old English heroic cycle; so Demodocus
+took his subjects from the heroic cycle of Achaea. The leisure of the
+Danish king's house is filled in the same manner as the leisure of
+Phaeacia. In spite of the difference of the climate, it is impossible
+to mistake the likeness between the Greek and the Northern conceptions
+of a dignified and reasonable way of life. The magnificence of the
+Homeric great man is like the magnificence of the Northern lord, in so
+far as both are equally marked off from the pusillanimity and
+cheapness of popular morality on the one hand, and from the
+ostentation of Oriental or chivalrous society on the other. The
+likeness here is not purely in the historical details, but much more
+in the spirit that informs the poetry.
+
+If this part of _Beowulf_ is a Northern _Odyssey_, there is nothing in
+the whole range of English literature so like a scene from the _Iliad_
+as the narrative of Maldon. It is a battle in which the separate deeds
+of the fighters are described, with not quite so much anatomy as in
+Homer. The fighting about the body of Byrhtnoth is described as
+strongly, as "the Fighting at the Wall" in the twelfth book of the
+_Iliad_, and essentially in the same way, with the interchange of
+blows clearly noted, together with the speeches and thoughts of the
+combatants. Even the most heroic speech in Homer, even the power of
+Sarpedon's address to Glaucus in the twelfth book of the _Iliad_,
+cannot discredit, by comparison, the heroism and the sublimity of the
+speech of the "old companion" at the end of _Maldon_. The language is
+simple, but it is not less adequate in its own way than the
+simplicity of Sarpedon's argument. It states, perhaps more clearly and
+absolutely than anything in Greek, the Northern principle of
+resistance to all odds, and defiance of ruin. In the North the
+individual spirit asserts itself more absolutely against the bodily
+enemies than in Greece; the defiance is made wholly independent of any
+vestige of prudent consideration; the contradiction, "Thought the
+harder, Heart the keener, Mood the more, as our Might lessens," is
+stated in the most extreme terms. This does not destroy the
+resemblance between the Greek and the Northern ideal, or between the
+respective forms of representation.
+
+The creed of Maldon is that of Achilles:[5] "Xanthus, what need is
+there to prophesy of death? Well do I know that it is my doom to
+perish here, far from my father and mother; but for all that I will
+not turn back, until I give the Trojans their fill of war." The
+difference is that in the English case the strain is greater, the
+irony deeper, the antithesis between the spirit and the body more
+paradoxical.
+
+[Footnote 5: _Il._ xix. 420.]
+
+Where the centre of life is a great man's house, and where the most
+brilliant society is that which is gathered at his feast, where
+competitive boasting, story-telling, and minstrelsy are the principal
+intellectual amusements, it is inevitable that these should find their
+way into a kind of literature which has no foundation except
+experience and tradition. Where fighting is more important than
+anything else in active life, and at the same time is carried on
+without organisation or skilled combinations, it is inevitable that it
+should be described as it is in the _Iliad_, the _Song of Maldon_ and
+_Song of Roland_, and the Icelandic Sagas, as a series of personal
+encounters, in which every stroke is remembered. From this early
+aristocratic form of society, there is derived in one age the
+narrative of life at Ithaca or of the navigation of Odysseus, in
+another the representation of the household of Njal or of Olaf the
+Peacock, and of the rovings of Olaf Tryggvason and other captains.
+There is an affinity between these histories in virtue of something
+over and above the likeness in the conditions of things they describe.
+There is a community of literary sense as well as of historical
+conditions, in the record of Achilles and Kjartan Olafsson, of
+Odysseus and Njal.
+
+The circumstances of an heroic age may be found in numberless times
+and places, in the history of the world. Among its accompaniments will
+be generally found some sort of literary record of sentiments and
+imaginations; but to find an heroic literature of the highest order is
+not so easy. Many nations instead of an _Iliad_ or an _Odyssey_ have
+had to make shift with conventional repetitions of the praise of
+chieftains, without any story; many have had to accept from their
+story-tellers all sorts of monstrous adventures in place of the
+humanities of debate and argument. Epic literature is not common; it
+is brought to perfection by a slow process through many generations.
+The growth of Epic out of the older and commoner forms of poetry,
+hymns, dirges, or panegyrics, is a progress towards intellectual and
+imaginative freedom. Few nations have attained, at the close of their
+heroic age, to a form of poetical art in which men are represented
+freely in action and conversation. The labour and meditation of all
+the world has not discovered, for the purposes of narrative, any
+essential modification of the procedure of Homer. Those who are
+considered reformers and discoverers in later times--Chaucer,
+Cervantes, Fielding--are discoverers merely of the old devices of
+dramatic narration which were understood by Homer and described after
+him by Aristotle.
+
+The growth of Epic, in the beginning of the history of the modern
+nations, has been generally thwarted and stunted. It cannot be said of
+many of the languages of the North and West of Europe that in them the
+epic form has come fully to its own, or has realised its proper
+nature. Many of them, however, have at least made a beginning. The
+history of the older German literature, and of old French, is the
+history of a great number of experiments in Epic; of attempts, that
+is, to represent great actions in narrative, with the personages well
+defined. These experiments are begun in the right way. They are not
+merely barbarous nor fantastic. They are different also from such
+traditional legends and romances as may survive among simple people
+long after the day of their old glories and their old kings. The poems
+of _Beowulf_ and _Waldere_, of _Roland_ and _William of Orange_, are
+intelligible and reasonable works, determined in the main by the same
+essential principles of narrative art, and of dramatic conversation
+within the narrative, as are observed in the practice of Homer.
+Further, these are poems in which, as in the Homeric poems, the ideas
+of their time are conveyed and expressed in a noble manner: they are
+high-spirited poems. They have got themselves clear of the confusion
+and extravagance of early civilisation, and have hit upon a way of
+telling a story clearly and in proportion, and with dignity. They are
+epic in virtue of their superiority to the more fantastic motives of
+interest, and in virtue of their study of human character. They are
+heroic in the nobility of their temper and their style. If at any time
+they indulge in heroic commonplaces of sentiment, they do so without
+insincerity or affectation, as the expression of the general temper or
+opinion of their own time. They are not separated widely from the
+matters of which they treat; they are not antiquarian revivals of past
+forms, nor traditional vestiges of things utterly remote and separate
+from the actual world. What art they may possess is different from the
+"rude sweetness" of popular ballads, and from the unconscious grace of
+popular tales. They have in different degrees and manners the form of
+epic poetry, in their own right. There are recognisable qualities that
+serve to distinguish even a fragment of heroic poetry from the ballads
+and romances of a lower order, however near these latter forms may
+approach at times to the epic dignity.
+
+
+II
+
+EPIC AND ROMANCE
+
+It is the nature of epic poetry to be at ease in regard to its subject
+matter, to be free from the strain and excitement of weaker and more
+abstract forms of poetry in dealing with heroic subjects. The heroic
+ideal of epic is not attained by a process of abstraction and
+separation from the meannesses of familiar things. The magnificence
+and aristocratic dignity of epic is conformable to the practical and
+ethical standards of the heroic age; that is to say, it tolerates a
+number of things that may be found mean and trivial by academicians.
+Epic poetry is one of the complex and comprehensive kinds of
+literature, in which most of the other kinds may be included--romance,
+history, comedy; _tragical_, _comical_, _historical_, _pastoral_ are
+terms not sufficiently various to denote the variety of the _Iliad_
+and the _Odyssey_.
+
+The "common life" of the Homeric poems may appeal to modern pedantic
+theorists, and be used by them in support of Euripidean or
+Wordsworthian receipts for literature. But the comprehensiveness of
+the greater kinds of poetry, of Homer and Shakespeare, is a different
+thing from the premeditated and self-assertive realism of the authors
+who take viciously to common life by way of protest against the
+romantic extreme. It has its origin, not in a critical theory about
+the proper matter of literature, but in dramatic imagination. In an
+epic poem where the characters are vividly imagined, it follows
+naturally that their various moods and problems involve a variety of
+scenery and properties, and so the whole business of life comes into
+the story.
+
+The success of epic poetry depends on the author's power of imagining
+and representing characters. A kind of success and a kind of
+magnificence may be attained in stories, professing to be epic, in
+which there is no dramatic virtue, in which every new scene and new
+adventure merely goes to accumulate, in immortal verse, the proofs of
+the hero's nullity and insignificance. This is not the epic poetry of
+the heroic ages.
+
+Aristotle, in his discussion of tragedy, chose to lay stress upon the
+plot, the story. On the other hand, to complete the paradox, in the
+epic he makes the characters all-important, not the story. Without the
+tragic plot or fable, the tragedy becomes a series of moral essays or
+monologues; the life of the drama is derived from the original idea of
+the fable which is its subject. Without dramatic representation of the
+characters, epic is mere history or romance; the variety and life of
+epic are to be found in the drama that springs up at every encounter
+of the personages.
+
+"Homer is the only poet who knows the right proportions of epic
+narrative; when to narrate, and when to let the characters speak for
+themselves. Other poets for the most part tell their story straight
+on, with scanty passages of drama and far between. Homer, with little
+prelude, leaves the stage to his personages, men and women, all with
+characters of their own."[6]
+
+[Footnote 6: [Greek: Homęros de alla te polla axios epaineisthai kai
+dę kai hoti monos tôn poiętôn ouk agnoei ho dei poiein auton. auton
+gar dei ton poiętęn elachista legein: ou gar esti kata tauta mimętęs.
+hoi men oun alloi autoi men di' holou agônizontai, mimountai de oliga
+kai oligakis: ho de oliga phroimiasamenos euthys eisagei andra ę
+gynaika ę allo ti ęthos kai ouden' aęthę all' echonta ęthę.]--ARIST.
+_Poet._ 1460 a 5.]
+
+Aristotle wrote with very little consideration for the people who were
+to come after him, and gives little countenance to such theories of
+epic as have at various times been prevalent among the critics, in
+which the dignity of the subject is insisted on. He does not imagine
+it the chief duty of an epic poet to choose a lofty argument for
+historical rhetoric. He does not say a word about the national or the
+ecumenical importance of the themes of the epic poet. His analysis of
+the plot of the _Odyssey_, but for the reference to Poseidon, might
+have been the description of a modern realistic story.
+
+"A man is abroad for many years, persecuted by Poseidon and alone;
+meantime the suitors of his wife are wasting his estate and plotting
+against his son; after many perils by sea he returns to his own
+country and discovers himself to his friends. He falls on his enemies
+and destroys them, and so comes to his own again."
+
+The _Iliad_ has more likeness than the _Odyssey_ to the common pattern
+of later sophisticated epics. But the war of Troy is not the subject
+of the _Iliad_ in the same way as the siege of Jerusalem is the
+subject of Tasso's poem. The story of the _Aeneid_ can hardly be told
+in the simplest form without some reference to the destiny of Rome, or
+the story of _Paradise Lost_ without the feud of heaven and hell. But
+in the _Iliad_, the assistance of the Olympians, or even the presence
+of the whole of Greece, is not in the same degree essential to the
+plot of the story of Achilles. In the form of Aristotle's summary of
+the _Odyssey_, reduced to "the cool element of prose," the _Iliad_
+may be proved to be something quite different from the common fashion
+of literary epics. It might go in something like this way:--
+
+"A certain man taking part in a siege is slighted by the general, and
+in his resentment withdraws from the war, though his own side is in
+great need of his help. His dearest friend having been killed by the
+enemy, he comes back into the action and takes vengeance for his
+friend, and allows himself to be reconciled."
+
+It is the debate among the characters, and not the onset of Hera and
+Athena in the chariot of Heaven, that gives its greatest power to the
+_Iliad_. The _Iliad_, with its "machines," its catalogue of the
+forces, its funeral games, has contributed more than the _Odyssey_ to
+the common pattern of manufactured epics. But the essence of the poem
+is not to be found among the Olympians. Achilles refusing the embassy
+or yielding to Priam has no need of the Olympian background. The poem
+is in a great degree independent of "machines"; its life is in the
+drama of the characters. The source of all its variety is the
+imagination by which the characters are distinguished; the liveliness
+and variety of the characters bring with them all the other kinds of
+variety.
+
+It is impossible for the author who knows his personages intimately to
+keep to any one exclusive mode of sentiment or one kind of scene. He
+cannot be merely tragical and heroic, or merely comical and pastoral;
+these are points of view to which those authors are confined who are
+possessed by one kind of sentiment or sensibility, and who wish to
+find expression for their own prevailing mood. The author who is
+interested primarily in his characters will not allow them to be
+obliterated by the story or by its diffused impersonal sentiment. The
+action of an heroic poem must be "of a certain magnitude," but the
+accessories need not be all heroic and magnificent; the heroes do not
+derive their magnificence from the scenery, the properties, and the
+author's rhetoric, but contrariwise: the dramatic force and
+self-consistency of the _dramatis personae_ give poetic value to any
+accessories of scenery or sentiment which may be required by the
+action. They are not figures "animating" a landscape; what the
+landscape means for the poet's audience is determined by the character
+of his personages.
+
+All the variety of epic is explained by Aristotle's remark on Homer.
+Where the characters are true, and dramatically represented, there can
+be no monotony.
+
+In the different kinds of Northern epic literature--German, English,
+French, and Norse--belonging to the Northern heroic ages, there will
+be found in different degrees this epic quality of drama. Whatever
+magnificence they may possess comes mainly from the dramatic strength
+of the heroes, and in a much less degree from the historic dignity or
+importance of the issues of the story, or from its mythological
+decorations.
+
+The place of history in the heroic poems belonging to an heroic age is
+sometimes misconceived. Early epic poetry may be concerned with great
+historic events. It does not necessarily emphasise--by preference it
+does not emphasise--the historic importance or the historic results of
+the events with which it deals. Heroic poetry implies an heroic age,
+an age of pride and courage, in which there is not any extreme
+organisation of politics to hinder the individual talent and its
+achievements, nor on the other hand too much isolation of the hero
+through the absence of any national or popular consciousness. There
+must be some unity of sentiment, some common standard of appreciation,
+among the people to whom the heroes belong, if they are to escape
+oblivion. But this common sentiment must not be such as to make the
+idea of the community and its life predominant over the individual
+genius of its members. In such a case there may be a Roman history,
+but not anything approaching the nature of the Homeric poems.
+
+In some epic poems belonging to an heroic age, and not to a time of
+self-conscious and reflective literature, there may be found general
+conceptions that seem to resemble those of the _Aeneid_ rather than
+those of the _Iliad_. In many of the old French _Chansons de Geste_,
+the war against the infidels is made the general subject of the story,
+and the general idea of the Holy War is expressed as fully as by
+Tasso. Here, however, the circumstances are exceptional. The French
+epic with all its Homeric analogies is not as sincere as Homer. It is
+exposed to the touch of influences from another world, and though many
+of the French poems, or great part of many of them, may tell of heroes
+who would be content with the simple and positive rules of the heroic
+life, this is not allowed them. They are brought within the sphere of
+other ideas, of another civilisation, and lose their independence.
+
+Most of the old German heroic poetry is clearly to be traced, as far
+as its subjects are concerned, to the most exciting periods in early
+German history, between the fourth and the sixth centuries. The names
+that seem to have been most commonly known to the poets are the names
+that are most important to the historian--Ermanaric, Attila,
+Theodoric. In the wars of the great migration the spirit of each of
+the German families was quickened, and at the same time the spirit of
+the whole of Germany, so that each part sympathised with all the rest,
+and the fame of the heroes went abroad beyond the limits of their own
+kindred. Ermanaric, Attila, and Theodoric, Sigfred the Frank, and
+Gundahari the Burgundian, are heroes over all the region occupied by
+all forms of Teutonic language. But although the most important period
+of early German history may be said to have produced the old German
+heroic poetry, by giving a number of heroes to the poets, at the same
+time that the imagination was stirred to appreciate great things and
+make the most of them, still the result is nothing like the patriotic
+epic in twelve books, the _Aeneid_ or the _Lusiad_, which chooses, of
+set purpose, the theme of the national glory. Nor is it like those old
+French epics in which there often appears a contradiction between the
+story of individual heroes, pursuing their own fortunes, and the idea
+of a common cause to which their own fortunes ought to be, but are not
+always, subordinate. The great historical names which appear in the
+old German heroic poetry are seldom found there in anything like their
+historical character, and not once in their chief historical aspect as
+adversaries of the Roman Empire. Ermanaric, Attila, and Theodoric are
+all brought into the same Niblung story, a story widely known in
+different forms, though it was never adequately written out. The true
+history of the war between the Burgundians and the Huns in the fifth
+century is forgotten. In place of it, there is associated with the
+life and death of Gundahari the Burgundian king a story which may have
+been vastly older, and may have passed through many different forms
+before it became the story of the Niblung treasure, of Sigfred and
+Brynhild. This, which has made free with so many great historical
+names, the name of Attila, the name of Theodoric, has little to do
+with history. In this heroic story coming out of the heroic age, there
+is not much that can be traced to historical as distinct from mythical
+tradition. The tragedy of the death of Attila, as told in the
+_Atlakviđa_ and the _Atlamál_, may indeed owe something to the facts
+recorded by historians, and something more to vaguer historical
+tradition of the vengeance of Rosamund on Alboin the Lombard. But, in
+the main, the story of the Niblungs is independent of history, in
+respect of its matter; in its meaning and effect as a poetical story
+it is absolutely free from history. It is a drama of personal
+encounters and rivalries. This also, like the story of Achilles, is
+fit for a stage in which the characters are left free to declare
+themselves in their own way, unhampered by any burden of history, any
+purpose or moral apart from the events that are played out in the
+dramatic clashing of one will against another.
+
+It is not vanity in an historian to look for the historical origin of
+the tale of Troy or of the vengeance of Gudrun; but no result in
+either case can greatly affect the intrinsic relations of the various
+elements within the poems. The relations of Achilles to his
+surroundings in the _Iliad_, of Attila and Ermanaric to theirs, are
+freely conceived by the several poets, and are intelligible at once,
+without reference to anything outside the poems. To require of the
+poetry of an heroic age that it shall recognise the historical meaning
+and importance of the events in which it originates, and the persons
+whose names it uses, is entirely to mistake the nature of it. Its
+nature is to find or make some drama played by kings and heroes, and
+to let the historical framework take care of itself. The connexion of
+epic poetry with history is real, and it is a fitting subject for
+historical inquiry, but it lies behind the scene. The epic poem is cut
+loose and set free from history, and goes on a way of its own.
+
+Epic magnificence and the dignity of heroic poetry may thus be only
+indirectly derived from such greatness or magnificence as is known to
+true prosaic history. The heroes, even if they can be identified as
+historical, may retain in epic nothing of their historical character,
+except such qualities as fit them for great actions. Their conduct in
+epic poetry may be very far unlike their actual demeanour in true
+history; their greatest works may be thrust into a corner of the epic,
+or barely alluded to, or left out altogether. Their greatness in epic
+may be quite a different kind of greatness from that of their true
+history and where there are many poems belonging to the same cycle
+there may be the greatest discrepancy among the views taken of the
+same hero by different authors, and all the views may be alike remote
+from the prosaic or scientific view. There is no constant or
+self-consistent opinion about the character of Charles the Emperor in
+old French poetry: there is one view in the _Chanson de Roland_,
+another in the _Pčlerinage_, another in the _Coronemenz Looďs_: none
+of the opinions is anything like an elaborate or detailed historical
+judgment. Attila, though he loses his political importance and most of
+his historical acquisitions in the Teutonic heroic poems in which he
+appears, may retain in some of them his ruthlessness and strength; at
+other times he may be a wise and peaceful king. All that is constant,
+or common, in the different poetical reports of him, is that he was
+great. What touches the mind of the poet out of the depths of the past
+is nothing but the tradition, undefined, of something lordly. This
+vagueness of tradition does not imply that tradition is impotent or
+barren; only that it leaves all the execution, the growth of detail,
+to the freedom of the poet. He is bound to the past, in one way; it is
+laid upon him to tell the stories of the great men of his own race.
+But in those stories, as they come to him, what is most lively is not
+a set and established series of incidents, true or false, but
+something to which the standards of truth and falsehood are scarcely
+applicable; something stirring him up to admiration, a compulsion or
+influence upon him requiring him to make the story again in his own
+way; not to interpret history, but to make a drama of his own, filled
+somehow with passion and strength of mind. It does not matter in what
+particular form it may be represented, so long as in some form or
+other the power of the national glory is allowed to pass into his
+work.
+
+This vagueness and generality in the relation of heroic poetry to the
+historical events and persons of an heroic age is of course quite a
+different thing from vagueness in the poetry itself. Gunther and
+Attila, Roland and Charlemagne, in poetry, are very vaguely connected
+with their antitypes in history; but that does not prevent them from
+being characterised minutely, if it should agree with the poet's taste
+or lie within his powers to have it so. The strange thing is that this
+vague relation should be so necessary to heroic poetry; that it should
+be impossible at any stage of literature or in any way by taking
+thought to make up for the want of it.
+
+The place of Gunther the Burgundian, Sigfred the Frank, and Attila the
+Hun, in the poetical stories of the Niblung treasure may be in one
+sense accidental. The fables of the treasure with a curse upon it, the
+killing of the dragon, the sleeping princess, the wavering flame, are
+not limited to this particular course of tradition, and, further, the
+traditional motives of the Niblung story have varied enormously not
+only in different countries, but in one and the same language at the
+same time. The story is never told alike by two narrators; what is
+common and essential in it is nothing palpable or fixed, but goes from
+poet to poet "like a shadow from dream to dream." And the historical
+names are apparently unessential; yet they remain. To look for the
+details of the Niblung story in the sober history of the Goths and
+Huns, Burgundians and Franks, is like the vanity confessed by the
+author of the _Roman de Rou_, when he went on a sentimental journey to
+Broceliande, and was disappointed to find there only the common
+daylight and nothing of the Faerie. Nevertheless it is the historical
+names, and the vague associations about them, that give to the Niblung
+story, not indeed the whole of its plot, but its temper, its pride and
+glory, its heroic and epic character.
+
+Heroic poetry is not, as a rule, greatly indebted to historical fact
+for its material. The epic poet does not keep record of the great
+victories or the great disasters. He cannot, however, live without the
+ideas and sentiments of heroism that spring up naturally in periods
+like those of the Teutonic migrations. In this sense the historic
+Gunther and Attila are necessary to the Niblung story. The wars and
+fightings of generation on generation went to create the heroism, the
+loftiness of spirit, expressed in the Teutonic epic verse. The plots
+of the stories may be commonplace, the common property of all popular
+tales. The temper is such as is not found everywhere, but only in
+historical periods of great energy. The names of Ermanaric and Attila
+correspond to hardly anything of literal history in the heroic poems;
+but they are the sign of conquests and great exploits that have gone
+to form character, though their details are forgotten.
+
+It may be difficult to appreciate and understand in detail this vague
+relation of epic poetry to the national life and to the renown of the
+national heroes, but the general fact is not less positive or less
+capable of verification than the date of the battle of Châlons, or the
+series of the Gothic vowels. All that is needed to prove this is to
+compare the poetry of a national cycle with the poetry that comes in
+its place when the national cycle is deserted for other heroes.
+
+The secondary or adopted themes may be treated with so much of the
+manner of the original poetry as to keep little of their foreign
+character. The rhetoric, the poetical habit, of the original epic may
+be retained. As in the Saxon poem on the Gospel history, the
+_Hęliand_, the twelve disciples may be represented as Thanes owing
+loyalty to their Prince, in common poetic terms befitting the men of
+Beowulf or Byrhtnoth. As in the French poems on Alexander the Great,
+Alexander may become a feudal king, and take over completely all that
+belongs to such a rank. There may be no consciousness of any need for
+a new vocabulary or a new mode of expression to fit the foreign
+themes. In France, it is true, there is a general distinction of form
+between the _Chansons de Geste_ and the romances; though to this there
+are exceptions, themes not French, and themes not purely heroic, being
+represented in the epic form. In the early Teutonic poetry there is no
+distinction of versification, vocabulary, or rhetoric between the
+original and the secondary narrative poems; the alliterative verse
+belongs to both kinds equally. Nor is it always the case that subjects
+derived from books or from abroad are handled with less firmness than
+the original and traditional plots. Though sometimes a prevailing
+affection for imported stories, for Celtic or Oriental legend, may be
+accompanied by a relaxation in the style, the superiority of national
+to foreign subjects is not always proved by greater strength or
+eloquence. Can it be said that the Anglo-Saxon _Judith_, for instance,
+is less heroic, less strong and sound, than the somewhat damaged and
+motley accoutrements of Beowulf?
+
+The difference is this, that the more original and native kind of epic
+has immediate association with all that the people know about
+themselves, with all their customs, all that part of their experience
+which no one can account for or refer to any particular source. A poem
+like _Beowulf_ can play directly on a thousand chords of association;
+the range of its appeal to the minds of an audience is almost
+unlimited; on no side is the poet debarred from freedom of movement,
+if only he remember first of all what is due to the hero. He has all
+the life of his people to strengthen him.
+
+A poem like the _Hęliand_ is under an obligation to a literary
+original, and cannot escape from this restriction. It makes what use
+it can of the native associations, but with whatever perseverance the
+author may try to bend his story into harmony with the laws of his own
+country, there is an untranslated residue of foreign ideas.
+
+Whatever the defects or excesses of _Beowulf_ may be, the characters
+are not distressed by any such unsolved contradiction as in the Saxon
+_Hęliand_, or in the old English _Exodus_, or _Andreas_, or the other
+poems taken from the Bible or the lives of saints. They have not, like
+the personages of the second order of poems, been translated from one
+realm of ideas to another, and made to take up burdens and offices
+not their own. They have grown naturally in the mind of a poet, out of
+the poet's knowledge of human nature, and the traditional ethical
+judgments of which he is possessed.
+
+The comparative freedom of _Beowulf_ in its relation to historical
+tradition and traditional ethics, and the comparative limitation of
+the _Hęliand_, are not in themselves conditions of either advantage or
+inferiority. They simply mark the difference between two types of
+narrative poem. To be free and comprehensive in relation to history,
+to summarise and represent in epic characters the traditional
+experience of an heroic age, is not the proper virtue of every kind of
+poetry, though it is proper to the Homeric kind. The freedom that
+belongs to the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ is also shared by many a
+dismal and interminable poem of the Middle Ages. That foreign or
+literary subjects impose certain limitations, and interfere with the
+direct use of matter of experience in poetry, is nothing against them.
+The Anglo-Saxon _Judith_, which is thus restricted as compared with
+_Beowulf_, may be more like Milton for these restrictions, if it be
+less like Homer. Exemption from them is not a privilege, except that
+it gives room for the attainment of a certain kind of excellence, the
+Homeric kind; as, on the other hand, it excludes the possibility of
+the literary art of Virgil or Milton.
+
+The relation of epic poetry to its heroic age is not to be found in
+the observance of any strict historical duty. It lies rather in the
+epic capacity for bringing together all manner of lively passages from
+the general experience of the age, in a story about famous heroic
+characters. The plot of the story gives unity and harmony to the
+composition, while the variety of its matter is permitted and
+justified by the dramatic variety of the characters and their
+interests.
+
+By its comprehensiveness and the variety of its substance, which are
+the signs and products of its dramatic imagination, epic poetry of the
+heroic age is distinguished from the more abstract kinds of narrative,
+such as the artificial epic, and from all kinds of imagination or
+fancy that are limited in their scope.
+
+In times when "the Epic Poem" was a more attractive, if not more
+perilous theme of debate than it now is, there was a strong
+controversy about the proper place and the proper kind of miraculous
+details to be admitted. The question was debated by Tasso in his
+critical writings, against the strict and pedantic imitators of
+classical models, and with a strong partiality for Ariosto against
+Trissino. Tasso made less of a distinction between romance and epic
+than was agreeable to some of his successors in criticism; and the
+controversy went on for generations, always more or less concerned
+with the great Italian heroic poems, _Orlando_ and _Jerusalem_. Some
+record of it will be found in Dr. Hurd's _Letters on Chivalry and
+Romance_ (1762). If the controversy has any interest now, it must be
+because it provided the most extreme statements of abstract literary
+principles, which on account of their thoroughness are interesting.
+From the documents it can be ascertained how near some of the critics
+came to that worship of the Faultless Hero with which Dryden in his
+heroic plays occasionally conformed, while he guarded himself against
+misinterpretation in his prefaces.
+
+The epic poetry of the more austere critics was devised according to
+the strictest principles of dignity and sublimity, with a precise
+exclusion of everything "Gothic" and romantic. Davenant's Preface to
+_Gondibert_--"the Author's Preface to his much Honour'd friend, Mr
+Hobs"--may show how the canon of epic was understood by poets who took
+things seriously; "for I will yield to their opinion, who permit not
+_Ariosto_, no, not _Du Bartas_, in this eminent rank of the
+_Heroicks_; rather than to make way by their admission for _Dante_,
+_Marino_, and others."
+
+It is somewhat difficult to find a common measure for these names, but
+it is clear that what is most distasteful to the writer, in theory at
+any rate, is variety. Epic is the most solemn, stately, and frigid of
+all kinds of composition. This was the result attained by the perverse
+following of precepts supposed to be classical. The critics of the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were generally right in
+distinguishing between Epic and Romance, and generally wrong in
+separating the one kind from the other as opposite and mutually
+exclusive forms, instead of seeing with Tasso, in his critical
+discourses, that romance may be included in epic. Against the manifold
+perils of the Gothic fantasy they set up the image of the Abstract
+Hero, and recited the formulas of the decorous and symmetrical
+abstract heroic poem. They were occasionally troubled by the "Gothic"
+elements in Homer, of which their adversaries were not slow to take
+advantage.
+
+One of the most orthodox of all the formalists, who for some reason
+came to be very much quoted in England, Bossu, in his discourse on the
+Epic Poem, had serious difficulties with the adventures of Ulysses,
+and his stories told in Phaeacia. The episodes of Circe, of the
+Sirens, and of Polyphemus, are _machines_; they are also not quite
+easy to understand. "They are necessary to the action, and yet they
+are not humanly probable." But see how Homer gets over the difficulty
+and brings back these _machines_ to the region of human probability.
+"Homčre les fait adroitement rentrer dans la Vraisemblance humaine par
+la simplicité de ceux devant qui il fait faire ses récits fabuleux. Il
+dit assez plaisamment que les Phéaques habitoient dans une Isle
+éloignée des lieux oů demeurent les hommes qui ont de l'esprit.
+[Greek: heisen d' en Scherię hekas andrôn alphęstaôn]. Ulysses les
+avoit connus avant que de se faire connoître ŕ eux: et aiant observé
+qu'ils avoient toutes les qualités de ces fainéans qui n'admirent rien
+avec plus de plaisir que les aventures Romanesques: il les satisfait
+par ces récits accommodez ŕ leur humeur. Mais le Poëte n'y a pas
+oublié les Lecteurs raisonnables. Il leur a donné en ces Fables tout
+le plaisir que l'on peut tirer des véritez Morales, si agréablement
+déguisées sous ces miraculeuses allégories. C'est ainsi qu'il a réduit
+ces Machines dans la vérité et dans la Vraisemblance Poëtique."[7]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Traité du Poëme Épique_, par le R.P. Le Bossu, Chanoine
+Régulier de Sainte Genevičve; MDCLXXV (t. ii. p. 166).]
+
+Although the world has fallen away from the severity of this critic,
+there is still a meaning at the bottom of his theory of machines. He
+has at any rate called attention to one of the most interesting parts
+of Epic, and has found the right word for the episodes of the
+Phaeacian story of Odysseus. Romance is the word for them, and Romance
+is at the same time one of the constituent parts and one of the
+enemies of epic poetry. That it was dangerous was seen by the
+academical critics. They provided against it, generally, by treating
+it with contempt and proscribing it, as was done by those French
+critics who were offended by Ariosto and perplexed by much of the
+Gothic machinery of Tasso. They did not readily admit that epic poetry
+is as complex as the plays of Shakespeare, and as incongruous as these
+in its composition, if the different constituents be taken out
+separately in the laboratory and then compared.
+
+Romance by itself is a kind of literature that does not allow the full
+exercise of dramatic imagination; a limited and abstract form, as
+compared with the fulness and variety of Epic; though episodes of
+romance, and romantic moods and digressions, may have their place,
+along with all other human things, in the epic scheme.
+
+The difference between the greater and the lesser kinds of narrative
+literature is vital and essential, whatever names may be assigned to
+them. In the one kind, of which Aristotle knew no other examples than
+the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, the personages are made individual
+through their dramatic conduct and their speeches in varying
+circumstances; in the other kind, in place of the moods and sentiments
+of a multitude of different people entering into the story and working
+it out, there is the sentiment of the author in his own person; there
+is one voice, the voice of the story-teller, and his theory of the
+characters is made to do duty for the characters themselves. There may
+be every poetic grace, except that of dramatic variety; and wherever,
+in narrative, the independence of the characters is merged in the
+sequence of adventures, or in the beauty of the landscape, or in the
+effusion of poetic sentiment, the narrative falls below the highest
+order, though the art be the art of Ovid or of Spenser.
+
+The romance of Odysseus is indeed "brought into conformity with poetic
+verisimilitude," but in a different way from that of Bossu _On the
+Epic Poem_. It is not because the Phaeacians are romantic in their
+tastes, but because it belongs to Odysseus, that the Phaeacian night's
+entertainment has its place in the _Odyssey_. The _Odyssey_ is the
+story of his home-coming, his recovery of his own. The great action
+of the drama of Odysseus is in his dealings with Penelope, Eumaeus,
+Telemachus, the suitors. The Phaeacian story is indeed episodic; the
+interest of those adventures is different from that of the meeting
+with Penelope. Nevertheless it is all kept in harmony with the
+stronger part of the poem. It is not pure fantasy and "Faerie," like
+the voyage of Maelduin or the vigil in the castle of Busirane.
+Odysseus in the house of Alcinous is not different from Odysseus of
+the return to Ithaca. The story is not pure romance, it is a dramatic
+monologue; and the character of the speaker has more part than the
+wonders of the story in the silence that falls on the listeners when
+the story comes to an end.
+
+In all early literature it is hard to keep the story within limits, to
+observe the proportion of the _Odyssey_ between strong drama and
+romance. The history of the early heroic literature of the Teutonic
+tongues, and of the epics of old France, comes to an end in the
+victory of various romantic schools, and of various restricted and
+one-sided forms of narrative. From within and without, from the
+resources of native mythology and superstition and from the
+fascination of Welsh and Arabian stories, there came the temptation to
+forget the study of character, and to part with an inheritance of
+tragic fables, for the sake of vanities, wonders, and splendours among
+which character and the tragic motives lost their pre-eminent interest
+and their old authority over poets and audience.
+
+
+III
+
+ROMANTIC MYTHOLOGY
+
+Between the dramatic qualities of epic poetry and the myths and
+fancies of popular tradition there must inevitably be a conflict and a
+discrepancy. The greatest scenes of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ have
+little to do with myth. Where the characters are most vividly realised
+there is no room for the lighter kinds of fable; the epic "machines"
+are superfluous. Where all the character of Achilles is displayed in
+the interview with Priam, all his generosity, all his passion and
+unreason, the imagination refuses to be led away by anything else from
+looking on and listening. The presence of Hermes, Priam's guide, is
+forgotten. Olympus cannot stand against the spell of words like those
+of Priam and Achilles; it vanishes like a parched scroll. In the great
+scene in the other poem where the disguised Odysseus talks with
+Penelope, but will not make himself known to her for fear of spoiling
+his plot, there is just as little opportunity for any intervention of
+the Olympians. "Odysseus pitied his wife as she wept, but his eyes
+were firm as horn or steel, unwavering in his eyelids, and with art he
+concealed his tears.[8]"
+
+[Footnote 8:
+
+ [Greek: autar' Odysseus
+ thymôi men gooôsan heęn eleaire gynaika,
+ ophthalmoi d' hôs ei kera hestasan ęe sidęros
+ atremas en blepharoisi; dolôi d' ho ge dakrya keuthen.]
+
+ _Od._ xix. 209.]
+
+In passages like these the epic poet gets clear away from the cumbrous
+inheritance of traditional fancies and stories. In other places he is
+inevitably less strong and self-sustained; he has to speak of the gods
+of the nation, or to work into his large composition some popular and
+improbable histories. The result in Homer is something like the result
+in Shakespeare, when he has a more than usually childish or
+old-fashioned fable to work upon. A story like that of the _Three
+Caskets_ or the _Pound of Flesh_ is perfectly consistent with itself
+in its original popular form. It is inconsistent with the form of
+elaborate drama, and with the lives of people who have souls of their
+own, like Portia or Shylock. Hence in the drama which uses the popular
+story as its ground-plan, the story is never entirely reduced into
+conformity with the spirit of the chief characters. The caskets and
+the pound of flesh, in despite of all the author's pains with them,
+are imperfectly harmonised; the primitive and barbarous imagination in
+them retains an inconvenient power of asserting its discordance with
+the principal parts of the drama. Their unreason is of no great
+consequence, yet it is something; it is not quite kept out of sight.
+
+The epic poet, at an earlier stage of literature than Shakespeare, is
+even more exposed to this difficulty. Shakespeare was free to take his
+plots where he chose, and took these old wives' tales at his own risk.
+The epic poet has matter of this sort forced upon him. In his
+treatment of it, it will be found that ingenuity does not fail him,
+and that the transition from the unreasonable or old-fashioned part of
+his work to the modern and dramatic part is cunningly worked out. "He
+gets over the unreason by the grace and skill of his handling,"[9]
+says Aristotle of a critical point in the "machinery" of the
+_Odyssey_, where Odysseus is carried ashore on Ithaca in his sleep.
+There is a continual play in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ between the
+wonders of mythology and the spirit of the drama. In this, as in other
+things, the Homeric poems observe the mean: the extremes may be found
+in the heroic literature of other nations; the extreme of marvellous
+fable in the old Irish heroic legends, for example; the extreme of
+plainness and "soothfastness" in the old English lay of _Maldon_. In
+some medieval compositions, as in _Huon of Bordeaux_, the two extremes
+are brought together clumsily and without harmony. In other medieval
+works again it is possible to find something like the Homeric
+proportion--the drama of strong characters, taking up and transforming
+the fanciful products of an earlier world, the inventions of minds not
+deeply or especially interested in character.
+
+[Footnote 9:
+
+ [Greek: nun de tois allois agathois aphanizei hędunôn to atopon.]
+
+ ARISTOT. _Poet._ 1460 b.]
+
+The defining and shaping of myths in epic poetry is a process that
+cannot go on in a wholly simple and unreflecting society. On the
+contrary, this process means that the earlier stages of religious
+legend have been succeeded by a time of criticism and selection. It is
+hard on the old stories of the gods when men come to appreciate the
+characters of Achilles and Odysseus. The old stories are not all of
+equal value and authority; they cannot all be made to fit in with the
+human story; they have to be tested, and some have to be rejected as
+inconvenient. The character of the gods is modified under the
+influence of the chief actors in the drama. Agamemnon, Diomede,
+Odysseus, Ajax, and Achilles set the standard by which the gods are
+judged. The Homeric view of the gods is already more than half-way to
+the view of a modern poet. The gods lose their old tyranny and their
+right to the steam of sacrifice as they gain their new poetical
+empire, from which they need not fear to be banished; not, at any
+rate, for any theological reasons.
+
+In Shakespearean drama, where each man is himself, with his own
+character and his own fortune to make, there is small scope for any
+obvious Divine interposition in the scene. The story of human actions
+and characters, the more fully it is developed, leaves the less
+opportunity for the gods to interfere in it. Something of this sort
+was felt by certain medieval historians; they found it necessary to
+begin with an apologetic preface explaining the long-suffering of God,
+who has given freedom to the will of man to do good or evil. It was
+felt to be on the verge of impiety to think of men as left to
+themselves and doing what they pleased. Those who listen to a story
+might be tempted to think of the people in it as self-sufficient and
+independent powers, trespassing on the domain of Providence. A pious
+exculpation was required to clear the author of blame.[10]
+
+[Footnote 10: "In the events of this history may be proved the great
+long-suffering of God Almighty towards us every day; and the freedom
+of will which He has given to every man, that each may do what he
+will, good or evil."--_Hrafns Saga_, Prologue (_Sturlunga Saga_
+Oxford, 1878, II. p. 275).
+
+"As all good things are the work of God, so valour is made by Him and
+placed in the heart of stout champions, and freedom therewithal to use
+it as they will, for good or evil."--_Fóstbrćđra Saga_ (1852), p. 12:
+one of the sophistical additions to the story: see below p. 275.
+
+The moral is different in the following passage:--
+
+"And inasmuch as the Providence of God hath ordained, and it is His
+pleasure, that the seven planets should have influence on the world,
+and bear dominion over man's nature, giving him divers inclinations to
+sin and naughtiness of life: nevertheless the Universal Creator has
+not taken from him the free will, which, as it is well governed, may
+subdue and abolish these temptations by virtuous living, if men will
+use discretion."--_Tirant lo Blanch_ (1460), c. i.]
+
+In the _Iliad_ this scrupulous conscience has less need to deliver
+itself. The gods are not far away; the heroes are not left alone. But
+the poet has already done much to reduce the immediate power of the
+gods, not by excluding them from the action, certainly, nor by any
+attenuation of their characters into allegory, but by magnifying and
+developing the characters of men. In many occasional references it
+would seem that an approach was being made to that condition of mind,
+at ease concerning the gods, so common in the North, in Norway and
+Iceland, in the last days of heathendom. There is the great speech of
+Hector to Polydamas--"we defy augury"[11]--there is the speech of
+Apollo himself to Aeneas[12] about those who stand up for their own
+side, putting trust in their own strength. But passages like these do
+not touch closely on the relations of gods and men as they are
+depicted in the story. As so depicted, the gods are not shadowy or
+feeble abstractions and personifications; yet they are not of the
+first value to the poem, they do not set the tone of it.
+
+[Footnote 11: _Il._ xii. 241.]
+
+[Footnote 12: _Il._ xvii. 227.]
+
+They are subsidiary, like some other of the most beautiful things in
+the poem; like the similes of clouds and winds, like the pictures on
+the Shield. They are there because the whole world is included in epic
+poetry; the heroes, strong in themselves as they could be if they were
+left alone in the common day, acquire an additional strength and
+beauty from their fellowship with the gods. Achilles talking with the
+Embassy is great; he is great in another way when he stands at the
+trench with the flame of Athena on his head. These two scenes belong
+to two different kinds of imagination. It is because the first is
+there that the second takes effect. It is the hero that gives meaning
+and glory to the light of the goddess. It is of some importance that
+it is Achilles, and not another, that here is crowned with the light
+of heaven and made terrible to his enemies.
+
+There is a double way of escape for young nations from their outgrown
+fables and mythologies. They start with enormous, monstrous, and
+inhuman beliefs and stories. Either they may work their way out of
+them, by gradual rejection of the grosser ingredients, to something
+more or less positive and rational; or else they may take up the myths
+and transmute them into poetry.
+
+The two processes are not independent of one another. Both are found
+together in the greater artists of early times, in Homer most notably;
+and also in artists less than Homer; in the poem of _Beowulf_, in the
+stories of Sigfred and Brynhild.
+
+There are further, under the second mode, two chief ways of operation
+by which the fables of the gods may be brought into poetry.
+
+It is possible to take them in a light-hearted way and weave them into
+poetical stories, without much substance or solemnity; enhancing the
+beauty that may be inherent in any part of the national legend, and
+either rejecting the scandalous chronicle of Olympus or Asgard
+altogether, or giving it over to the comic graces of levity and irony,
+as in the Phaeacian story of Ares and Aphrodite, wherein the Phaeacian
+poet digressed from his tales of war in the spirit of Ariosto, and
+with an equally accomplished and elusive defiance of censure.[13]
+
+[Footnote 13: The censure is not wanting:--
+
+"L'on doit considérer que ce n'est ni le Poëte, ni son Héros, ni un
+honnęte homme qui fait ce récit: mais que les Phéaques, peuples mols
+et effeminez, se le font chanter pendant leur festin."--BOSSU, _op.
+cit._ p. 152.]
+
+There is another way in which poetry may find room for fable.
+
+It may treat the myths of the gods as material for the religious or
+the ethical imagination, and out of them create ideal characters,
+analogous in poetry to the ideal divine or heroic figures of painting
+and sculpture. This is the kind of imagination in virtue of which
+modern poets are best able to appropriate the classical mythology; but
+this modern imagination is already familiar to Homer, and that not
+only in direct description, as in the description of the majesty of
+Zeus, but also, more subtly, in passages where the character of the
+divinity is suggested by comparison with one of the human personages,
+as when Nausicaa is compared to Artemis,[14] a comparison that
+redounds not less to the honour of the goddess than of Nausicaa.
+
+[Footnote 14: _Od._ vi. 151.]
+
+In Icelandic literature there are many instances of the trouble
+arising from inconsiderate stories of the gods, in the minds of people
+who had got beyond the more barbarous kind of mythology. They took the
+boldest and most conclusive way out of the difficulty; they made the
+barbarous stories into comedy. The _Lokasenna_, a poem whose author
+has been called the Aristophanes of the Western Islands, is a dramatic
+piece in which Loki, the Northern Satan, appearing in the house of the
+gods, is allowed to bring his railing accusations against them and
+remind them of their doings in the "old days." One of his victims
+tells him to "let bygones be bygones." The gods are the subject of
+many stories that are here raked up against them, stories of another
+order of belief and of civilisation than those in which Odin appears
+as the wise and sleepless counsellor. This poem implies a great amount
+of independence in the author of it. It is not a satire on the gods;
+it is pure comedy; that is, it belongs to a type of literature which
+has risen above prejudices and which has an air of levity because it
+is pure sport--or pure art--and therefore is freed from bondage to
+the matter which it handles. This kind of invention is one that tests
+the wit of its audience. A serious-minded heathen of an older school
+would no doubt have been shocked by the levity of the author's manner.
+Not much otherwise would the poem have affected a serious adversary of
+heathendom, or any one whose education had been entirely outside of
+the circle of heathen or mythological tradition. An Englishman of the
+tenth century, familiar with the heroic poetry of his own tongue,
+would have thought it indecent. If chance had brought such an one to
+hear this _Lokasenna_ recited at some entertainment in a great house
+of the Western Islands, he might very well have conceived the same
+opinion of his company and their tastes in literature as is ascribed
+by Bossu to Ulysses among the Phaeacians.
+
+This genius for comedy is shown in other Icelandic poems. As soon as
+the monstrosities of the old traditions were felt to be monstrous,
+they were overcome (as Mr. Carlyle has shown) by an appreciation of
+the fun of them, and so they ceased to be burdensome. It is something
+of this sort that has preserved old myths, for amusement, in popular
+tales all over the world. The Icelandic poets went further, however,
+than most people in their elaborate artistic treatment of their myths.
+There is with them more art and more self-consciousness, and they give
+a satisfactory and final poetical shape to these things, extracting
+pure comedy from them.
+
+The perfection of this ironical method is to be found in the _Edda_, a
+handbook of the Art of Poetry, written in the thirteenth century by a
+man of liberal genius, for whom the Ćsir were friends of the
+imagination, without any prejudice to the claims of the Church or of
+his religion. In the view of Snorri Sturluson, the old gods are exempt
+from any touch of controversy. Belief has nothing to do with them;
+they are free. It may be remembered that some of the greatest English
+writers of the seventeenth century have come short of this security of
+view, and have not scrupled to repeat the calumny of the missionaries
+and the disputants against the ancient gods, that Jupiter and Apollo
+were angels of the bottomless pit, given over to their own devices for
+a season, and masking as Olympians.
+
+In this freedom from embarrassing and irrelevant considerations in
+dealing with myth, the author of the _Edda_ follows in his prose the
+spirit of mythological poems three centuries older, in which, even
+before the change of faith in the North, the gods were welcomed
+without fear as sharing in many humorous adventures.
+
+And at the same time, along with this detached and ironical way of
+thinking there is to be found in the Northern poetry the other, more
+reverent mode of shaping the inherited fancies; the mode of Pindar,
+rejecting the vain things fabled about the gods, and holding fast to
+the more honourable things. The humours of Thor in the fishing for the
+serpent and the winning of the hammer may be fairly likened to the
+humours of Hermes in the Greek hymn. The _Lokasenna_ has some likeness
+to the Homeric description of the brawls in heaven. But in the poems
+that refer to the death of Balder and the sorrow of the gods there is
+another tone; and the greatest of them all, the _Sibyl's Prophecy_, is
+comparable, not indeed in volume of sound, but in loftiness of
+imagination, to the poems in which Pindar has taken up the myths of
+most inexhaustible value and significance--the Happy Islands, the
+Birth of Athena.
+
+The poet who lives in anything like an heroic or Homeric age has it in
+his power to mingle the elements of mythology and of human
+story--Phaeacia and Ithaca--in any proportion he pleases. As a matter
+of fact, all varieties of proportion are to be found in medieval
+documents. At the one extreme is the mythological romance and fantasy
+of Celtic epic, and at the other extreme the plain narrative of human
+encounters, in the old English battle poetry or the Icelandic family
+histories. As far as one can judge from the extant poems, the old
+English and old German poetry did not make such brilliant romance out
+of mythological legend as was produced by the Northern poets. These
+alone, and not the poets of England or Saxony, seem to have
+appropriated for literature, in an Homeric way, the histories of the
+gods. Myth is not wanting in old English or German poetry, but it does
+not show itself in the same clear and delightful manner as in the
+Northern poems of Thor, or in the wooing of Frey.
+
+Thus in different places there are different modes in which an
+inheritance of mythical ideas may be appreciated and used. It may
+become a treasury for self-possessed and sure-handed artists, as in
+Greece, and so be preserved long after it has ceased to be adequate to
+all the intellectual desires. It may, by the fascination of its
+wealth, detain the minds of poets in its enchanted ground, and prevent
+them from ever working their way through from myth to dramatic
+imagination, as in Ireland.
+
+The early literature, and therewith the intellectual character and
+aptitudes, of a nation may be judged by their literary use of
+mythology. They may neglect it, like the Romans; they may neglect all
+things for the sake of it, like the Celts; they may harmonise it, as
+the Greeks did, in a system of imaginative creations where the
+harmony is such that myth need never be felt as an encumbrance or an
+absurdity, however high or far the reason may go beyond it in any
+direction of art or science.
+
+At the beginning of modern literature there are to be found the
+attempts of Irish and Welsh, of English and Germans, Danes and
+Northmen, to give shape to myth, and make it available for literature.
+Together with that, and as part of the same process, there is found
+the beginning of historical literature in an heroic or epic form. The
+results are various; but one thing may be taken as certain, that
+progress in literature is most assured when the mythology is so far
+under control as to leave room for the drama of epic characters; for
+epic, as distinguished from romance.
+
+Now the fortunes of these people were such as to make this
+self-command exceedingly difficult for them, and to let in an enormous
+extraneous force, encouraging the native mythopoetic tendencies, and
+unfavourable to the growth of epic. They had to come to an
+understanding with themselves about their own heathen traditions, to
+bring the extravagances of them into some order, so as to let the epic
+heroes have free play. But they were not left to themselves in this
+labour of bringing mythology within bounds; even before they had
+fairly escaped from barbarism, before they had made a fair beginning
+of civilisation and of reflective literature on their own account,
+they were drawn within the Empire, into Christendom. Before their
+imaginations had fully wakened out of the primeval dream, the
+cosmogonies and theogonies, gross and monstrous, of their national
+infancy, they were asked to have an opinion about the classical
+mythology, as represented by the Latin poets; they were made
+acquainted with the miracles of the lives of saints.
+
+More than all this, even, their minds were charmed away from the
+labour of epic invention, by the spell of the preacher. The task of
+representing characters--Waldere or Theodoric or Attila--was forgotten
+in the lyrical rapture of devotion, in effusion of pathos. The
+fascination of religious symbolism crept over minds that had hardly
+yet begun to see and understand things as they are; and in all their
+reading the "moral," "anagogical," and "tropological" significations
+prevailed against the literal sense.
+
+One part of medieval history is concerned with the progress of the
+Teutonic nations, in so far as they were left to themselves, and in so
+far as their civilisation is home-made. The _Germania_ of Tacitus, for
+instance, is used by historians to interpret the later development of
+Teutonic institutions. But this inquiry involves a good deal of
+abstraction and an artificial limitation of view. In reality, the
+people of Germania were never left to themselves at all, were never
+beyond the influence of Southern ideas; and the history of the
+influence of Southern ideas on the Northern races takes up a larger
+field than the isolated history of the North. Nothing in the world is
+more fantastic. The logic of Aristotle and the art of Virgil are
+recommended to people whose chief men, barons and earls, are commonly
+in their tastes and acquirements not very different from the suitors
+in the _Odyssey_. Gentlemen much interested in raids and forays, and
+the profits of such business, are confronted with a literature into
+which the labours of all past centuries have been distilled. In a
+society that in its native elements is closely analogous to Homer's
+Achaeans, men are found engaged in the study of Boethius _On the
+Consolation of Philosophy_, a book that sums up the whole course of
+Greek philosophical speculation. Ulysses quoting Aristotle is an
+anachronism; but King Alfred's translation of Boethius is almost as
+much of a paradox. It is not easy to remain unmoved at the thought of
+the medieval industry bestowed on authors like Martianus Capella _de
+Nuptiis Philologiae_, or Macrobius _de Somnio Scipionis_. What is to
+be said of the solemnity with which, in their pursuit of authoritative
+doctrine, they applied themselves to extract the spiritual meaning of
+Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, and appropriate the didactic system of the
+_Art of Love_?
+
+In medieval literature, whatever there is of the Homeric kind has an
+utterly different relation to popular standards of appreciation from
+that of the Homeric poems in Greece. Here and there some care may be
+taken, as by Charlemagne and Alfred, to preserve the national heroic
+poetry. But such regard for it is rare; and even where it is found, it
+comes far short of the honour paid to Homer by Alexander. English Epic
+is not first, but one of the least, among the intellectual and
+literary interests of King Alfred. Heroic literature is only one
+thread in the weft of medieval literature.
+
+There are some curious documents illustrative of its comparative
+value, and of the variety and complexity of medieval literature.
+
+Hauk Erlendsson, an Icelander of distinction in the fourteenth
+century, made a collection of treatises in one volume for his own
+amusement and behoof. It contains the _Volospá_, the most famous of
+all the Northern mythical poems, the Sibyl's song of the doom of the
+gods; it contains also the _Landnámabók_, the history of the
+colonisation of Iceland; _Kristni Saga_, the history of the conversion
+to Christianity; the history of _Eric the Red_, and _Fóstbrćđra Saga_,
+the story of the two sworn brethren, Thorgeir and Thormod the poet.
+Besides these records of the history and the family traditions of
+Iceland and Greenland, there are some mythical stories of later date,
+dealing with old mythical themes, such as the life of Ragnar Lodbrok.
+In one of them, the _Heidreks Saga_, are embedded some of the most
+memorable verses, after _Volospá_, in the old style of Northern
+poetry--the poem of the _Waking of Angantyr_. The other contents of
+the book are as follows: geographical, physical, and theological
+pieces; extracts from St. Augustine; the _History of the Cross_; the
+_Description of Jerusalem_; the _Debate of Body and Soul_;
+_Algorismus_ (by Hauk himself, who was an arithmetician); a version of
+the _Brut_ and of _Merlin's Prophecy_; _Lucidarium_, the most popular
+medieval handbook of popular science. This is the collection, to which
+all the ends of the earth have contributed, and it is in strange and
+far-fetched company like this that the Northern documents are found.
+In Greece, whatever early transactions there may have been with the
+wisdom of Egypt or Phoenicia, there is no such medley as this.
+
+Another illustration of the literary chaos is presented, even more
+vividly than in the contents of Hauk's book, by the whalebone casket
+in the British Museum. Weland the smith (whom Alfred introduced into
+his _Boethius_) is here put side by side with the Adoration of the
+Magi; on another side are Romulus and Remus; on another, Titus at
+Jerusalem; on the lid of the casket is the defence of a house by one
+who is shooting arrows at his assailants; his name is written over
+him, and his name is _Ćgili_,--Egil the master-bowman, as Weland is
+the master-smith, of the Northern mythology. Round the two companion
+pictures, Weland on the left and the Three Kings on the right, side by
+side, there go wandering runes, with some old English verses about
+the "whale," or walrus, from which the ivory for these engravings was
+obtained. The artist plainly had no more suspicion than the author of
+_Lycidas_ that there was anything incorrect or unnatural in his
+combinations. It is under these conditions that the heroic poetry of
+Germania has been preserved; never as anything more than an accident
+among an infinity of miscellaneous notions, the ruins of ancient
+empires, out of which the commonplaces of European literature and
+popular philosophy have been gradually collected.
+
+The fate of epic poetry was the same as that of the primitive German
+forms of society. In both there was a progress towards independent
+perfection, an evolution of the possibilities inherent in them,
+independent of foreign influences. But both in Teutonic society, and
+in the poetry belonging to it and reflecting it, this independent
+course of life is thwarted and interfered with. Instead of independent
+strong Teutonic national powers, there are the more or less Romanised
+and blended nationalities possessing the lands that had been conquered
+by Goths and Burgundians, Lombards and Franks; instead of Germania,
+the Holy Roman Empire; instead of Epic, Romance; not the old-fashioned
+romance of native mythology, not the natural spontaneous romance of
+the Irish legends or the Icelandic stories of gods and giants, but the
+composite far-fetched romance of the age of chivalry, imported from
+all countries and literatures to satisfy the medieval appetite for
+novel and wonderful things.
+
+Nevertheless, the stronger kind of poetry had still something to show,
+before all things were overgrown with imported legend, and before the
+strong enunciation of the older manner was put out of fashion by the
+medieval clerks and rhetoricians.
+
+
+IV
+
+THE THREE SCHOOLS--TEUTONIC EPIC--FRENCH EPIC--THE ICELANDIC HISTORIES
+
+The Teutonic heroic poetry was menaced on all hands from the earliest
+times; it was turned aside from the national heroes by saints and
+missionaries, and charmed out of its sterner moods by the spell of
+wistful and regretful meditation. In continental Germany it appears to
+have been early vanquished. In England, where the epic poetry was
+further developed than on the Continent, it was not less exposed to
+the rivalry of the ideas and subjects that belonged to the Church.
+
+The Anglo-Saxon histories of St. Andrew and St. Helen are as full of
+romantic passages as those poems of the fourteenth century in which
+the old alliterative verse is revived to tell the tale of Troy or of
+the _Mort Arthur_. The national subjects themselves are not proof
+against the ideas of the Church; even in the fragments of _Waldere_
+they are to be found; and the poem of _Beowulf_ has been filled, like
+so much of the old English poetry, with the melancholy of the
+preacher, and the sense of the vanity of earthly things. But the
+influence of fantasy and pathos could not dissolve the strength of
+epic beyond recovery, or not until it had done something to show what
+it was worth. Not all the subjects are treated in the romantic manner
+of Cynewulf and his imitators. The poem of _Maldon_, written at the
+very end of the tenth century, is firm and unaffected in its style,
+and of its style there can be no question that it is heroic.
+
+The old Norse poetry was beyond the influence of most of the
+tendencies and examples that corrupted the heroic poetry of the
+Germans, and changed the course of poetry in England. It was not till
+the day of its glory was past that it took to subjects like those of
+Cynewulf and his imitators. But it was hindered in other ways from
+representing the lives of heroes in a consistent epic form. If it knew
+less of the miracles of saints, it knew more of the old mythology; and
+though it was not, like English and German poetry, taken captive by
+the preachers, it was stirred and thrilled by the beauty of its own
+stories in a way that inclined to the lyrical rather than the epic
+tone. Yet here also there are passages of graver epic, where the tone
+is more assured and the composition more stately.
+
+The relation of the French epics to French romance is on the one side
+a relation of antagonism, in which the older form gives way to the
+newer, because "the newer song is sweeter in the ears of men." The
+_Chanson de Geste_ is driven out by poems that differ from it in
+almost every possible respect; in the character of their original
+subject-matter, in their verse, their rhetoric, and all their gear of
+commonplaces, and all the devices of their art. But from another point
+of view there may be detected in the _Chansons de Geste_ no small
+amount of the very qualities that were fatal to them, when the
+elements were compounded anew in the poems of _Erec_ and _Lancelot_.
+
+The French epics have many points of likeness with the Teutonic
+poetry of _Beowulf_ or _Finnesburh_, or of the Norse heroic songs.
+They are epic in substance, having historical traditions at the back
+of them, and owing the materials of their picture to no deliberate
+study of authorities. They differ from _Beowulf_ in this respect,
+among others, that they are the poems of feudal society, not of the
+simpler and earlier communities. The difference ought not to be
+exaggerated. As far as heroic poetry is concerned, the difference lies
+chiefly in the larger frame of the story. The kingdom of France in the
+French epics is wider than the kingdom of Hrothgar or Hygelac. The
+scale is nearer that of the _Iliad_ than of the _Odyssey_. The
+"Catalogue of the Armies sent into the Field" is longer, the mass of
+fighting-men is more considerable, than in the epic of the older
+school. There is also, frequently, a much fuller sense of the national
+greatness and the importance of the defence of the land against its
+enemies, a consciousness of the dignity of the general history, unlike
+the carelessness with which the Teutonic poets fling themselves into
+the story of individual lives, and disregard the historical
+background. Generally, however, the Teutonic freedom and rebellious
+spirit is found as unmistakably in the _Chansons de Geste_ as in the
+alliterative poems. Feudalism appears in heroic poetry, and indeed in
+prosaic history, as a more elaborate form of that anarchy which is the
+necessary condition of an heroic age. It does not deprive the poet of
+his old subjects, his family enmities, and his adventures of private
+war. Feudalism did not invent, neither did it take away, the virtue of
+loyalty that has so large a place in all true epic, along with its
+counterpart of defiance and rebellion, no less essential to the story.
+It intensified the poetical value of both motives, but they are older
+than the _Iliad_. It provided new examples of the "wrath" of injured
+or insulted barons; it glorified to the utmost, it honoured as
+martyrs, those who died fighting for their lord.[15]
+
+[Footnote 15:
+
+ Lor autres mors ont toz en terre mis:
+ Crois font sor aus, qu'il erent droit martir:
+ Por lor seignor orent esté ocis.
+
+ _Garin le Loherain_, tom. ii. p. 88.]
+
+In all this it did nothing to change the essence of heroic poetry. The
+details were changed, the scene was enlarged, and so was the number of
+the combatants. But the details of feudalism that make a difference
+between Beowulf, or the men of Attila, and the epic paladins of
+Charlemagne in the French poems of the eleventh and twelfth centuries,
+need not obscure the essential resemblance between one heroic period
+and another.
+
+On the other hand, it is plain from the beginning that French epic had
+to keep its ground with some difficulty against the challenge of
+romantic skirmishers. In one of the earliest of the poems about
+Charlemagne, the Emperor and his paladins are taken to the East by a
+poet whom Bossu would hardly have counted "honest." In the poem of
+_Huon of Bordeaux_, much later, the story of Oberon and the magic horn
+has been added to the plot of a feudal tragedy, which in itself is
+compact and free from extravagance. Between those extreme cases there
+are countless examples of the mingling of the graver epic with more or
+less incongruous strains. Sometimes there is magic, sometimes the
+appearance of a Paynim giant, often the repetition of long prayers
+with allusions to the lives of saints and martyrs, and throughout
+there is the constant presence of ideas derived from homilies and the
+common teaching of the Church. In some of these respects the French
+epics are in the same case as the old English poems which, like
+_Beowulf_, show the mingling of a softer mood with the stronger; of
+new conventions with old. In some respects they show a further
+encroachment of the alien spirit.
+
+The English poem of _Maldon_ has some considerable likeness in the
+matter of its story, and not a little in its ideal of courage, with
+the _Song of Roland_. A comparison of the two poems, in those respects
+in which they are commensurable, will show the English poem to be
+wanting in certain elements of mystery that are potent in the other.
+
+The _Song of Maldon_ and the _Song of Roncesvalles_ both narrate the
+history of a lost battle, of a realm defended against its enemies by a
+captain whose pride and self-reliance lead to disaster, by refusing to
+take fair advantage of the enemy and put forth all his available
+strength. Byrhtnoth, fighting the Northmen on the shore of the Essex
+river, allows them of his own free will to cross the ford and come to
+close quarters. "He gave ground too much to the adversary; he called
+across the cold river and the warriors listened: 'Now is space granted
+to you; come speedily hither and fight; God alone can tell who will
+hold the place of battle.' Then the wolves of blood, the rovers, waded
+west over Panta."
+
+This unnecessary magnanimity has for the battle of Maldon the effect
+of Roland's refusal to sound the horn at the battle of Roncesvalles;
+it is the tragic error or transgression of limit that brings down the
+crash and ruin at the end of the day.
+
+In both poems there is a like spirit of indomitable resistance. The
+close of the battle of Maldon finds the loyal companions of Byrhtnoth
+fighting round his body, abandoned by the cowards who have run away,
+but themselves convinced of their absolute strength to resist to the
+end.
+
+ Byrhtwold spoke and grasped his shield--he was an old
+ companion--he shook his ashen spear, and taught courage to
+ them that fought:--
+
+ "Thought shall be the harder, heart the keener, mood shall
+ be the more, as our might lessens. Here our prince lies low,
+ they have hewn him to death! Grief and sorrow for ever on
+ the man that leaves this war-play! I am old of years, but
+ hence I will not go; I think to lay me down by the side of
+ my lord, by the side of the man I cherished."
+
+The story of Roncesvalles tells of an agony equally hopeless and
+equally secure from every touch of fear.
+
+The _Song of Maldon_ is a strange poem to have been written in the
+reign of Ethelred the Unready. But for a few phrases it might, as far
+as the matter is concerned, have been written before the conversion of
+England, and although it is a battle in defence of the country, and
+not a mere incident of private war, the motive chiefly used is not
+patriotism, but private loyalty to the captain. Roland is full of the
+spirit of militant Christendom, and there is no more constant thought
+in the poem than that of the glory of France. The virtue of the
+English heroes is the old Teutonic virtue. The events of the battle
+are told plainly and clearly; nothing adventitious is brought in to
+disturb the effect of the plain story; the poetical value lies in the
+contrast between the grey landscape (which is barely indicated), the
+severe and restrained description of the fighters, on the one hand,
+and on the other the sublimity of the spirit expressed in the last
+words of the "old companion." In the narrative of events there are no
+extraneous beauties to break the overwhelming strength of the
+eloquence in which the meaning of the whole thing is concentrated.
+With Roland at Roncesvalles the case is different. He is not shown in
+the grey light of the Essex battlefield. The background is more
+majestic. There is a mysterious half-lyrical refrain throughout the
+tale of the battle: "high are the mountains and dark the valleys"
+about the combatants in the pass; they are not left to themselves like
+the warriors of the poem of _Maldon_. It is romance, rather than epic
+or tragedy, which in this way recognises the impersonal power of the
+scene; the strength of the hills under which the fight goes on. In the
+first part of the _Odyssey_ the spell of the mystery of the sea is all
+about the story of Odysseus; in the later and more dramatic part the
+hero loses this, and all the strength is concentrated in his own
+character. In the story of Roland there is a vastness and vagueness
+throughout, coming partly from the numbers of the hosts engaged,
+partly from the author's sense of the mystery of the Pyrenean valleys,
+and, in a very large measure, from the heavenly aid accorded to the
+champion of Christendom. The earth trembles, there is darkness over
+all the realm of France even to the Mount St. Michael:
+
+ C'est la dulur pur la mort de Rollant.
+
+St. Gabriel descends to take from the hand of Roland the glove that he
+offers with his last confession; and the three great angels of the
+Lord are there to carry his soul to Paradise.
+
+There is nothing like this in the English poem. The battle is fought
+in the light of an ordinary day; there is nothing to greet the eyes of
+Byrhtnoth and his men except the faces of their enemies.
+
+It is not hard to find in old English poetry descriptions less austere
+than that of _Maldon_; there may be found in the French _Chansons de
+Geste_ great spaces in which there is little of the majestic light and
+darkness of Roncesvalles. But it is hard to escape the conviction that
+the poem of _Maldon_, late as it is, has uttered the spirit and
+essence of the Northern heroic literature in its reserved and simple
+story, and its invincible profession of heroic faith; while the poem
+of Roncesvalles is equally representative of the French epic spirit,
+and of the French poems in which the ideas common to every heroic age
+are expressed with all the circumstances of the feudal society of
+Christendom, immediately before the intellectual and literary
+revolutions of the twelfth century. The French epics are full of omens
+of the coming victory of romance, though they have not yet given way.
+They still retain, in spite of their anticipations of the Kingdom of
+the Grail, an alliance in spirit with the older Teutonic poetry, and
+with those Icelandic histories that are the highest literary
+expression of the Northern spirit in its independence of feudalism.
+
+The heroic age of the ancient Germans may be said to culminate, and
+end, in Iceland in the thirteenth century. The Icelandic _Sagas_--the
+prose histories of the fortunes of the great Icelandic houses--are the
+last and also the finest expression and record of the spirit and the
+ideas belonging properly to the Germanic race in its own right, and
+not derived from Rome or Christendom. Those of the German nations who
+stayed longest at home had by several centuries the advantage of the
+Goths and Franks, and had time to complete their native education
+before going into foreign subjects. The English were less exposed to
+Southern influences than the continental Germans; the Scandinavian
+nations less than the Angles and Saxons. In Norway particularly, the
+common German ideas were developed in a way that produced a code of
+honour, a consciousness of duty, and a strength of will, such as had
+been unknown in the German nations who were earlier called upon to
+match themselves against Rome. Iceland was colonised by a picked lot
+of Norwegians; by precisely those Norwegians who had this strength of
+will in its highest degree.
+
+Political progress in the Middle Ages was by way of monarchy; but
+strong monarchy was contrary to the traditions of Germania, and in
+Norway, a country of great extent and great difficulties of
+communication, the ambition of Harold Fairhair was resisted by numbers
+of chieftains who had their own local following and their own family
+dignity to maintain, in their firths and dales. Those men found Norway
+intolerable through the tyranny of King Harold, and it was by them
+that Iceland was colonised through the earlier colonies in the
+west--in Scotland, in Ireland, in Shetland and the other islands.
+
+The ideas that took the Northern colonists to Iceland were the ideas
+of Germania,--the love of an independent life, the ideal of the
+old-fashioned Northern gentleman, who was accustomed to consideration
+and respect from the freemen, his neighbours, who had authority by his
+birth and fortune to look after the affairs of his countryside, who
+would not make himself the tenant, vassal, or steward of any king. In
+the new country these ideas were intensified and defined. The ideal of
+the Icelandic Commonwealth was something more than a vague motive, it
+was present to the minds of the first settlers in a clear and definite
+form. The most singular thing in the heroic age of Iceland is that the
+heroes knew what they were about. The heroic age of Iceland begins in
+a commonwealth founded by a social contract. The society that is
+established there is an association of individuals coming to an
+agreement with one another to invent a set of laws and observe them.
+Thus while Iceland on the one hand is a reactionary state, founded by
+men who were turning their backs on the only possible means of
+political progress, cutting themselves off from the world, and
+adhering obstinately to forms of life with no future before them, on
+the other hand this reactionary commonwealth, this fanatical
+representative of early Germanic use and wont, is possessed of a
+clearness of self-consciousness, a hard and positive clearness of
+understanding, such as is to be found nowhere else in the Middle Ages
+and very rarely at all in any polity.
+
+The prose literature of Iceland displays the same two contradictory
+characters throughout. The actions described, and the customs, are
+those of an early heroic age, with rather more than the common amount
+of enmity and vengeance, and an unequalled power of resistance and
+rebellion in the individual wills of the personages. The record of all
+this anarchy is a prose history, rational and unaffected, seeing all
+things in a dry light; a kind of literature that has not much to learn
+from any humanism or rationalism, in regard to its own proper subjects
+at any rate.
+
+The people of Iceland were not cut off from the ordinary European
+learning and its commonplaces. They read the same books as were read
+in England or Germany. They read St. Gregory _de Cura Pastorali_, they
+read _Ovidius Epistolarum_, and all the other popular books of the
+Middle Ages. In time those books and the world to which they belonged
+were able to obtain a victory over the purity of the Northern
+tradition and manners, but not until the Northern tradition had
+exhausted itself, and the Icelandic polity began to break up. The
+literature of the maturity of Iceland just before the fall of the
+Commonwealth is a literature belonging wholly and purely to Iceland,
+in a style unmodified by Latin syntax and derived from the colloquial
+idiom. The matter is the same in kind as the common matter of heroic
+poetry. The history represents the lives of adventurers, the rivalries
+and private wars of men who are not ignorant of right and honour, but
+who acknowledge little authority over them, and are given to choose
+their right and wrong for themselves, and abide the consequences. This
+common matter is presented in a form which may be judged on its own
+merits, and there is no need to ask concessions from any one in
+respect of the hard or unfavourable conditions under which this
+literature was produced. One at least of the Icelandic Sagas is one of
+the great prose works of the world--the story of Njal and his sons.
+
+The most perfect heroic literature of the Northern nations is to be
+found in the country where the heroic polity and society had most room
+and leisure; and in Iceland the heroic ideals of life had conditions
+more favourable than are to be discovered anywhere else in history.
+Iceland was a world divided from the rest, outside the orbit of all
+the states of Europe; what went on there had little more than an ideal
+relation to the course of the great world; it had no influence on
+Europe, it was kept separate as much as might be from the European
+storms and revolutions. What went on in Iceland was the progress in
+seclusion of the old Germanic life--a life that in the rest of the
+world had been blended and immersed in other floods and currents.
+Iceland had no need of the great movements of European history.
+
+They had a humanism of their own, a rationalism of their own, gained
+quite apart from the great European tumults, and gained prematurely,
+in comparison with the rest of Europe. Without the labour of the
+Middle Ages, without the storm and stress of the reform of learning,
+they had the faculty of seeing things clearly and judging their values
+reasonably, without superstition. They had to pay the penalty of their
+opposition to the forces of the world; there was no cohesion in their
+society, and when once the balance of power in the island was
+disturbed, the Commonwealth broke up. But before that, they
+accomplished what had been ineffectually tried by the poet of
+_Beowulf_, the poet of _Roland_; they found an adequate form of heroic
+narrative. Also in their use of this instrument they were led at last
+to a kind of work that has been made nowhere else in the world, for
+nowhere else does the form of heroic narrative come to be adapted to
+contemporary events, as it was in Iceland, by historians who were
+themselves partakers in the actions they described. Epic, if the Sagas
+are epic, here coincides with autobiography. In the _Sturlunga Saga_,
+written by Sturla, Snorri's nephew, the methods of heroic literature
+are applied by an eye-witness to the events of his own time, and there
+is no discrepancy or incongruity between form and matter. The age
+itself takes voice and speaks in it; there is no interval between
+actors and author. This work is the end of the heroic age, both in
+politics and in literature. After the loss of Icelandic freedom there
+is no more left of Germania, and the _Sturlunga Saga_ which tells the
+story of the last days of freedom is the last word of the Teutonic
+heroic age. It is not a decrepit or imitative or secondary thing; it
+is a masterpiece; and with this true history, this adaptation of an
+heroic style to contemporary realities, the sequence of German heroic
+tradition comes to an end.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE TEUTONIC EPIC
+
+
+I
+
+THE TRAGIC CONCEPTION
+
+Of the heroic poetry in the Teutonic alliterative verse, the history
+must be largely conjectural. The early stages of it are known merely
+through casual references like those of Tacitus. We know that to the
+mind of the Emperor Julian, the songs of the Germans resembled the
+croaking of noisy birds; but this criticism is not satisfactory,
+though it is interesting. The heroes of the old time before Ermanaric
+and Attila were not without their poets, but of what sort the poems
+were in which their praises were sung, we can only vaguely guess. Even
+of the poems that actually remain it is difficult to ascertain the
+history and the conditions of their production. The variety of styles
+discoverable in the extant documents is enough to prevent the easy
+conclusion that the German poetry of the first century was already a
+fixed type, repeated by successive generations of poets down to the
+extinction of alliterative verse as a living form.
+
+After the sixth century things become a little clearer, and it is
+possible to speak with more certainty. One thing at any rate of the
+highest importance may be regarded as beyond a doubt. The passages in
+which Jordanes tells of Suanihilda trampled to death by the horses of
+Ermanaric, and of the vengeance taken by her brothers Sarus and
+Ammius, are enough to prove that the subjects of heroic poetry had
+already in the sixth century, if not earlier, formed themselves
+compactly in the imagination. If Jordanes knew a Gothic poem on
+Ermanaric and the brothers of Suanihilda, that was doubtless very
+different from the Northern poem of Sorli and Hamther, which is a
+later version of the same story. But even if the existence of a Gothic
+ballad of Swanhild were doubted,--and the balance of probabilities is
+against the doubter,--it follows indisputably from the evidence that
+in the time of Jordanes people were accustomed to select and dwell
+upon dramatic incidents in what was accepted as history; the
+appreciation of tragedy was there, the talent to understand a tragic
+situation, to shape a tragic plot, to bring out the essential matter
+in relief and get rid of irrelevant particulars.
+
+In this respect at any rate, and it is one of the most important,
+there is continuity in the ancient poetry, onward from this early
+date. The stories of Alboin in the Lombard history of Paulus Diaconus,
+the meaning of which for the history of poetry is explained so
+admirably in the Introduction to _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_, by Dr.
+Vigfusson and Mr. York Powell, are further and more vivid
+illustrations of the same thing. In the story of the youth of Alboin,
+and the story of his death, there is matter of the same amount as
+would suffice for one of the short epics of the kind we know,--a poem
+of the same length as the Northern lay of the death of Ermanaric, of
+the same compass as _Waltharius_,--or, to take another standard of
+measurement, matter for a single tragedy with the unities preserved.
+Further, there is in both of them exactly that resolute comprehension
+and exposition of tragic meaning which is the virtue of the short
+epics. The tragic contradiction in them could not be outdone by Victor
+Hugo. It is no wonder that the story of Rosamond and Albovine king of
+the Lombards became a favourite with dramatists of different schools,
+from the first essays of the modern drama in the _Rosmunda_ of
+Rucellai, passing by the common way of the novels of Bandello to the
+Elizabethan stage. The earlier story of Alboin's youth, if less
+valuable for emphatic tragedy, being without the baleful figure of a
+Rosamond or a Clytemnestra, is even more perfect as an example of
+tragic complication. Here again is the old sorrow of Priam; the slayer
+of the son face to face with the slain man's father, and not in
+enmity. In beauty of original conception the story is not finer than
+that of Priam and Achilles; and it is impossible to compare the
+stories in any other respect than that of the abstract plot. But in
+one quality of the plot the Lombard drama excels or exceeds the story
+of the last book of the _Iliad_. The contradiction is strained with a
+greater tension; the point of honour is more nearly absolute. This
+does not make it a better story, but it proves that the man who told
+the story could understand the requirements of a tragic plot, could
+imagine clearly a strong dramatic situation, could refrain from
+wasting or obliterating the outline of a great story.
+
+The Lombards and the Gepidae were at war. Alboin, son of the Lombard
+king Audoin, and Thurismund, son of the Gepid king Thurisvend, met in
+battle, and Alboin killed Thurismund. After the battle, the Lombards
+asked King Audoin to knight his son. But Audoin answered that he would
+not break the Lombard custom, according to which it was necessary for
+the young man to receive arms first from the king of some other
+people. Alboin when he heard this set out with forty of the Lombards,
+and went to Thurisvend, whose son he had killed, to ask this honour
+from him. Thurisvend welcomed him, and set him down at his right hand
+in the place where his son used to sit.
+
+Then follows the critical point of the action. The contradiction is
+extreme; the reconciliation also, the solution of the case, is
+perfect. Things are stretched to the breaking-point before the release
+comes; nothing is spared that can possibly aggravate the hatred
+between the two sides, which is kept from breaking out purely by the
+honour of the king. The man from whom an infinite debt of vengeance is
+owing, comes of his own will to throw himself on the generosity of his
+adversary. This, to begin with, is hardly fair to simple-minded people
+like the Gepid warriors; they may fairly think that their king is
+going too far in his reading of the law of honour:
+
+ And it came to pass while the servants were serving at the
+ tables, that Thurisvend, remembering how his son had been
+ lately slain, and calling to mind his death, and beholding
+ his slayer there beside him in his very seat, began to draw
+ deep sighs, for he could not withhold himself any longer,
+ and at last his grief burst forth in words. "Very pleasant
+ to me," quoth he, "is the seat, but sad enough it is to see
+ him that is sitting therein."[16]
+
+[Footnote 16: _C.P.B._, Introduction, p. lii.]
+
+By his confession of his thoughts the king gives an opening to those
+who are waiting for it, and it is taken at once. Insult and rejoinder
+break out, and it is within a hair's breadth of the irretrievable
+plunge that the king speaks his mind. He is lord in that house, and
+his voice allays the tumult; he takes the weapons of his son
+Thurismund, and gives them to Alboin and sends him back in peace and
+safety to his father's kingdom. It is a great story, even in a prose
+abstract, and the strength of its tragic problem is invincible. It is
+with strength like that, with a knowledge not too elaborate or minute,
+but sound and clear, of some of the possibilities of mental conflict
+and tragic contradiction, that heroic poetry first reveals itself
+among the Germans. It is this that gives strength to the story of the
+combat between Hildebrand and his son, of the flight of Walter and
+Hildegund, of the death of Brynhild, of Attila and Gudrun. Some of the
+heroic poems and plots are more simple than these. The battle of
+Maldon is a fair fight without any such distressful circumstances as
+in the case of Hildebrand or of Walter of Aquitaine. The adventures of
+Beowulf are simple, also; there is suspense when he waits the attack
+of the monster, but there is nothing of the deadly crossing of
+passions that there is in other stories. Even in _Maldon_, however,
+there is the tragic error; the fall and defeat of the English is
+brought about by the over-confidence and over-generosity of Byrhtnoth,
+in allowing the enemy to come to close quarters. In _Beowulf_, though
+the adventures of the hero are simple, other less simple stories are
+referred to by the way. One of these is a counterpart to the story of
+the youth of Alboin and the magnanimity of Thurisvend. One of the most
+famous of all the old subjects of heroic poetry was the vengeance of
+Ingeld for the death of his father, King Froda. The form of this story
+in _Beowulf_ agrees with that of Saxo Grammaticus in preserving the
+same kind of opposition as in the story of Alboin, only in this case
+there is a different solution. Here a deadly feud has been put to rest
+by a marriage, and the daughter of Froda's slayer is married to
+Froda's son. But as in the Lombard history and in so many of the
+stories of Iceland, this reconciliation is felt to be intolerable and
+spurious; the need of vengeance is real, and it finds a spokesman in
+an old warrior, who cannot forget his dead lord, nor endure the sight
+of the new bride's kinsmen going free and wearing the spoils of their
+victory. So Ingeld has to choose between his wife, wedded to him out
+of his enemy's house, and his father, whom that enemy has killed. And
+so everywhere in the remains, not too voluminous, of the literature of
+the heroic age, one encounters this sort of tragic scheme. One of
+those ancient plots, abstracted and written out fair by Saxo, is the
+plot of _Hamlet_.
+
+There is not one of the old Northern heroic poems, as distinct from
+the didactic and mythological pieces, that is without this tragic
+contradiction; sometimes expressed with the extreme of severity, as in
+the lay of the death of Ermanaric; sometimes with lyrical
+effusiveness, as in the lament of Gudrun; sometimes with a mystery
+upon it from the under-world and the kingdom of the dead, as in the
+poems of Helgi, and of the daughter of Angantyr.
+
+The poem of the death of Ermanaric is a version of the story told by
+Jordanes, which since his time had come to be attached to the cycle of
+the Niblungs.
+
+Swanhild, the daughter of Sigurd and Gudrun, was wedded to Ermanaric,
+king of the Goths. The king's counsellor wrought on his mind with
+calumnies against the queen, and he ordered her to be trampled to
+death under horses' feet, and so she died, though the horses were
+afraid of the brightness of her eyes and held back until her eyes were
+covered. Gudrun stirred up her sons, Sorli and Hamther, to go and
+avenge their sister. As they set out, they quarrelled with their
+base-born brother Erp, and killed him,--the tragic error in this
+history, for it was the want of a third man that ruined them, and Erp
+would have helped them if they had let him. In the hall of the Goths
+they defy their enemy and hew down his men; no iron will bite in their
+armour; they cut off the hands and feet of Ermanaric. Then, as happens
+so often in old stories, they go too far, and a last insult alters the
+balance against them, as Odysseus alters it at the leave-taking with
+Polyphemus. The last gibe at Ermanaric stirs him as he lies, and he
+calls on the remnant of the Goths to stone the men that neither sword
+nor spear nor arrow will bring down. And that was the end of them.
+
+ "We have fought a good fight; we stand on slain Goths that
+ have had their fill of war. We have gotten a good report,
+ though we die to-day or to-morrow. No man can live over the
+ evening, when the word of the Fates has gone forth."
+
+ There fell Sorli at the gable of the hall, and Hamther was
+ brought low at the end of the house.
+
+Among the Norse poems it is this one, the _Hamđismál_, that comes
+nearest to the severity of the English _Maldon_ poem. It is wilder and
+more cruel, but the end attains to simplicity.
+
+The gap in _Codex Regius_, the "Elder" or "Poetic Edda," has destroyed
+the poems midway between the beginning and end of the tragedy of
+Sigfred and Brynhild, and among them the poem of their last meeting.
+There is nothing but the prose paraphrase to tell what that was, but
+the poor substitute brings out all the more clearly the strength of
+the original conception, the tragic problem.
+
+After the gap in the manuscript there are various poems of Brynhild
+and Gudrun, in which different views of the story are taken, and in
+all of them the tragic contradiction is extreme: in Brynhild's
+vengeance on Sigurd, in Gudrun's lament for her husband slain by her
+brothers, and in the later fortunes of Gudrun. In some of these poems
+the tragedy becomes lyrical, and two kinds of imagination, epic and
+elegiac, are found in harmony.
+
+The story of Helgi and Sigrun displays this rivalry of moods--a tragic
+story, carried beyond the tragic stress into the mournful quiet of the
+shadows.
+
+Helgi is called upon by Sigrun to help her against Hodbrodd, and save
+her from a hateful marriage. Helgi kills Hodbrodd, and wins Sigrun;
+but he has also killed Sigrun's father Hogni and her elder brother.
+The younger brother Dag takes an oath to put away enmity, but breaks
+his oath and kills Helgi.
+
+It is a story like all the others in which there is a conflict of
+duties, between friendship and the duty of vengeance, a plot of the
+same kind as that of Froda and Ingeld. Sigrun's brother is tried in
+the same way as Ingeld in the story told by Saxo and mentioned in
+_Beowulf_. But it does not end with the death of Helgi. Sigrun looks
+for Helgi to come back in the hour of the "Assembly of Dreams," and
+Helgi comes and calls her, and she follows him:--
+
+ "Thy hair is thick with rime, thou art wet with the dew of
+ death, thy hands are cold and dank."
+
+ "It is thine own doing, Sigrun from Sevafell, that Helgi is
+ drenched with deadly dew; thou weepest cruel tears, thou
+ gold-dight, sunbright lady of the South, before thou goest
+ to sleep; every one of them falls with blood, wet and chill,
+ upon my breast. Yet precious are the draughts that are
+ poured for us, though we have lost both love and land, and
+ no man shall sing a song of lamentation though he see the
+ wounds on my breast, for kings' daughters have come among
+ the dead."
+
+ "I have made thee a bed, Helgi, a painless bed, thou son of
+ the Wolfings. I shall sleep in thine arms, O king, as I
+ should if thou wert alive."
+
+This is something different from epic or tragedy, but it does not
+interfere with the tragedy of which it is the end.
+
+The poem of the _Waking of Angantyr_ is so filled with mystery and
+terror that it is hard to find in it anything else. After the
+_Volospá_ it is the most wonderful of all the Northern poems.
+
+Hervor, daughter of Angantyr, is left alone to avenge her father and
+her eleven brothers, killed by Arrow Odd before her birth. In her
+father's grave is the sword of the Dwarfs that never is drawn in vain,
+and she comes to his grave to find it. The island where he lies is
+full of death-fires, and the dead are astir, but Hervor goes on. She
+calls on her father and her brothers to help her:
+
+ "Awake, Angantyr! It is Hervor that bids thee awake. Give me
+ the sword of the Dwarfs! Hervard! Hiorvard! Rani! Angantyr!
+ I bid you all awake!"
+
+Her father answers from the grave; he will not give up the sword, for
+the forgers of it when it was taken from them put a curse on those who
+wear it. But Hervor will not leave him until he has yielded to her
+prayers, and at last she receives the sword from her father's
+hands.[17]
+
+[Footnote 17: This poem has been followed by M. Leconte de Lisle in
+_L'Épée d'Angantyr (Počmes Barbares)_. It was among the first of the
+Northern poems to be translated into English, in Hickes's _Thesaurus_
+(1705), i. p. 193. It is also included in Percy's _Five Pieces of
+Runic Poetry_ (1763).]
+
+Although the poem of Hervor lies in this way "between the worlds" of
+Life and Death,--the phrase is Hervor's own,--although the action is
+so strange and so strangely encompassed with unearthly fire and
+darkness, its root is not set in the dim borderland where the dialogue
+is carried on. The root is tragic, and not fantastic, nor is there any
+excess, nor anything strained beyond the limit of tragedy, in the
+passion of Hervor.
+
+Definite imagination of a tragic plot, and sure comprehension of the
+value of dramatic problems, are not enough in themselves to make a
+perfect poem. They may go along with various degrees of imperfection
+in particular respects; faults of diction, either tenuity or
+extravagance of phrasing may accompany this central imaginative power.
+Strength of plot is partly independent of style; it bears translation,
+it can be explained, it is something that can be abstracted from the
+body of a poem and still make itself impressive. The dramatic value of
+the story of the death of Alboin is recognisable even when it is
+stated in the most general terms, as a mere formula; the story of
+_Waltharius_ retains its life, even in the Latin hexameters; the plot
+of _Hamlet_ is interesting, even in Saxo; the story of the Niblungs,
+even in the mechanical prose paraphrase. This gift of shaping a plot
+and letting it explain itself without encumbrances is not to be
+mistaken for the whole secret of the highest kind of poetry. But, if
+not the whole, it is the spring of the whole. All the other gifts may
+be there, but without this, though all but the highest kind of epic or
+tragic art may be attainable, the very highest will not be attained.
+
+Aristotle may be referred to again. As he found it convenient in his
+description of epic to insist on its dramatic nature, in his
+description of tragedy it pleased him to lay emphasis on that part of
+the work which is common to tragedy and epic--the story, the plot. It
+may be remarked how well the barbarous poetry conforms to the pattern
+laid down in Aristotle's description. The old German epic, in
+_Hildebrand_, _Waldere_, _Finnesburh_, _Byrhtnoth_, besides all the
+Northern lays of Sigurd, Brynhild, and Gudrun, is dramatic in its
+method, letting the persons speak for themselves as much as may be. So
+far it complies with Aristotle's delineation of epic. And further, all
+this dramatic bent may be seen clearly to have its origin in the mere
+story,--in the dramatic situation, in fables that might be acted by
+puppets or in a dumb show, and yet be tragical. No analytic or
+psychological interest in varieties of character--in [Greek:
+ęthę]--could have uttered the passion of Brynhild or of Gudrun.
+Aristotle knew that psychological analysis and moral rhetoric were not
+the authors of Clytemnestra or Oedipus. The barbarian poets are on a
+much lower and more archaic level than the poets with whom Aristotle
+is concerned, but here, where comparison is not meaningless nor
+valueless, their imaginations are seen to work in the same sound and
+productive way as the minds of Aeschylus or Sophocles, letting the
+seed--the story in its abstract form, the mere plot--develop itself
+and spring naturally into the fuller presentation of the characters
+that are implied in it. It is another kind of art that studies
+character in detail, one by one, and then sets them playing at chance
+medley, and trusts to luck that the result will be entertaining.
+
+That Aristotle is confirmed by these barbarian auxiliaries is of no
+great importance to Aristotle, but it is worth arguing that the
+barbarous German imagination at an earlier stage, relatively, than the
+Homeric, is found already possessed of something like the sanity of
+judgment, the discrimination of essentials from accidents, which is
+commonly indicated by the term classical. Compared with Homer these
+German songs are prentice work; but they are begun in the right way,
+and therefore to compare them with a masterpiece in which the same way
+is carried out to its end is not unjustifiable.
+
+
+II
+
+SCALE OF THE POEMS
+
+The following are the extant poems on native heroic themes, written in
+one or other of the dialects of the Teutonic group, and in unrhymed
+alliterative measures.
+
+(1) _Continental._--The _Lay of Hildebrand_ (_c._ A.D. 800), a Low
+German poem, copied by High German clerks, is the only remnant of the
+heroic poetry of the continental Germans in which, together with the
+national metre, there is a national theme.
+
+(2) _English._--The poems of this order in old English are _Beowulf_,
+_Finnesburh_, _Waldere_, and _Byrhtnoth_, or the _Lay of Maldon_.
+Besides these there are poems on historical themes preserved in the
+Chronicle, of which _Brunanburh_ is the most important, and two
+dramatic lyrics, _Widsith_ and _Deor_, in which there are many
+allusions to the mythical and heroic cycles.
+
+(3) _Scandinavian and Icelandic._--The largest number of heroic poems
+in alliterative verse is found in the old Northern language, and in
+manuscripts written in Iceland. The poems themselves may have come
+from other places in which the old language of Norway was spoken, some
+of them perhaps from Norway itself, many of them probably from those
+islands round Britain to which a multitude of Norwegian settlers were
+attracted,--Shetland, the Orkneys, the Western Islands of
+Scotland.[18]
+
+[Footnote 18: Cf. G. Vigfusson, Prolegomena to _Sturlunga_ (Oxford,
+1878); (_Corpus Poeticum Boreale_ (_ibid._ 1883); _Grimm Centenary
+Papers_ 1886); Sophus Bugge, _Helgedigtene_ (1896; trans. Schofield,
+1899).]
+
+The principal collection is that of the manuscript in the King's
+Library at Copenhagen (2365, 4'o) generally referred to as _Codex
+Regius_ (R); it is this book, discovered in the seventeenth century,
+that has received the inaccurate but convenient names of _Elder Edda_,
+or _Poetic Edda_, or _Edda of Sćmund the Wise_, by a series of
+miscalculations fully described in the preface to the _Corpus Poeticum
+Boreale_. Properly, the name _Edda_ belongs only to the prose treatise
+by Snorri Sturluson.
+
+The chief contents of _Codex Regius_ are a series of independent poems
+on the Volsung story, beginning with the tragedies of _Helgi and
+Swava_ and _Helgi and Sigrun_ (originally unconnected with the Volsung
+legend), and going on in the order of events.
+
+The series is broken by a gap in which the poems dealing with some of
+the most important parts of the story have been lost. The matter of
+their contents is known from the prose paraphrase called _Volsunga
+Saga_. Before the Volsung series comes a number of poems chiefly
+mythological: the _Sibyl's Prophecy_, (Volospá); _the Wooing of Frey_,
+or the _Errand of Skirnir_; the _Flyting of Thor and Woden_
+(Harbarzlióđ); _Thor's Fishing for the Midgarth Serpent_ (Hymiskviđa);
+the _Railing of Loki_ (Lokasenna); the _Winning of Thor's Hammer_
+(Ţrymskviđa); the _Lay of Weland_. There are also some didactic poems,
+chief among them being the gnomic miscellany under the title
+_Hávamál_; while besides this there are others, like _Vafţrúđnismál_,
+treating of mythical subjects in a more or less didactic and
+mechanical way. There are a number of prose passages introducing or
+linking the poems. The confusion in some parts of the book is great.
+
+_Codex Regius_ is not the only source; other mythic and heroic poems
+are found in other manuscripts. The famous poem of the _Doom of
+Balder_ (Gray's "Descent of Odin"); the poem of the _Rescue of
+Menglad_, the enchanted princess; the verses preserved in the
+_Heiđreks Saga_, belonging to the story of Angantyr; besides the poem
+of the _Magic Mill_ (Grottasöngr) and the _Song of the Dart_ (Gray's
+"Fatal Sisters"). There are many fragmentary verses, among them some
+from the _Biarkamál_, a poem with some curious points of likeness to
+the English _Lay of Finnesburh_. A Swedish inscription has preserved
+four verses of an old poem on Theodoric.
+
+Thus there is some variety in the original documents now extant out of
+the host of poems that have been lost. One conclusion at least is
+irresistible--that, in guessing at the amount of epic poetry of this
+order which has been lost, one is justified in making a liberal
+estimate. Fragments are all that we possess. The extant poems have
+escaped the deadliest risks; the fire at Copenhagen in 1728, the
+bombardment in 1807, the fire in the Cotton Library in 1731, in which
+_Beowulf_ was scorched but not burned. The manuscripts of _Finnesburh_
+and _Maldon_ have been mislaid; but for the transcripts taken in time
+by Hickes and Hearne they would have been as little known as the songs
+that the Sirens sang. The poor remnants of _Waldere_ were found by
+Stephens in two scraps of bookbinders' parchment.
+
+When it is seen what hazards have been escaped by those bits of
+wreckage, and at the same time how distinct in character the several
+poems are, it is plain that one may use some freedom in thinking of
+the amount of this old poetry that has perished.
+
+The loss is partly made good in different ways: in the Latin of the
+historians, Jordanes, Paulus Diaconus, and most of all in the
+paraphrases, prose and verse, by Saxo Grammaticus; in Ekkehard's Latin
+poem of _Waltharius_ (_c._ A.D. 930); in the _Volsunga Saga_, which
+has kept the matter of the lost poems of _Codex Regius_ and something
+of their spirit; in the _Thidreks Saga_, a prose story made up by a
+Norwegian in the thirteenth century from current North German ballads
+of the Niblungs; in the German poems of the twelfth and thirteenth
+centuries, which, in a later form of the language and in rhyming
+verse, have preserved at any rate some matters of tradition, some
+plots of stories, if little of the peculiar manner and imagination of
+the older poetry.
+
+The casual references to Teutonic heroic subjects in a vast number of
+authors have been brought together in a monumental work, _die deutsche
+Heldensage_, by Wilhelm Grimm (1829).
+
+
+THE WESTERN GROUP
+
+_Hildebrand_, _Finnesburh_, _Waldere_, _Beowulf_, _Byrhtnoth_
+
+The Western group of poems includes all those that are not
+Scandinavian; there is only one among them which is not English, the
+poem of _Hildebrand_. They do not afford any very copious material for
+inferences as to the whole course and progress of poetry in the
+regions to which they belong. A comparison of the fragmentary
+_Hildebrand_ with the fragments of _Waldere_ shows a remarkable
+difference in compass and fulness; but, at the same time, the
+vocabulary and phrases of _Hildebrand_ declare that poem unmistakably
+to belong to the same family as the more elaborate _Waldere_.
+_Finnesburh_, the fragmentary poem of the lost Lambeth MS., seems
+almost as far removed as _Hildebrand_ from the more expansive and
+leisurely method of _Waldere_; while _Waldere_, _Beowulf_, and the
+poem of _Maldon_ resemble one another in their greater ease and
+fluency, as compared with the brevity and abruptness of _Hildebrand_
+or _Finnesburh_. The documents, as far as they go, bear out the view
+that in the Western German tongues, or at any rate in England, there
+was a development of heroic poetry tending to a greater amplitude of
+narration. This progress falls a long way short of the fulness of
+Homer, not to speak of the extreme diffuseness of some of the French
+_Chansons de Geste_. It is such, however, as to distinguish the
+English poems, _Waldere_, _Beowulf_, and _Byrhtnoth_, very obviously
+from the poem of _Hildebrand_. While, at the same time, the brevity of
+_Hildebrand_ is not like the brevity of the Northern poems.
+_Hildebrand_ is a poem capable of expansion. It is easy enough to see
+in what manner its outlines might be filled up and brought into the
+proportions of _Waldere_ or _Beowulf_. In the Northern poems, on the
+other hand, there is a lyrical conciseness, and a broken emphatic
+manner of exposition, which from first to last prevented any such
+increase of volume as seems to have taken place in the old English
+poetry; though there are some poems, the _Atlamál_ particularly, which
+indicate that some of the Northern poets wished to go to work on a
+larger scale than was generally allowed them by their traditions.
+
+In the Northern group there is a great variety in respect of the
+amount of incident that goes to a single poem; some poems deal with a
+single adventure, while others give an abstract of a whole heroic
+history. In the Western poems this variety is not to be found. There
+is a difference in this respect between _Hildebrand_ and _Waldere_,
+and still more, at least on the surface, between _Hildebrand_ and
+_Beowulf_; but nothing like the difference between the _Lay of the
+Hammer_ (Ţrymskviđa), which is an episode of Thor, and the _Lay of
+Weland_ or the _Lay of Brynhild_, which give in a summary way a whole
+history from beginning to end.
+
+_Hildebrand_ tells of the encounter of father and son, Hildebrand and
+Hadubrand, with a few references to the past of Hildebrand and his
+relations to Odoacer and Theodoric. It is one adventure, a tragedy in
+one scene.
+
+_Finnesburh_, being incomplete at the beginning and end, is not good
+evidence. What remains of it presents a single adventure, the fight in
+the hall between Danes and Frisians. There is another version of the
+story of _Finnesburh_, which, as reported in _Beowulf_ (ll. 1068-1154)
+gives a good deal more of the story than is given in the separate
+_Finnesburh Lay_. This episode in _Beowulf_, where a poem of
+_Finnesburh_ is chanted by the Danish minstrel, is not to be taken as
+contributing another independent poem to the scanty stock; the
+minstrel's story is reported, not quoted at full length. It has been
+reduced by the poet of _Beowulf_, so as not to take up too large a
+place of its own in the composition. Such as it is, it may very well
+count as direct evidence of the way in which epic poems were produced
+and set before an audience; and it may prove that it was possible for
+an old English epic to deal with almost the whole of a tragic history
+in one sitting. In this case the tragedy is far less complex than the
+tale of the Niblungs, whatever interpretation may be given to the
+obscure allusions in which it is preserved.
+
+Finn, son of Folcwalda, king of the Frisians, entertained Hnćf the
+Dane, along with the Danish warriors, in the castle of Finnesburh.
+There, for reasons of his own, he attacked the Danes; who kept the
+hall against him, losing their own leader Hnćf, but making a great
+slaughter of the Frisians.
+
+The _Beowulf_ episode takes up the story at this point.
+
+Hnćf was slain in the place of blood. His sister Hildeburg, Finn's
+wife, had to mourn for brother and son.
+
+Hengest succeeded Hnćf in command of the Danes and still kept the hall
+against the Frisians. Finn was compelled to make terms with the Danes.
+Hengest and his men were to live among the Frisians with a place of
+their own, and share alike with Finn's household in all the gifts of
+the king. Finn bound himself by an oath that Hengest and his men
+should be free of blame and reproach, and that he would hold any
+Frisian guilty who should cast it up against the Danes that they had
+followed their lord's slayer.[19] Then, after the oaths, was held the
+funeral of the Danish and the Frisian prince, brother and son of
+Hildeburg the queen.
+
+[Footnote 19: Compare _Cynewulf and Cyneheard_ in the Chronicle (A.D.
+755); also the outbreak of enmity, through recollection of old wrongs,
+in the stories of Alboin, and of the vengeance for Froda (_supra_, pp.
+68-70).]
+
+Then they went home to Friesland, where Hengest stayed with Finn
+through the winter. With the spring he set out, meaning vengeance; but
+he dissembled and rendered homage, and accepted the sword the lord
+gives his liegeman. Death came upon Finn in his house; for the Danes
+came back and slew him, and the hall was made red with the Frisian
+blood. The Danes took Hildeburg and the treasure of Finn and carried
+the queen and the treasure to Denmark.
+
+The whole story, with the exception of the original grievance or
+grudge of the Frisian king, which is not explained, and the first
+battle, which is taken as understood, is given in _Beowulf_ as the
+contents of one poem, delivered in one evening by a harper. It is more
+complicated than the story of _Hildebrand_, more even than _Waldere_;
+and more than either of the two chief sections of _Beowulf_ taken
+singly--"Beowulf in Denmark" and the "Fight with the Dragon." It is
+far less than the plot of the long _Lay of Brynhild_, in which the
+whole Niblung history is contained. In its distribution of the action,
+it corresponds very closely to the story of the death of the Niblungs
+as given by the _Atlakviđa_ and the _Atlamál_. The discrepancies
+between these latter poems need not be taken into account here. In
+each of them and in the _Finnesburh_ story there is a double climax;
+first the wrong, then the vengeance. _Finnesburh_ might also be
+compared, as far as the arrangement goes, with the _Song of Roland_;
+the first part gives the treacherous attack and the death of the hero;
+then comes a pause between the two centres of interest, followed in
+the second part by expiation of the wrong.
+
+The story of _Finnesburh_ is obscure in many respects; the tradition
+of it has failed to preserve the motive for Finn's attack on his
+wife's brother, without which the story loses half its value.
+Something remains, nevertheless, and it is possible to recognise in
+this episode a greater regard for unity and symmetry of narrative than
+is to be found in _Beowulf_ taken as a whole.
+
+The Lambeth poem of _Finnesburh_ most probably confined itself to the
+battle in the hall. There is no absolute proof of this, apart from the
+intensity of its tone, in the extant fragment, which would agree best
+with a short story limited, like _Hildebrand_, to one adventure. It
+has all the appearance of a short lay, a single episode. Such a poem
+might end with the truce of Finn and Hengest, and an anticipation of
+the Danes' vengeance:
+
+ It is marvel an the red blood run not, as the rain does in
+ the street.
+
+Yet the stress of this adventure is not greater than that of Roland,
+which does not end at Roncesvalles; it may be that the _Finnesburh_
+poem went on to some of the later events, as told in the _Finnesburh_
+abridgment in _Beowulf_.
+
+The story of Walter of Aquitaine as represented by the two fragments
+of old English verse is not greatly inconsistent with the same story
+in its Latin form of _Waltharius_. The Latin verses of _Waltharius_
+tell the story of the flight of Walter and Hildegund from the house of
+Attila, and of the treacherous attack on Walter by Gunther, king of
+the Franks, against the advice, but with the unwilling consent, of
+Hagen, his liegeman and Walter's friend. Hagen, Hildegund, and Walter
+were hostages with Attila from the Franks, Burgundians, and
+Aquitanians. They grew up together at the Court of Attila till
+Gunther, son of Gibicho, became king of the Franks and refused tribute
+to the Huns. Then Hagen escaped and went home. Walter and Hildegund
+were lovers, and they, too, thought of flight, and escaped into the
+forests, westward, with a great load of treasure, and some fowling and
+fishing gear for the journey.
+
+After they had crossed the Rhine, they were discovered by Hagen; and
+Gunther, with twelve of the Franks, went after them to take the
+Hunnish treasure: Hagen followed reluctantly. The pursuers came up
+with Walter as he was asleep in a hold among the hills, a narrow green
+place with overhanging cliffs all round, and a narrow path leading up
+to it. Hildegund awakened Walter, and he went and looked down at his
+adversaries. Walter offered terms, through the mediation of Hagen, but
+Gunther would have none of them, and the fight began. The Latin poem
+describes with great spirit how one after another the Franks went up
+against Walter: Camelo (ll. 664-685), Scaramundus (686-724),
+Werinhardus the bowman (725-755), Ekevrid the Saxon (756-780), who
+went out jeering at Walter; Hadavartus (781-845), Patavrid (846-913),
+Hagen's sister's son, whose story is embellished with a diatribe on
+avarice; Gerwicus (914-940), fighting to avenge his companions and
+restore their honour--
+
+ Is furit ut caesos mundet vindicta sodales;
+
+but he, too, fell--
+
+ Exitiumque dolens, pulsabat calcibus arvum.
+
+Then there was a breathing-space, before Randolf, the eighth of them,
+made trial of Walter's defence (962-981). After him came Eleuther,
+whose other name was Helmnod, with a harpoon and a line, and the line
+was held by Trogus, Tanastus, and the king; Hagen still keeping aloof,
+though he had seen his nephew killed. The harpoon failed; three
+Frankish warriors were added to the slain; the king and Hagen were
+left (l. 1060).
+
+Gunther tried to draw Hagen into the fight. Hagen refused at first,
+but gave way at last, on account of the slaying of his nephew. He
+advised a retreat for the night, and an attack on Walter when he
+should have left the fastness. And so the day ended.
+
+Walter and Hildegund took turns to watch, Hildegund singing to awaken
+Walter when his turn came. They left their hold in the morning; but
+they had not gone a mile when Hildegund, looking behind, saw two men
+coming down a hill after them. These were Gunther and Hagen, and they
+had come for Walter's life. Walter sent Hildegund with the horse and
+its burden into the wood for safety, while he took his stand on rising
+ground. Gunther jeered at him as he came up; Walter made no answer to
+him, but reproached Hagen, his old friend. Hagen defended himself by
+reason of the vengeance due for his nephew; and so they fought, with
+more words of scorn. Hagen lost his eye, and Gunther his leg, and
+Walter's right hand was cut off by Hagen; and "this was their sharing
+of the rings of Attila!"--
+
+ Sic, sic, armillas partiti sunt Avarenses (l. 1404).
+
+Walter and Hildegund were king and queen of Aquitaine, but of his
+later wars and victories the tale has no more to tell.
+
+Of the two old English fragments of this story the first contains part
+of a speech of Hildegund[20] encouraging Walter.
+
+[Footnote 20: Hildegyth, her English name, is unfortunately not
+preserved in either of the fragmentary leaves. It is found (Hildigiđ)
+in the _Liber Vitae_ (Sweet, _Oldest English Texts_, p. 155).]
+
+Its place appears to be in the pause of the fight, when the Frankish
+champions have been killed, and Gunther and Hagen are alone. The
+speech is rhetorical: "Thou hast the sword Mimming, the work of
+Weland, that fails not them that wield it. Be of good courage, captain
+of Attila; never didst thou draw back to thy hold for all the strokes
+of the foeman; nay, my heart was afraid because of thy rashness. Thou
+shalt break the boast of Gunther; he came on without a cause, he
+refused the offered gifts; he shall return home empty-handed, if he
+return at all." That is the purport of it.
+
+The second fragment is a debate between Gunther and Walter. It begins
+with the close of a speech of Gunther (Guđhere) in which there are
+allusions to other parts of the heroic cycle, such as are common in
+_Beowulf_.
+
+The allusion here is to one of the adventures of Widia, Weland's son;
+how he delivered Theodoric from captivity, and of Theodoric's
+gratitude. The connexion is obscure, but the reference is of great
+value as proving the resemblance of narrative method in _Waldere_ and
+_Beowulf_, not to speak of the likeness to the Homeric way of quoting
+old stories. Waldere answers, and this is the substance of his
+argument: "Lo, now, Lord of the Burgundians, it was thy thought that
+Hagena's hand should end my fighting. Come then and win my corselet,
+my father's heirloom, from the shoulders weary of war."[21]
+
+[Footnote 21: The resemblance to Hildebrand, l. 58, is pointed out by
+Sophus Bugge: "Doh maht du nu aodlihho, ibu dir din ellen taoc, In sus
+heremo man hrusti giwinnan." (Hildebrand speaks): "Easily now mayest
+thou win the spoils of so old a man, if thy strength avail thee." It
+is remarkable as evidence of the strong conventional character of the
+Teutonic poetry, and of the community of the different nations in the
+poetical convention, that two short passages like _Hildebrand_ and
+_Waldere_ should present so many points of likeness to other poems, in
+details of style. Thus the two lines quoted from _Hildebrand_ as a
+parallel to _Waldere_ contain also the equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon
+phrase, _Ţonne his ellen deah_, a familiar part of the Teutonic
+_Gradus_.]
+
+The fragment closes with a pious utterance of submission to heaven, by
+which the poem is shown to be of the same order as _Beowulf_ in this
+respect also, as well as others, that it is affected by a turn for
+edification, and cannot stand as anything like a pure example of the
+older kind of heroic poetry. The phrasing here is that of the
+Anglo-Saxon secondary poems; the common religious phrasing that came
+into vogue and supplemented the old heathen poetical catch-words.
+
+The style of _Waldere_ makes it probable that the action of the story
+was not hurried unduly. If the author kept the same proportion
+throughout, his poem may have been almost as long as _Waltharius_. It
+is probable that the fight among the rocks was described in detail;
+the _Maldon_ poem may show how such a subject could be managed in old
+English verse, and how the matter of _Waltharius_ may have been
+expressed in _Waldere_. Roughly speaking, there is about as much
+fighting in the three hundred and twenty-five lines of _Maldon_ as in
+double the number of hexameters in _Waltharius_; but the _Maldon_ poem
+is more concise than the extant fragments of _Waldere_. _Waldere_ may
+easily have taken up more than a thousand lines.
+
+The Latin and the English poems are not in absolute agreement. The
+English poet knew that Guđhere, Guntharius, was Burgundian, not Frank;
+and an expression in the speech of Hildegyth suggests that the fight
+in the narrow pass was not so exact a succession of single combats as
+in _Waltharius_.
+
+The poem of _Maldon_ is more nearly related in its style to _Waldere_
+and _Beowulf_ than to the _Finnesburh_ fragment. The story of the
+battle has considerable likeness to the story of the fight at
+Finnesburh. The details, however, are given in a fuller and more
+capable way, at greater length.
+
+_Beowulf_ has been commonly regarded as exceptional, on account of its
+length and complexity, among the remains of the old Teutonic poetry.
+This view is hardly consistent with a right reading of _Waldere_, or
+of _Maldon_ either, for that matter. It is not easy to make any great
+distinction between _Beowulf_ and _Waldere_ in respect of the
+proportions of the story. The main action of _Beowulf_ is comparable
+in extent with the action of _Waltharius_. The later adventure of
+_Beowulf_ has the character of a sequel, which extends the poem, to
+the detriment of its proportions, but without adding any new element
+of complexity to the epic form. Almost all the points in which the
+manner of _Beowulf_ differs from that of _Finnesburh_ may be found in
+_Waldere_ also, and are common to _Waldere_ and _Beowulf_ in
+distinction from _Hildebrand_ and _Finnesburh_. The two poems, the
+poem of _Beowulf_ and the fragments of _Waldere_, seem to be alike in
+the proportion they allow to dramatic argument, and in their manner of
+alluding to heroic matters outside of their own proper stories, not to
+speak of their affinities of ethical tone and sentiment.
+
+The time of the whole action of _Beowulf_ is long. The poem, however,
+falls naturally into two main divisions--_Beowulf in Denmark_, and the
+_Death of Beowulf_. If it is permissible to consider these for the
+present as two separate stories, then it may be affirmed that in none
+of the stories preserved in the old poetic form of England and the
+German Continent is there any great length or complexity.
+_Hildebrand_, a combat; _Finnesburh_, a defence of a house; _Waldere_,
+a champion beset by his enemies; _Beowulf in Denmark_, the hero as a
+deliverer from pests; _Beowulf's Death_ in one action; _Maldon_ the
+last battle of an English captain; these are the themes, and they are
+all simple. There is more complexity in the story of _Finnesburh_, as
+reported in _Beowulf_, than in all the rest; but even that story
+appears to have observed as much as possible the unity of action. The
+epic singer at the court of the Dane appears to have begun, not with
+the narrative of the first contest, but immediately after that,
+assuming that part of the story as known, in order to concentrate
+attention on the vengeance, on the penalty exacted from Finn the
+Frisian for his treachery to his guests.
+
+Some of the themes may have less in them than others, but there is no
+such variety of scale among them as will be found in the Northern
+poems. There seems to be a general agreement of taste among the
+Western German poets and audiences, English and Saxon, as to the right
+compass of an heroic lay. When the subject was a foreign one, as in
+the _Hęliand_, in the poems of _Genesis_ and _Exodus_, in _Andreas_,
+or _Elene_, there might be room for the complexity and variety of the
+foreign model. The poem of _Judith_ may be considered as a happy
+instance in which the foreign document has of itself, by a
+pre-established harmony, conformed to an old German fashion. In the
+original story of _Judith_ the unities are observed in the very degree
+that was suited to the ways of the Anglo-Saxon poetry. It is hazardous
+to speak generally of a body of poetry so imperfectly represented in
+extant literature, but it is at any rate permissible to say that the
+extant heroic poems, saved out of the wreck of the Western Teutonic
+poetry, show a strong regard for unity of action, in every case except
+that of _Beowulf_; while in that case there are two stories--a story
+and a sequel--each observing a unity within its own limit.
+
+Considered apart from the Northern poems, the poems of England and
+Germany give indication of a progress in style from a more archaic and
+repressed, to a more developed and more prolix kind of narrative. The
+difference is considerable between _Hildebrand_ and _Waldere_,
+between _Finnesburh_ and _Beowulf_.
+
+It is the change and development in style, rather than any increase in
+the complexity of the themes, that accounts for the difference in
+scale between the shorter and the longer poems.
+
+For the natural history of poetical forms this point is of the highest
+importance. The Teutonic poetry shows that epic may be developed out
+of short lays through a gradual increase of ambition and of eloquence
+in the poets who deal with common themes. There is no question here of
+the process of agglutination and contamination whereby a number of
+short lays are supposed to be compounded into an epic poem. Of that
+process it may be possible to find traces in _Beowulf_ and elsewhere.
+But quite apart from that, there is the process by which an archaic
+stiff manner is replaced by greater freedom, without any loss of unity
+in the plot. The story of Walter of Aquitaine is as simple as the
+story of Hildebrand. The difference between _Hildebrand_ and _Waldere_
+is the difference between an archaic and an accomplished mode of
+narrative, and this difference is made by a change in spirit and
+imagination, not by a process of agglutination. To make the epic of
+_Waldere_ it was not necessary to cobble together a number of older
+lays on separate episodes. It was possible to keep the original plan
+of the old story in its simplest irreducible form, and still give it
+the force and magnificence of a lofty and eloquent style. It was for
+the attainment of this pitch of style that the heroic poetry laboured
+in _Waldere_ and _Beowulf_, with at least enough success to make these
+poems distinct from the rest in this group.
+
+With all the differences among them, the continental and English
+poems, _Hildebrand_, _Waldere_, and the rest, form a group by
+themselves, with certain specific qualities of style distinguishing
+them from the Scandinavian heroic poetry. The history of the
+Scandinavian poetry is the converse of the English development. Epic
+poetry in the North becomes more and more hopeless as time goes on,
+and with some exceptions tends further and further away from the
+original type which was common to all the Germans, and from which
+those common forms and phrases have been derived that are found in the
+"Poetic Edda" as well as in _Beowulf_ or the _Hęliand_.
+
+In England before the old poetry died out altogether there was
+attained a certain magnitude and fulness of narrative by which the
+English poems are distinguished, and in virtue of which they may claim
+the title _epic_ in no transferred or distorted sense of the term. In
+the North a different course is taken. There seems indeed, in the
+_Atlamál_ especially, a poem of exceptional compass and weight among
+those of the North, to have been something like the Western desire for
+a larger scale of narrative poem. But the rhetorical expansion of the
+older forms into an equable and deliberate narrative was counteracted
+by the still stronger affection for lyrical modes of speech, for
+impassioned, abrupt, and heightened utterance. No epic solidity or
+composure could be obtained in the fiery Northern verse; the poets
+could not bring themselves into the frame of mind required for long
+recitals; they had no patience for the intervals necessary, in epic as
+in dramatic poetry, between the critical moments. They would have
+everything equally full of energy, everything must be emphatic and
+telling. But with all this, the Northern heroic poems are in some of
+their elements strongly allied to the more equable and duller poems
+of the West; there is a strong element of epic in their lyrical
+dialogues and monologues, and in their composition and arrangement of
+plots.
+
+
+THE NORTHERN GROUP
+
+In comparing the English and the Northern poems, it should be borne in
+mind that the documents of the Northern poetry are hardly sufficient
+evidence of the condition of Northern epic at its best. The English
+documents are fragmentary, indeed, but at least they belong to a time
+in which the heroic poetry was attractive and well appreciated; as is
+proved by the wonderful freshness of the _Maldon_ poem, late though it
+is. The Northern poems seem to have lost their vogue and freshness
+before they came to be collected and written down. They were
+imperfectly remembered and reported; the text of them is broken and
+confused, and the gaps are made up with prose explanations. The
+fortunate preservation of a second copy of _Volospá_, in Hauk's book,
+has further multiplied labours and perplexities by a palpable
+demonstration of the vanity of copiers, and of the casual way in which
+the strophes of a poem might be shuffled at random in different texts;
+while the chief manuscript of the poems itself has in some cases
+double and incongruous versions of the same passage.[22]
+
+[Footnote 22: Cf. _C.P.B._, i. p. 375, for double versions of part of
+_Hamđismál_, and of the _Lay of Helgi_. On pp. 377-379, parts of the
+two texts of _Volospá_--R and H--are printed side by side for
+comparison.]
+
+The _Codex Regius_ contains a number of poems that can only be called
+_epic_ in the widest and loosest sense of the term, and some that are
+not _epic_ in any sense at all. The gnomic verses, the mythological
+summaries, may be passed over for the present; whatever illustrations
+they afford of early beliefs and ideas, they have no evidence to give
+concerning the proportions of stories. Other poems in the collection
+come under the denomination of epic only by a rather liberal extension
+of the term to include poems which are no more epic than dramatic, and
+just as much the one as the other, like the poems of _Frey's Wooing_
+and of the earlier exploits of Sigurd, which tell their story
+altogether by means of dialogue, without any narrative passages at
+all. The links and explanations are supplied, in prose, in the
+manuscript. Further, among the poems which come nearer to the English
+form of narrative poetry there is the very greatest variety of scale.
+The amount of story told in the Northern poems may vary indefinitely
+within the widest limits. Some poems contain little more than an idyll
+of a single scene; others may give an abstract of a whole history, as
+the whole Volsung story is summarised, for instance, in the _Prophecy
+of Gripir_.
+
+Some of the poems are found in such a confused and fragmentary form,
+with interruptions and interpolations, that, although it is possible
+to make out the story, it is hardly possible to give any confident
+judgment about the original proportions of the poems. This is
+particularly the case with the poems in which the hero bears the name
+of Helgi. The difficulties of these were partly appreciated, but not
+solved, by the original editor.
+
+The differences of scale may be illustrated by the following summary
+description, which aims at little more than a rough measurement of the
+stories, for purposes of comparison with _Beowulf_ and _Waldere_.
+
+The _Lay of Weland_ gives a whole mythical history. How Weland and his
+brother met with the swan-maidens, how the swan-brides left them in
+the ninth year, how Weland Smith was taken prisoner by King Nidad, and
+hamstrung, and set to work for the king; and of the vengeance of
+Weland. There are one hundred and fifty-nine lines, but in the text
+there are many defective places. The _Lay_ is a ballad history,
+beginning at the beginning, and ending, not with the end of the life
+of Weland, nor with the adventures of his son Widia, but with the
+escape of Weland from the king, his enemy, after he had killed the
+king's sons and put shame on the king's daughter Bodvild.
+
+In plan, the _Lay of Weland_ is quite different from the lays of the
+adventures of Thor, the _Ţrymskviđa_ and the _Hymiskviđa_, the songs
+of the Hammer and the Cauldron. These are chapters, episodes, in the
+history of Thor, not summaries of the whole matter, such as is the
+poem of _Weland_.
+
+The stories of Helgi Hundingsbane, and of his namesakes, as has been
+already remarked, are given in a more than usually complicated and
+tangled form.
+
+At first everything is simple enough. A poem of the life of Helgi
+begins in a way that promises a mode of narrative fuller and less
+abrupt than the _Lay of Weland_. It tells of the birth of Helgi, son
+of Sigmund; of the coming of the Norns to make fast the threads of his
+destiny; of the gladness and the good hopes with which his birth was
+welcomed. Then the _Lay of Helgi_ tells, very briefly, how he slew
+King Hunding, how the sons of Hunding made claims for recompense. "But
+the prince would make no payment of amends; he bade them look for no
+payment, but for the strong storm, for the grey spears, and for the
+rage of Odin."[23] And the sons of Hunding were slain as their father
+had been.
+
+[Footnote 23: Cf. _Maldon_, l. 45 _sq._, "Hearest thou what this
+people answer? They will pay you, for tribute, spears, the deadly
+point, the old swords, the weapons of war that profit you not," etc.]
+
+Then the main interest begins, the story of Helgi and Sigrun.
+
+"A light shone forth from the Mountains of Flame, and lightnings
+followed." There appeared to Helgi, in the air, a company of armed
+maidens riding across the field of heaven; "their armour was stained
+with blood, and light went forth from their spears." Sigrun from among
+the other "ladies of the South" answered Helgi, and called on him for
+help; her father Hogni had betrothed her, against her will, to
+Hodbrodd, son of Granmar. Helgi summoned his men to save her from this
+loathed wedding. The battle in which Helgi slew his enemies and won
+the lady of the air is told very shortly, while disproportionate
+length is given to an interlude of vituperative dialogue between two
+heroes, Sinfiotli, Helgi's brother, and Gudmund, son of Granmar, the
+warden of the enemy's coast; this passage of _Vetus Comoedia_ takes up
+fifty lines, while only six are given to the battle, and thirteen to
+the meeting of Helgi and Sigrun afterwards. Here ends the poem which
+is described in _Codex Regius_ as the _Lay of Helgi_ (_Helgakviđa_).
+The story is continued in the next section in a disorderly way, by
+means of ill-connected quotations. The original editor, whether
+rightly or wrongly, is quite certain that the _Lay of Helgi_, which
+ends with the victory of Helgi over the unamiable bridegroom, is a
+different poem from that which he proceeds to quote as the _Old Lay of
+the Volsungs_, in which the same story is told. In this second version
+there is at least one interpolation from a third; a stanza from a poem
+in the "dialogue measure," which is not the measure in which the rest
+of the story is told. It is uncertain what application was meant to
+be given to the title _Old Lay of the Volsungs_, and whether the
+editor included under that title the whole of his second version of
+Helgi and Sigrun. For instance, he gives another version of the
+railing verses of Sinfiotli, which he may or may not have regarded as
+forming an essential part of his _Old Volsung Lay_. He distinguishes
+it at any rate from the other "Flyting," which he definitely and by
+name ascribes to _Helgakviđa_.
+
+It is in this second version of the story of Helgi that the tragedy is
+worked out. Helgi slays the father of Sigrun in his battle against the
+bridegroom's kindred: Sigrun's brother takes vengeance. The space is
+scant enough for all that is told in it; scant, that is to say, in
+comparison with the space of the story of Beowulf; though whether the
+poem loses, as poetry, by this compression is another matter.
+
+It is here, in connexion with the second version, that the tragedy is
+followed by the verses of the grief of Sigrun, and the return of Helgi
+from the dead; the passage of mystery, the musical close, in which the
+tragic idea is changed into something less distinct than tragedy, yet
+without detriment to the main action.
+
+Whatever may be the critical solution of the textual problems of these
+_Lays_, it is impossible to get out of the text any form of narrative
+that shall resemble the English mode. Even where the story of Helgi is
+slowest, it is quicker, more abrupt, and more lyrical even than the
+_Lay of Finnesburh_, which is the quickest in movement of the English
+poems.
+
+The story of Helgi and Sigrun is intelligible, and though incomplete,
+not yet so maimed as to have lost its proportions altogether. Along
+with it, however, in the manuscript there are other, even more
+difficult fragments of poems about another Helgi, son of Hiorvard,
+and his love for another Valkyria, Swava. And yet again there are
+traces of a third Helgi, with a history of his own. The editors of
+_Corpus Poeticum Boreale_ have accepted the view of the three Helgis
+that is indicated by the prose passages of the manuscript here;
+namely, that the different stories are really of the same persons born
+anew, "to go through the same life-story, though with varying
+incidents."[24] "Helgi and Swava, it is said, were born again," is the
+note in the manuscript. "There was a king named Hogni, and his
+daughter was Sigrun. She was a Valkyria and rode over air and sea;
+_she was Swava born again_." And, after the close of the story of
+Sigrun, "it was a belief in the old days that men were born again, but
+that is now reckoned old wives' fables. Helgi and Sigrun, it is
+reported, were born anew, and then he was Helgi Haddingjaskati, and
+she Kara, Halfdan's daughter, as is told in the songs of Kara, and she
+was a Valkyria."
+
+[Footnote 24: _C.P.B._, i. p. 130.]
+
+It is still possible to regard the "old wives' fable" (which is a
+common element in Celtic legend and elsewhere) as something
+unessential in the poems of Helgi; as a popular explanation intended
+to reconcile different myths attaching to the name. However that may
+be, the poems of _Helgi and Swava_ are so fragmentary and confused,
+and so much has to be eked out with prose, that it is impossible to
+say what the complete form and scale of the poetical story may have
+been, and even difficult to be certain that it was ever anything else
+than fragments. As they stand, the remains are like those of the story
+of Angantyr; prominent passages quoted by a chronicler, who gives the
+less important part of the story in prose, either because he has
+forgotten the rest of the poem, or because the poem was made in that
+way to begin with.
+
+Of the poem of _Kara_, mentioned in the manuscript, there is nothing
+left except what can be restored by a conjectural transference of some
+verses, given under the name of Helgi and Sigrun, to this third
+mysterious plot. The conjectures are supported by the reference to the
+third story in the manuscript, and by the fact that certain passages
+which do not fit in well to the story of Helgi and Sigrun, where they
+are placed by the collector, correspond with prose passages in the
+late Icelandic romance of _Hromund Greipsson_,[25] in which Kara is
+introduced.
+
+[Footnote 25: _C.P.B._, Introduction, p. lxxviii.]
+
+The story of Helgi and Swava is one that covers a large period of
+time, though the actual remnants of the story are small. It is a
+tragedy of the early Elizabethan type described by Sir Philip Sidney,
+which begins with the wooing of the hero's father and mother. The hero
+is dumb and nameless from his birth, until the Valkyria, Swava, meets
+him and gives him his name, Helgi; and tells him of a magic sword in
+an island, that will bring him victory.
+
+The tragedy is brought about by a witch who drives Hedin, the brother
+of Helgi, to make a foolish boast, an oath on the Boar's head (like
+the vows of the Heron or the Peacock, and the _gabs_ of the Paladins
+of France) that he will wed his brother's bride. Hedin confesses his
+vanity to Helgi, and is forgiven, Helgi saying, "Who knows but the
+oath may be fulfilled? I am on my way to meet a challenge."
+
+Helgi is wounded mortally, and sends a message to Swava to come to
+him, and prays her after his death to take Hedin for her lord. The
+poem ends with two short energetic speeches: of Swava refusing to have
+any love but Helgi's; and of Hedin bidding farewell to Swava as he
+goes to make amends, and avenge his brother.
+
+These fragments, though their evidence tells little regarding epic
+scale or proportions, are, at least, illustrations of the nature of
+the stories chosen for epic narrative. The character of Hedin, his
+folly and magnanimity, is in strong contrast to that of Dag, the
+brother of Sigrun, who makes mischief in the other poem. The character
+of Swava is a fainter repetition of Sigrun.
+
+Nothing very definite can be made out of any of the Helgi poems with
+regard to the conventions of scale in narrative; except that the
+collector of the poems was himself in difficulties in this part of his
+work, and that he knew he had no complete poem to offer his readers,
+except perhaps the _Helgakviđa_.
+
+The poem named by the Oxford editors "The Long Lay of Brunhild" (i. p.
+293) is headed in the manuscript "Qviđa Sigurţar," _Lay of Sigurd_,
+and referred to, in the prose gloss of _Codex Regius_, as "The Short
+Lay of Sigurd."[26] This is one of the most important of the Northern
+heroic lays, in every respect; and, among other reasons, as an example
+of definite artistic calculation and study, a finished piece of work.
+It shows the difference between the Northern and the Western standards
+of epic measurement. The poem is one that gives the whole of the
+tragedy in no longer space than is used in the poem of _Maldon_ for
+the adventures of a few hours of battle. There are 288 lines, not all
+complete.
+
+[Footnote 26: The "Long Lay of Sigurd" has disappeared. Cf. Heusler,
+_Die Lieder der Lücke im Codex Regius der Edda_, 1902.]
+
+There are many various modes of representation in the poem. The
+beginning tells the earlier story of Sigurd and Brynhild in twenty
+lines:--
+
+ It was in the days of old that Sigurd, the young Volsung,
+ the slayer of Fafni, came to the house of Giuki. He took the
+ troth-plight of two brothers; the doughty heroes gave oaths
+ one to another. They offered him the maid Gudrun, Giuki's
+ daughter, and store of treasure; they drank and took counsel
+ together many a day, Child Sigurd and the sons of Giuki;
+ until they went to woo Brynhild, and Sigurd the Volsung rode
+ in their company; he was to win her if he could get her. The
+ Southern hero laid a naked sword, a falchion graven, between
+ them twain; nor did the Hunnish king ever kiss her, neither
+ take her into his arms; he handed the young maiden over to
+ Giuki's son.
+
+ She knew no guilt in her life, nor was any evil found in her
+ when she died, no blame in deed or thought. The grim Fates
+ came between.[27]
+
+[Footnote 27: From _C.P.B._, i. pp. 293, 294, with some
+modifications.]
+
+"It was the Fates that worked them ill." This sententious close of the
+prologue introduces the main story, chiefly dramatic in form, in which
+Brynhild persuades Gunnar to plan the death of Sigurd, and Gunnar
+persuades Hogni. It is love for Sigurd, and jealousy of Gudrun, that
+form the motive of Brynhild. Gunnar's conduct is barely intelligible;
+there is no explanation of his compliance with Brynhild, except the
+mere strength of her importunity. Hogni is reluctant, and remembers
+the oaths sworn to Sigurd. Gothorm, their younger brother, is made
+their instrument,--he was "outside the oaths." The slaying of Sigurd
+by Gothorm, and Sigurd's dying stroke that cuts his slayer in two, are
+told in the brief manner of the prologue to the poem; likewise the
+grief of Gudrun. Then comes Sigurd's speech to Gudrun before his
+death.
+
+The principal part of the poem, from line 118 to the end, is filled by
+the storm in the mind of Brynhild: her laughter at the grief of
+Gudrun, her confession of her own sorrows, and her preparation for
+death; the expostulations of Gunnar, the bitter speech of
+Hogni,--"Let no man stay her from her long journey"; the stroke of the
+sword with which Brynhild gives herself the death-wound; her dying
+prophecy. In this last speech of Brynhild, with all its vehemence,
+there is manifest care on the part of the author to bring out clearly
+his knowledge of the later fortunes of Gudrun and Gunnar. The prophecy
+includes the birth of Swanhild, the marriage of Attila and Gudrun, the
+death of Gunnar at the hands of Attila, by reason of the love between
+Gudrun and Oddrun; the vengeance of Gudrun on Attila, the third
+marriage of Gudrun, the death of Swanhild among the Goths. With all
+this, and carrying all this burden of history, there is the passion of
+Brynhild, not wholly obscured or quenched by the rhetorical ingenuity
+of the poet. For it is plain that the poet was an artist capable of
+more than one thing at a time. He was stirred by the tragic personage
+of Brynhild; he was also pleased, intellectually and dispassionately,
+with his design of grouping together in one composition all the events
+of the tragic history.
+
+The poem is followed by the short separate Lay (forty-four lines) of
+the _Hell-ride of Brynhild_, which looks as if it might have been
+composed by the same or another poet, to supply some of the history
+wanting at the beginning of the _Lay of Brynhild_. Brynhild, riding
+Hell-ward with Sigurd, from the funeral pile where she and Sigurd had
+been laid by the Giuking lords, is encountered by a giantess who
+forbids her to pass through her "rock-built courts," and cries shame
+upon her for her guilt. Brynhild answers with the story of her evil
+fate, how she was a Valkyria, punished by Odin for disobedience, set
+in the ring of flame, to be released by none but the slayer of Fafni;
+how she had been beguiled in Gunnar's wooing, and how Gudrun cast it
+in her teeth. This supplies the motive for the anger of Brynhild
+against Sigurd, not clearly expressed in the _Lay_, and also for
+Gunnar's compliance with her jealous appeal, and Hogni's consent to
+the death of Sigurd. While, in the same manner as in the _Lay_, the
+formalism and pedantry of the historical poet are burnt up in the
+passion of the heroine. "Sorrow is the portion of the life of all men
+and women born: we two, I and Sigurd, shall be parted no more for
+ever." The latter part of the _Lay_, the long monologue of Brynhild,
+is in form like the _Lamentation of Oddrun_ and the idyll of Gudrun
+and Theodoric; though, unlike those poems, it has a fuller narrative
+introduction: the monologue does not begin until the situation has
+been explained.
+
+On the same subject, but in strong contrast with the _Lay of
+Brynhild_, is the poem that has lost its beginning in the great gap in
+_Codex Regius_. It is commonly referred to in the editions as the
+_Fragmentary Lay of Sigurd_ ("Brot af Sigurđarkviđu"); in the Oxford
+edition it is styled the "Fragment of a short Brunhild Lay." There are
+seventy-six lines (incomplete) beginning with the colloquy of Gunnar
+and Hogni. Here also the character of Brynhild is the inspiration of
+the poet. But there does not seem to have been in his mind anything
+like the historical anxiety of the other poet to account for every
+incident, or at least to show that, if he wished, he could account for
+every incident, in the whole story. It is much stronger in expression,
+and the conception of Brynhild is more dramatic and more imaginative,
+though less eloquent, than in the longer poem. The phrasing is short
+and emphatic:--
+
+ Gudrun, Giuki's daughter, stood without, and this was the
+ first word she spoke: "Where is Sigurd, the king of men,
+ that my brothers are riding in the van?" Hogni made answer
+ to her words: "We have hewn Sigurd asunder with the sword;
+ ever the grey horse droops his head over the dead king."
+
+ Then spake Brynhild, Budli's daughter: "Have great joy of
+ your weapons and hands. Sigurd would have ruled everything
+ as he chose, if he had kept his life a little longer. It was
+ not meet that he should so rule over the host of the Goths
+ and the heritage of Giuki, who begat five sons that
+ delighted in war and in the havoc of battle."
+
+ Brynhild laughed, the whole house rang: "Have long joy of
+ your hands and weapons, since ye have slain the valiant
+ king."[28]
+
+[Footnote 28: From _C.P.B._, i. p. 307, with some changes.]
+
+The mood of Brynhild is altered later, and she "weeps at that she had
+laughed at." She wakens before the day, chilled by evil dreams. "It
+was cold in the hall, and cold in the bed," and she had seen in her
+sleep the end of the Niblungs, and woke, and reproached Gunnar with
+the treason to his friend.
+
+It is difficult to estimate the original full compass of this
+fragmentary poem, but the scale of its narrative and its drama can be
+pretty clearly understood from what remains. It is a poem with nothing
+superfluous in it. The death of Sigurd does not seem to have been
+given in any detail, except for the commentary spoken by the eagle and
+the raven, prophetic of the doom of the Niblungs. The mystery of
+Brynhild's character is curiously recognised by a sort of informal
+chorus. It is said that "they were stricken silent as she spoke, and
+none could understand her bearing, that she should weep to speak of
+that for which she had besought them laughing." It is one of the
+simplest forms in narrative; but in this case the simplicity of the
+rhetoric goes along with some variety and subtlety of dramatic
+imagination. The character of the heroine is rightly imagined and
+strongly rendered, and her change of mind is impressive, as the
+author plainly meant it to be.
+
+The _Lay of Attila_ (_Atlakviđa_) and the Greenland poem of _Attila_
+(_Atlamál_) are two poems which have a common subject and the same
+amount of story: how Attila sent for Gunnar and Hogni, the brothers of
+Gudrun, and had them put to death, and how Gudrun took vengeance on
+Attila.
+
+In the _Atlakviđa_ there are 174 lines, and some broken places; in
+_Atlamál_ there are 384 lines; its narrative is more copious than in
+most of the Norse Lays. There are some curious discrepancies in the
+matter of the two poems, but these hardly affect the scale of the
+story. The difference between them in this respect is fairly
+represented by the difference in the number of their lines. The scenes
+of the history are kept in similar proportions in both poems.
+
+The story of Gudrun's vengeance has been seen (p. 83) to correspond,
+as far as the amount of action is concerned, pretty closely with the
+story of Hengest and Finn. The epic unity is preserved; and, as in the
+_Finnesburh_ story, there is a distribution of interest between the
+_wrong_ and the _vengeance_,--(1) the death of Hnćf, the death of
+Gunnar and Hogni; (2) the vengeance of Hengest, the vengeance of
+Gudrun, with an interval of dissimulation in each case.
+
+The plot of the death of Attila, under all its manifold variations, is
+never without a certain natural fitness for consistent and
+well-proportioned narrative.
+
+None of the Northern poems take any account of the theory that the
+murder of Sigfred was avenged by his wife upon her brothers. That
+theory belongs to the _Nibelungenlied_; in some form or other it was
+known to Saxo; it is found in the Danish ballad of _Grimild's
+Revenge_, a translation or adaptation from the German. That other
+conception of the story may be more full of tragic meaning; the
+Northern versions, which agree in making Attila the slayer of the
+Niblung kings, have the advantage of greater concentration. The motive
+of Attila, which is different in each of the poems on this subject, is
+in no case equal to the tragic motive of Kriemhild in the
+_Nibelungen_. On the other hand, the present interest of the story is
+not distracted by reference to the long previous history of Sigfred; a
+new start is made when the Niblungs are invited to Attila's Court. The
+situation is intelligible at once, without any long preliminary
+explanation.
+
+In the _Lay of Attila_ the hoard of the Niblungs comes into the story;
+its fatal significance is recognised; it is the "metal of discord"
+that is left in the Rhine for ever. But the situation can be
+understood without any long preliminary history of the Niblung
+treasure and its fate. Just as the story of _Waldere_ explains itself
+at once,--a man defending his bride and his worldly wealth against a
+number of enemies, in a place where he is able to take them one by
+one, as they come on,--so the story of _Attila_ can begin without long
+preliminaries; though the previous history is to be found, in
+tradition, in common stories, if any one cares to ask for it. The plot
+is intelligible in a moment: the brothers inveigled away and killed by
+their sister's husband (for reasons of his own, as to which the
+versions do not agree); their sister's vengeance by the sacrifice of
+her own children and the death of her husband.
+
+In the _Atlamál_ there is very much less recognition of the previous
+history than in _Atlakviđa_. The story begins at once with the
+invitation to the Niblung brothers and with their sister's warning.
+Attila's motive is not emphasised; he has a grudge against them on
+account of the death of Brynhild his sister, but his motive is not
+very necessary for the story, as the story is managed here. The
+present scene and the present passion are not complicated with too
+much reference to the former history of the personages. This mode of
+procedure will be found to have given some trouble to the author, but
+the result at any rate is a complete and rounded work.
+
+There is great difference of treatment between _Atlakviđa_ and the
+Greenland poem _Atlamál_, a difference which is worth some further
+consideration.[29] There is, however, no very great difference of
+scale; at any rate, the difference between them becomes unimportant
+when they are compared with _Beowulf_. Even the more prolix of the
+two, which in some respects is the fullest and most elaborate of the
+Northern heroic poems, yet comes short of the English scale. _Atlamál_
+takes up very little more than the space of the English poem of
+_Maldon_, which is a simple narrative of a battle, with nothing like
+the tragic complexity and variety of the story of the vengeance of
+Gudrun.
+
+[Footnote 29: See pp. 150-156 below.]
+
+There is yet another version of the death of Gunnar the Giuking to
+compare with the two poems of _Attila_--the _Lament of Oddrun_
+(_Oddrúnargrátr_), which precedes the _Atlakviđa_ in the manuscript.
+The form of this, as well as the plot of it, is wonderfully different
+from either of the other two poems. This is one of the epic or tragic
+idylls in which a passage of heroic legend is told dramatically by one
+who had a share in it. Here the death of Gunnar is told by Oddrun his
+mistress, the sister of Attila.
+
+This form of indirect narration, by giving so great a dramatic value
+to the person of the narrator, before the beginning of her story, of
+course tends to depreciate or to exclude the vivid dramatic scenes
+that are common everywhere else in the Northern poems. The character
+of the speaker leaves too little independence to the other characters.
+But in none of the poems is the tragic plot more strongly drawn out
+than in the seventy lines of Oddrun's story to Borgny.
+
+The father of Oddrun, Brynhild, and Attila had destined Oddrun to be
+the bride of Gunnar, but it was Brynhild that he married. Then came
+the anger of Brynhild against Sigurd, the death of Sigurd, the death
+of Brynhild that is renowned over all the world. Gunnar sought the
+hand of Oddrun from her brother Attila, but Attila would not accept
+the price of the bride from the son of Giuki. The love of Oddrun was
+given to Gunnar. "I gave my love to Gunnar as Brynhild should have
+loved him. We could not withstand our love: I kept troth with Gunnar."
+The lovers were betrayed to Attila, who would not believe the
+accusation against his sister; "yet no man should pledge his honour
+for the innocence of another, when it is a matter of love." At last he
+was persuaded, and laid a plot to take vengeance on the Niblungs;
+Gudrun knew nothing of what was intended.
+
+The death of Gunnar and Hogni is told in five-and-twenty lines:--
+
+ There was din of the hoofs of gold when the sons of Giuki
+ rode into the Court. The heart was cut out of the body of
+ Hogni; his brother they set in the pit of snakes. The wise
+ king smote on his harp, for he thought that I should come to
+ his help. Howbeit I was gone to the banquet at the house of
+ Geirmund. From Hlessey I heard how the strings rang loud. I
+ called to my handmaidens to rise and go; I sought to save
+ the life of the prince; we sailed across the sound, till we
+ saw the halls of Attila. But the accursed serpent crept to
+ the heart of Gunnar, so that I might not save the life of
+ the king.
+
+ Full oft I wonder how I keep my life after him, for I
+ thought I loved him like myself.
+
+ Thou hast sat and listened while I have told thee many evils
+ of my lot and theirs. The life of a man is as his thoughts
+ are.
+
+ The Lamentation of Oddrun is finished.
+
+The _Hamđismál_, the poem of the death of Ermanaric, is one that, in
+its proportions, is not unlike the _Atlakviđa_: the plot has been
+already described (pp. 70-71). The poem of 130 lines as it stands has
+suffered a good deal. This also is like the story of Hengest and the
+story of Gudrun in the way the action is proportioned. It began with
+the slaying of Swanhild, the wrong to Gudrun--this part is lost. It
+goes on to the speech of Gudrun to her sons, Sorli and Hamther, and
+their expedition to the hall of the Goth; it ends with their death. In
+this case, also, the action must have begun at once and intelligibly,
+as soon as the motive of the Gothic treachery and cruelty was
+explained, or even without that explanation, in the more immediate
+sense of the treachery and cruelty, in the story of Swanhild trampled
+to death, and of the news brought to Gudrun. Here, also, there is much
+less expansion of the story than in the English poems; everything is
+surcharged with meaning.
+
+The _Old Lay of Gudrun_ (_Guđrúnarkviđa in forna_), or the tale of
+Gudrun to Theodoric, an idyll like the story of Oddrun, goes quickly
+over the event of the killing of Sigurd, and the return of Grani,
+masterless. Unlike the _Lament of Oddrun_, this monologue of Gudrun
+introduces dramatic passages. The meeting of Gudrun and her brother is
+not merely told by Gudrun in indirect narration; the speeches of Hogni
+and Gudrun are reported directly, as they might have been in a poem of
+the form of _Atlakviđa_, or the _Lay of Sigurd_, or any other in
+which the poet tells the story himself, without the introduction of an
+imaginary narrator. The main part of the poem is an account of the way
+in which Gudrun's mother, Grimhild, compelled her, by a potion of
+forgetfulness, to lose the thought of Sigurd and of all her woes, and
+consent to become the wife of Attila. This part is well prefaced by
+the quiet account of the life of Gudrun in her widowhood, before
+Grimhild began her schemes; how Gudrun lived in the house of Half,
+with Thora, daughter of Hakon, in Denmark, and how the ladies spent
+their time at the tapestry frame, working pictures of the heroes, the
+ships of Sigmund, the ranks of Hunnish warriors.
+
+In the manuscript there are found at the end of the _Old Lay of
+Gudrun_, as if they were part of it, some verses which have been
+separated from it by the editors (_C.P.B._, i. 347) as a "Fragment of
+an Atli Lay." They came from a poem of which the design, at any rate,
+was the same as that of the _Old Lay_, and Gudrun is the speaker. She
+tells how, after the death of Gunnar and Hogni, she was wakened by
+Atli, to listen to his evil dreams, foreboding his doom, and how she
+interpreted them in a way to comfort him and put him off his guard.
+
+In English poetry there are instances of stories introduced
+dramatically, long before the pilgrimage to Canterbury. In _Beowulf_
+there are various episodes where a story is told by one of the persons
+engaged. Besides the poem of Hengest chanted in Heorot, there is
+Beowulf's own narrative of his adventures, after his return to his own
+people in the kingdom of the Gauts, and passages still nearer in form
+to the _Lament of Oddrun_ and the _Confession of Gudrun_ are the last
+speech of Beowulf before his death (2426-2537), and the long speech of
+Wiglaf (2900-3027) telling of the enmity of the Gauts and the Swedes.
+But those are not filled with dramatic pathos to the same degree as
+these Northern _Heroides_, the monologues of Oddrun and Gudrun.
+
+The _Lay of Gudrun_ (_Gudrúnarkviđa_) which comes in the manuscript
+immediately before the _Lay of Sigurd_, is a pure heroic idyll. Unlike
+most of its companions, it leaves the details of the Volsung story
+very much in neglect, and brings all its force to bear on the
+representation of the grief of the queen, contrasted with the stormy
+passion of Brynhild. It is rightly honoured for its pathetic
+imagination of the dumb grief of Gudrun, broken up and dissolved when
+her sister draws away the covering from the face of Sigurd. "But fire
+was kindled in the eyes of Brynhild, daughter of Budli, when she
+looked upon his wounds."
+
+The refrain of the poem increases its resemblance to the form of a
+Greek idyll. The verse is that of narrative poetry; the refrain is not
+purely lyrical and does not come in at regular intervals.
+
+The _Tregrof Guđrúnar_, or _Chain of Woe_, restored by the Oxford
+editors out of the most confused part of the original text, is pure
+lamentation, spoken by Gudrun before her death, recounting all her
+sorrows: the bright hair of Swanhild trampled in the mire; Sigurd
+slain in his bed, despoiled of victory; Gunnar in the court of the
+serpents; the heart of Hogni cut out of his living body--"Saddle thy
+white steed and come to me, Sigurd; remember what we promised to one
+another, that thou wouldst come from Hell to seek me, and I would come
+to thee from the living world."
+
+The short poem entitled _Qviđa Guđrúnar_ in the manuscript, the
+_Ordeal of Gudrun_ in the English edition, has a simple plot. The
+subject is the calumny which was brought against Gudrun by Herkja, the
+cast-off mistress of Attila (that "she had seen Gudrun and Theodoric
+together") and the ordeal of water by which Gudrun proved her
+innocence, while the falsehood was brought home to Herkja, the
+bondwoman. The theme is slighter than all the rest, and this poem, at
+least, might be reckoned not unfit to be taken up as a single scene in
+a long epic.
+
+Some of the Northern poems in the epic measure are almost wholly made
+up of dialogue. The story of _Balder's Doom_ is a dialogue between
+Odin and the witch whom he raises from the dead. The earlier part of
+the story of Sigurd in the "Elder Edda" is almost all dialogue, even
+where the narrative measure is employed.
+
+There is hardly any mere narrative in the poems remaining of the cycle
+of Angantyr. In several other cases, the writer has only given,
+perhaps has only remembered clearly, the dramatic part of the poems in
+which he was interested; the intervals of the story he fills up with
+prose. It is difficult to tell where this want of narrative connexion
+in the poetry is original, and where it is due to forgetfulness or
+ignorance; where the prose of the manuscripts is to be taken as
+standing in the place of lost narrative verses, and where it fills a
+gap that was never intended to be filled with verse, but was always
+left to the reciter, to be supplied in his own way by passages of
+story-telling, between his chantings of the poetic dialogue of Hervor
+and the Shepherd, for instance, or of Hervor and Angantyr.
+
+The poems just mentioned are composed in narrative measure. There are
+also other dialogue poems in a measure different from this, and
+peculiarly adapted to dialogues, the measure of the gnomic _Hávamál_
+and of the didactic mythological poems, _Vafţrúđnismál_, _Alvíssmál_,
+_Grímnismál_. These pieces are some distance removed from epic or
+ballad poetry. But there are others in this gnomic measure which it
+is not easy to keep far apart from such dialogue poems as _Balder's
+Doom_, though their verse is different. By their peculiar verse they
+are distinguished from the English and Saxon heroic poetry; but they
+retain, for all their peculiar metre and their want of direct
+narrative, some of the characteristics of Teutonic epic.
+
+The _Lokasenna_ has a plot, and represents dramatically an incident in
+the history of the gods. The chief business is Loki's shameless
+rehearsal of accusations against the gods, and their helpless
+rejoinders. It is a masque of the gods, and not a ballad like the
+_Winning of Thor's Hammer_. It is not, however, a mere string of
+"flytings" without a plot; there is some plot and action. It is the
+absence of Thor that gives Loki courage to browbeat the gods; the
+return of Thor at the end of the poem avenges the gods on their
+accuser.
+
+In the strange poem of the _Railing of Thor and Harbard_, and in a
+very rough and irregular kind of verse, there is a similar kind of
+plot.
+
+The _Contention of Atli and Rimgerd the Giantess_ is a short comic
+dialogue, interposed among the fragments of the poem of Helgi
+Hiorvard's son, and marked off from them by its use of the dialogue
+verse, as well as by its episodic plot.
+
+Helgi Hiorvard's son had killed the giant Hati, and the giant's
+daughter comes at night where Helgi's ships are moored in the firth,
+and stands on a rock over them, challenging Helgi and his men. Atli,
+keeping watch on deck, answers the giantess, and there is an exchange
+of gibes in the old style between them. Helgi is awakened and joins in
+the argument. It is good comedy of its kind, and there is poetry in
+the giantess's description of the company of armed maidens of the air
+whom she has seen keeping guard over Helgi's ships--"three nines of
+maids, but one rode foremost, a white maid, enhelmed. Their rearing
+horses shook dew from their manes into the deep dales, and hail upon
+the lofty woods; thence come fair seasons among men. But the whole
+sight was hateful to me" (_C.P.B._, i. p. 154).
+
+The giantess is kept there by the gibes of Atli till the daybreak.
+"Look eastward, now, Rimgerd!" And the giantess is turned into stone,
+a great harbour mark, to be laughed at.
+
+In some other poems there is much more action, and much more need for
+an interpreter to act as chorus in the intervals between the
+dialogues. The story of the wooing of Gerd is in this form: how Frey
+sat in the seat of Odin and saw a fair maid in Jotunheim, and got
+great sickness of thought, till his swain Skirnir found the cause of
+his languishing, and went to woo Gerd for him in Gymi's Garth. Another
+love-story, and a story not unlike that of Frey and Gerd, is contained
+in two poems _Grógaldr_ and _Fiölsvinnsmál_, that tell of the winning
+of Menglad by her destined lover.
+
+These two latter poems are not in _Codex Regius_, and it was only
+gradually that their relation to one another was worked out, chiefly
+by means of the Danish ballad which contains the story of both
+together in the right order.
+
+In the first, Svipdag the hero comes to his mother's grave to call on
+her for counsel. He has been laid under a mysterious charge, to go on
+a quest which he cannot understand, "to find out Menglad," and Menglad
+he has never heard of, and does not know where she is to be found.
+
+The second poem, also in dialogue, and in the dialogue measure, gives
+the coming of Svipdag to the mysterious castle, and his debate with
+the giant who keeps the gate. For Menglad is the princess whose story
+is told everywhere, and under a thousand names,--the lady of a strange
+country, kept under a spell in a witch's castle till the deliverer
+comes. The wooing of Gerd out of Jotunheim is another version of the
+same story, which in different forms is one of the oldest and most
+universal everywhere,--the fairy story of the princess beyond the sea.
+
+The second dialogue is very much encumbered by the pedantries of the
+giant who keeps the gate; it ends, however, in the recognition of
+Svipdag and Menglad. Menglad says: "Long have I sat waiting for thee,
+many a day; but now is that befallen that I have sought for, and thou
+art come to my bower. Great was the sorrow of my waiting; great was
+thine, waiting for the gladness of love. Now it is very truth for us:
+the days of our life shall not be sundered."
+
+The same form is used in the older poems of Sigurd, those that come
+before the hiatus of the great manuscript, and have been gathered
+together in the Oxford edition under the title of the _Old Play of the
+Wolsungs_. They touch briefly on all the chief points of the story of
+the Niblung hoard, from the capture and ransom of Andvari to the
+winning of the warrior maiden Sigrdrifa by Sigurd.
+
+All these last-mentioned dialogue poems, in spite of their lyric or
+elegiac measure, are like the narrative poems in their dependence upon
+traditional, mythic, or heroic stories, from which they choose their
+themes. They are not like the lyrical heroic poems of _Widsith_ and
+_Deor_ in Anglo-Saxon literature, which survey a large tract of heroic
+legend from a point of vantage. Something of this sort is done by some
+of the Norse dialogue poems, _Vafţrúđnismál_, etc., but in the poems
+of Frey and Gerd, of Svipdag and Menglad, and of the Niblung
+treasure, though this reflective and comparative method occasionally
+makes itself evident, the interest is that of the story. They have a
+story to represent, just as much as the narrative poems, though they
+are debarred from the use of narrative.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+It must be confessed that there is an easily detected ambiguity in the
+use of the term epic in application to the poems, whether German,
+English, or Northern, here reviewed. That they are heroic poems cannot
+be questioned, but that they are epic in any save the most general
+sense of the term is not quite clear. They may be epic in character,
+in a general way, but how many of them have a claim to the title in
+its eminent and special sense? Most of them are short poems; most of
+them seem to be wanting in the breadth of treatment, in the amplitude
+of substance, that are proper to epic poetry.
+
+_Beowulf_, it may be admitted, is epic in the sense that distinguishes
+between the longer narrative poem and the shorter ballad. The
+fragments of _Waldere_ are the fragments of a poem that is not cramped
+for room, and that moves easily and with sufficient eloquence in the
+representation of action. The narrative of the _Maldon_ poem is not
+pinched nor meagre in its proportions. Hardly any of the other poems,
+however, can be compared with these in this respect. These are the
+most liberal in scale of all the old Teutonic poems; the largest epic
+works of which we know anything directly. These are the fullest in
+composition, the least abstract or elliptical; and they still want
+something of the scale of the _Iliad_. The poem of _Maldon_, for
+instance, corresponds not to the _Iliad_, but to the action of a
+single book, such as the twelfth, with which it has been already
+compared. If the story of the English _Waldere_, when complete, was
+not more elaborate than the extant Latin _Waltharius_, it must have
+come far short of the proportions of Homer. It is a story for a single
+recitation, like the story of Finnesburh in _Beowulf_. The poem of
+_Beowulf_ may have more in it than the story of Walter and Hildegund,
+but this advantage would seem to be gained at the expense of the unity
+of the poem. It is lengthened out by a sequel, by the addition of a
+new adventure which requires the poet to make a new start. In the poem
+of _Hildebrand_ there is a single tragedy contained in a single scene.
+It is briefly rendered, in a style evidently more primitive, less
+expansive and eloquent, than the style of _Beowulf_ or _Waldere_. Even
+if it had been given in a fuller form, the story would still have been
+essentially a short one; it could not well have been longer than the
+poem of _Sohrab and Rustum_, where the theme is almost the same, while
+the scale is that of the classical epic.
+
+If the old English epic poetry falls short of the Homeric magnitude,
+it almost equally exceeds the scale of the Northern heroic poems. If
+_Beowulf_ and _Waldere_ seem inadequate in size, the defect will not
+be made good out of the Northern lays of _Helgi_ or _Sigfred_.
+
+The Northern poems are exceedingly varied in their plan and
+disposition, but none of them is long, and many of them are in the
+form of _dramatic lyric_, with no place for pure narrative at all;
+such are the poems of _Frey's Wooing_, of _Svipdag and Menglad_, and
+others, in which there is a definite plot worked out by means of lyric
+dialogue. None of them is of anything like the same scale as
+_Beowulf_, which is a complex epic poem, or _Byrhtnoth_, which is an
+episodic poem liberally dealt with and of considerable length.
+
+The Teutonic poetry presents itself, at a first view, as the
+complement of Homer. Here are to be found many of the things that are
+wanting at the beginning of Greek literary history. Here are single
+epic lays, or clusters of them, in every form. Here, in place of the
+two great poems, rounded and complete, there is the nebulous expanse
+of heroic tradition, the outline of an heroic cycle, together with a
+number of episodic poems taking their origin from one point or another
+of the cycle, according as the different parts of the story happen to
+catch the imagination of a poet. Instead of the Homeric scale of epic
+there are a number of brief epic tragedies, the plots of which are
+chosen from the multitude of stories current in tradition.
+
+Among these shorter epic poems, if such they may be called, there are
+to be distinguished great varieties of procedure in regard to the
+amount of action represented in the poem.
+
+There is one class of poem that represents a single action with some
+detail; there is another that represents a long and complex story in a
+summary and allusive way. The first kind may be called _episodic_ in
+the sense that it takes up about the same quantity of story as might
+make an act in a play; or perhaps, with a little straining of the
+term, as much as might serve for one play in a trilogy.
+
+The second kind is not episodic; it does not seem fitted for a place
+in a larger composition. It is a kind of short and summary epic,
+taking as large a province of history as the _Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_.
+
+_Hildebrand_, the _Fight at Finnesburh_, _Waldere_, _Byrhtnoth_, the
+_Winning of the Hammer_, _Thor's Fishing_, the _Death of the Niblungs_
+(in any of the Northern versions), the _Death of Ermanaric_, might all
+be fairly regarded as belonging to the first kind of story; while the
+_Lay of Weland_ and the _Lay of Brynhild_ cover a much larger extent
+of story, though not of actual space, than any of those.
+
+It is not quite easy to find a common measure for these and for the
+Homeric poems. One can tell perhaps from Mr. Arnold's poem of _Sohrab
+and Rustum_ how much is wanting to the _Lay of Hildebrand_, and on
+what scale the story of Hildebrand might have been told if it had been
+told in the Homeric instead of the archaic German manner. The story of
+Walter of Aquitaine in the Latin hexameters of _Waltharius_ takes up
+1456 lines. Although the author of this Latin poem is something short
+of Homer, "a little overparted" by the comparison, still his work is
+designed on the scale of classical epic, and gives approximately the
+right extent of the story in classical form. But while those stories
+are comparatively short, even in their most expanded forms, the story
+of Weland and the story of Helgi each contains as much as would
+suffice for the plot of an _Odyssey_, or more. The _Lay of Brynhild_
+is not an episodic poem of the vengeance and the passion of Brynhild,
+though that is the principal theme. It begins in a summary manner with
+Sigurd's coming to the house of the Niblungs, the wedding of Sigurd
+and Gudrun, the wooing of Brynhild for Gunnar; all these earlier
+matters are taken up and touched on before the story comes to the
+searchings of heart when the kings are persuaded to kill Sigurd. Then
+the death of Sigurd is told of, and the rest of the poem is filled
+with the tragedy of Brynhild and Gudrun; the future history of Gudrun
+is spoken of prophetically by Brynhild before she throws herself on
+the funeral pile. Plainly this cannot be considered in the same sense
+"episodic" as the poem of Thor's fishing for the Midgarth snake. The
+poems of Thor's fishing and the recovery of the hammer are distinctly
+fragments of a legendary cycle. The _Lay of Brynhild_ makes an
+attempt to complete the whole Volsung story from beginning to end,
+while giving special importance to one particular incident of it,--the
+passion of Brynhild after the death of Sigurd. The poems of _Attila_
+and the _Lay of the Death of Ermanaric_ are more restricted.
+
+It remains true that the great story of the Niblung tragedy was never
+told at length in the poetical measure used for episodes of it, and
+for the summary form of the _Lay of Brynhild_. It should be
+remembered, however, that a poem of the scale of the _Nibelungenlied_,
+taking up the whole matter, must go as far beyond the Homeric limit as
+the _Lay of Brynhild_ falls short of it. From one point of view the
+shorter episodic poems are more Homeric in their plots than either the
+summary epics which cover the whole ground, as the _Lay of Brynhild_
+attempts to cover it, or the longer works in prose that begin at the
+beginning and go on to the end, like the _Volsunga Saga_. The _Iliad_
+and the _Odyssey_ are themselves episodic poems; neither of them has
+the reach of the _Nibelungenlied_. It should not be forgotten, either,
+that Aristotle found the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ rather long. The
+Teutonic poems are not to be despised because they have a narrower
+orbit than the _Iliad_. Those among them that contain matter enough
+for a single tragedy, and there are few that have not as much as this
+in them, may be considered not to fall far short of the standard fixed
+by Aristotle for the right amount of action to be contained in an
+heroic poem. They are too hurried, they are wanting in the classical
+breadth and ease of narrative; but at any rate they are
+comprehensible, they observe an epic unity. They do not, like certain
+of the endless French poetical histories, remind one of the picture
+of incomprehensible bulk in Aristotle's _Poetics_, the animal 10,000
+stadia long.
+
+Thus, though it is natural at first to imagine that in the old
+Teutonic poetry one is possessed of such separate lays or ballads as
+might be the original materials of a larger epic, an epic of the
+Homeric scale, this impression will hardly remain long after a closer
+criticism of the workmanship of the poems. Very few of them correspond
+in the amount of their story to the episodes of the Homeric poems.
+Many of them contain in a short space the matter of stories more
+complicated, more tragical, than the story of Achilles. Most of them
+by their unity and self-consistency make it difficult to think of them
+as absorbed in a longer epic. This is the case not only with those
+that take in a whole history, like the _Lay of Brynhild_, but also
+with those whose plot is comparatively simple, like _Hildebrand_ or
+_Waldere_. It is possible to think of the story of Walter and
+Hildegund as forming part of a larger story of the fortunes of the
+Huns. It has this subordinate place in the _Thidreks Saga_. But it is
+not easy to believe that in such a case it preserves its value.
+_Thidreks Saga_ is not an epic, though it is made by an agglutination
+of ballads. In like manner the tragedy of _Hildebrand_ gains by its
+isolation from the stories of the other chiefs, Theodoric and Odoacer.
+The stories of Walter and of Hildebrand, like the story of Hamlet the
+Dane, are too strong in themselves to form part of a larger
+composition, without detriment to its unity and harmony. They might be
+brought in allusively and in a subordinate way, like the story of
+Thebes and other stories in the _Iliad_; but that is not the same
+thing as making an epic poem out of separate lays. So that on all
+grounds the first impression of the Teutonic epic poetry has to be
+modified. If ever epic poetry was made by a conglomeration of
+ballads, it must have had other kinds of material than this. Some of
+the poems are episodic; others are rather to be described as
+abridgments of epic than as separate epic scenes. But neither in the
+one case nor in the other is there to be found the kind of poetry that
+is required by the hypothesis of composite epic. There are short epics
+that might conceivably have served as the framework, or the
+ground-plan, of a more elaborate work, containing, like the _Lay of
+Helgi_ or the _Lay of Brynhild_, incidents enough and hints of
+character enough for a history fully worked out, as large as the
+Homeric poems. If it should be asked why there is so little evidence
+of any Teutonic attempt to weave together separate lays into an epic
+work, the answer might be, first, that the separate lays we know are
+too much separate and individual, too strong in themselves, to be
+satisfactorily cobbled into a more expansive fabric; and, secondly,
+that it has not yet been proved that epic poems can be made by process
+of cobbling. The need of a comprehensive epic of the Niblungs was not
+imperative. Neither was there any demand in Athens, in the time of
+Sophocles and Euripides, for a comprehensive work--a _Thebaid_, a
+_Roman de Thčbes_--to include the plots of all the tragedies of the
+house of Cadmus. It was not a poet, but a prose journeyman, who did
+this sort of work in the North, and it was not till the old school of
+poetry had passed away that the composite prose history of the
+Volsungs and Niblungs, of Sigmund and Sinfiotli, Sigurd, Brynhild,
+Gudrun, and Atli, was put together out of the old poems. The old lays,
+Northern and Western, whatever their value, have all strong individual
+characters of their own, and do not easily submit to be regarded as
+merely the unused materials, waiting for an epic composer who never
+was born.
+
+
+III
+
+EPIC AND BALLAD POETRY
+
+The ballads of a later age have many points of likeness to such poems
+as _Hildebrand_, _Finnesburh_, _Maldon_, and the poems of the Northern
+collection. The two orders of poetry are, however, not to be
+confounded. Their affinity indeed is clear. But the older poems in
+alliterative verse have a character not possessed by the ballads which
+followed them, and which often repeated the same stories in the later
+Middle Ages. Even the simplest of the older poems, which is the _Lay
+of Hildebrand_, is distinguished by evident signs of dignity from even
+the most ambitious of the rhyming ballads in any of the tongues. Its
+rhetoric is of a different order.
+
+This is not a question of preferences, but of distinction of kinds.
+The claim of an epic or heroic rank for the older poems need not be
+forced into a denial of all the other excellences of the rhyming
+ballads.
+
+_Ballad_, as the term is commonly used, implies a certain degree of
+simplicity, and an absence of high poetical ambition. Ballads are for
+the market-place and the "blind crowder," or for the rustic chorus
+that sings the ballad burden. The wonderful poetical beauty of some of
+the popular ballads of Scotland and Denmark, not to speak of other
+lands, is a kind of beauty that is never attained by the great
+poetical artists; an unconscious grace. The ballads of the Scottish
+Border, from their first invention to the publication of the _Border
+Minstrelsy_, lie far away from the great streams of poetical
+inspiration. They have little or nothing to do with the triumphs of
+the poets; the "progress of poesy" leaves them untouched; they learn
+neither from Milton nor from Pope, but keep a life of their own that
+has its sources far remote in the past, in quite another tradition of
+art than that to which the great authors and their works belong.
+
+The Teutonic epic poems, the Northern poems at any rate, are ballads
+in respect of their management of the plots. The scale of them is not
+to be distinguished from the scale of a ballad: the ballads have the
+same way of indicating and alluding to things and events without
+direct narrative, without continuity, going rapidly from critical
+point to point, in their survey of the fable.
+
+But there is this great difference, that the style of the earlier
+epics is ambitious and self-conscious, an aristocratic and
+accomplished style. The ballads of _Clerk Saunders_ or _Sir Patrick
+Spens_ tell about things that have been generally forgotten, in the
+great houses of the country, by the great people who have other things
+to think about, and, if they take to literature, other models of
+style. The lay of the fight at Finnesburh, the lays of the death of
+Attila, were in their time the poems of the king's or the earl's hall;
+they were at the height of literary accomplishment in their
+generation, and their style displays the consciousness of rank. The
+ballads never had anything like the honour that was given to the older
+lays.
+
+The difference between epic and ballad style comes out most obviously
+when, as frequently has happened, in Denmark, Iceland, and the
+Faroes, the poems of the old school have been translated from their
+epic verse into the "eights and sixes" or some other favourite measure
+of the common ballads. This has been the case, for instance, with the
+poem of Thor's Hammer, and the poem of the journey of Svipdag in
+search of Menglad. In other cases, as in that of the return of Helgi
+from the dead, it is less certain, though it is probable, that there
+is a direct relation between the two kinds of poetry, between the old
+Northern poem of Helgi and the Danish ballad of Sir Aage which has the
+same story to tell; but a comparison of the two styles, in a case like
+this, is none the less possible and justifiable.
+
+The poems in the older form and diction, however remote they may be
+from modern fashions, assert themselves unmistakably to be of an
+aristocratic and not a popular tradition. The ballads have many things
+in common with the other poems, but they have lost the grand style,
+and the pride and solemnity of language. One thing they have retained
+almost invariably. Ballad poetry may be trusted to preserve the sense
+of the tragic situation. If some ballads are less strong than others
+in their rendering of a traditional story, their failure is not
+peculiar to that kind of composition. Not every ballad-singer, and not
+every tragic poet, has the same success in the development of his
+fable. As a rule, however, it holds good that the ballads are sound in
+their conception of a story; if some are constitutionally weak or
+unshapely, and others have suffered from the infirmity of reciters and
+transcribers, these accidents are not to be counted against the class
+of poetry to which they belong. Yet, however well the ballads may give
+the story, they cannot give it with the power of epic; and that this
+power belongs to the older kind of verse, the verse of the _Lay of
+Brynhild_, may be proved with all the demonstration that this kind of
+argument allows. It is open to any one to say that the grand style is
+less attractive than the charm of the ballad burdens, that the airy
+music of the ballads is more appealing and more mysterious than all
+the eloquence of heroic poetry; but that does not touch the question.
+The rhetoric of the older poems merely claims to be acknowledged for
+what it is worth.
+
+The Danish ballad of _Ungen Sveidal_, "Child Sveidal,"[30] does not
+spoil the ancient story which had been given in the older language and
+older verse of _Svipdag and Menglad_. But there are different ways of
+describing how the adventurer comes to the dark tower to rescue the
+unknown maiden. The ballad uses the common ballad forms, the common
+easy rhymes and assonances:--
+
+ Out they cast their anchor
+ All on the white sea sand,
+ And who was that but the Child Sveidal
+ Was first upon the land?
+
+ His heart is sore with deadly pain
+ For her that he never saw,
+ His name is the Child Sveidal;
+ So the story goes.
+
+[Footnote 30: Grundtvig, _Danmarks gamle Folkeviser_, No. 70. See
+above, p. 114.]
+
+This sort of story need not be despised, and it is peculiarly valuable
+when it appears in the middle of one of the least refreshing seasons
+of literature, like this ballad in the age of the Lutheran Reformation
+in Denmark. In such an age and among theological tracts and
+controversies, the simple ballad measures may bring relief from
+oppression and desolation; and call for thanks to the Danish ladies by
+whose care this ballad and so many others were written down. But
+gratitude need not conceal the truth, that the style of the ballad is
+unlike the style of an heroic poem. The older poem from which _Child
+Sveidal_ is derived may have left many poetical opportunities
+unemployed; it comes short in many things, and makes up for them by
+mythological irrelevances. But it is composed in a style of which it
+is impossible to mistake the gravity; it has all the advantage of
+established forms that have been tested and are able to bear the
+weight of the poetical matter. There is a vast difference between the
+simplicity of the ballad and the stately measure and rhetorical pomp
+of the original:--
+
+ Svipdag is my name; Sunbright was my Father's name;
+ The winds have driven me far, along cold ways;
+ No one can gainsay the word of Fate,
+ Though it be spoken to his own destruction.
+
+The difference is as great as the difference between the ballad of the
+_Marriage of Gawayne_ and the same story as told in the _Canterbury
+Tales_; or the difference between Homer's way of describing the
+recovery of lifted cattle and the ballad of _Jamie Telfer of the Fair
+Dodheid_.
+
+It happens fortunately that one of the Danish ballads, _Sivard og
+Brynild_, which tells of the death of Sigurd (_Danmarks gamle
+Folkeviser_, No. 3), is one of the best of the ballads, in all the
+virtues of that style, so that a comparison with the _Lay of
+Brynhild_, one of the best poems of the old collection, is not unfair
+to either of them.
+
+The ballad of _Sivard_, like the _Lay of Brynhild_, includes much more
+than an episode; it is a complete tragic poem, indicating all the
+chief points of the story. The tragic idea is different from that of
+any of the other versions of the Volsung story, but quite as distinct
+and strong as any.
+
+
+ SIVARD
+
+ (_O the King's Sons of Denmark!_)
+
+ Sivard has a horse that is fleet, and he has stolen Brynild
+ from the Mountain of Glass, all by the light of day. From
+ the Mountain of Glass he has stolen proud Brynild, and given
+ her to Hagen, his brother-in-arms. Brynild and Signild went
+ to the river shore to wash their silken gowns. "Signild, my
+ sister, where got you the golden rings on your hand?"--"The
+ gold rings on my hand I got from Sivard, my own true love;
+ they are his pledge of troth: and you are given to Hagen."
+ When Brynild heard this she went into the upper room and lay
+ there sick: there she lay sick and Hagen came to her. "Tell
+ me, maiden Brynild, my own true love, what is there in the
+ world to heal you; tell me, and I will bring it, though it
+ cost all the world's red gold."--"Nothing in the world you
+ can bring me, unless you bring me, into my hands, the head
+ of Sivard."--"And how shall I bring to your hands the head
+ of Sivard? There is not the sword in all the world that will
+ bite upon him: no sword but his own, and that I cannot
+ get."--"Go to his room, and bid him lend you his sword, for
+ his honour, and say, 'I have vowed an adventure for the sake
+ of my true love.' When first he hands you over his sword, I
+ pray you remember me, in the Lord God's name." It is Hagen
+ that has swept his mantle round him, and goes into the upper
+ room to Sivard. "Here you sit, Sivard, my foster-brother;
+ will you lend me your good sword for your honour? for I have
+ vowed a vow for the sake of my love."--"And if I lend you my
+ good sword Adelbring, you will never come in battle where it
+ will fail you. My good sword Adelbring you may have, indeed,
+ but keep you well from the tears of blood that are under the
+ hilt, keep you from the tears of blood that are so red.[31]
+ If they run down upon your fingers, it will be your death."
+
+ Hagen got the sword, and it was his own sworn brother he
+ slew there in the room. He took up the bloody head under his
+ cloak of furs and brought it to proud Brynild. "Here you
+ have the head for which you sought; for the sake of you I
+ have slain my brother to my undoing."--"Take away the head
+ and let me not see it; nor will I pledge you my troth to
+ make you glad."--"Never will I pledge troth to you, and
+ nought is the gladness; for the sake of you I have slain my
+ brother; sorrow is on me, sore and great." It was Hagen drew
+ his sword and took the proud Brynild and hewed her asunder.
+ He set the sword against a stone, and the point was deadly
+ in the King's son's heart. He set the sword in the black
+ earth, and the point was death in the King's son's heart.
+ Ill was the day that maiden was born. For her were spilt the
+ lives of two King's sons. (_O the King's Sons of Denmark!_)
+
+[Footnote 31: Compare the warning of Angantyr to Hervor when he gives
+her the sword Tyrfing--"Keep the sword sheathed, the slayer of
+Hialmar; touch not the edges, there is venom upon them"--and the magic
+sword Skofnung in _Kormaks Saga_.]
+
+This is a consistent tragic story, and it is well told. It has the
+peculiar virtue of the ballad, to make things impressive by the sudden
+manner in which they are spoken of and passed by; in this abrupt mode
+of narrative the ballads, as has been noted already, are not much
+different from the earlier poems. The _Lay of Brynhild_ is not much
+more diffuse than the ballad of _Sivard_ in what relates to the
+slaying of the hero. Both are alike distinct from the method of Homer;
+compared with Homer both the lays and the ballads are hurried in their
+action, over-emphatic, cramped in a narrow space. But when the style
+and temper are considered, apart from the incidents of the story, then
+it will appear that the lay belongs to a totally different order of
+literature from the ballad. The ballad tells of things dimly
+discerned by the poet; king's sons and daughters are no more to him
+than they are to the story-tellers of the market-place--forms of a
+shadowy grandeur, different from ordinary people, swayed by strange
+motives, not irrationally, nor altogether in a way beyond the
+calculation of simple audiences, yet in ways for which there is no
+adequate mode of explanation known to the reciter. The ballad keeps
+instinctively a right outline for its tragic story, but to develop the
+characters is beyond its power. In the epic _Lay of Brynhild_, on the
+other hand, the poet is concerned with passions which he feels himself
+able to comprehend and to set forth dramatically; so that, while the
+story of the poem is not very much larger in scale than that of the
+ballad, the dramatic speeches are greatly elaborated. Brynhild in the
+lay is not a mere tragic symbol, as in the ballad, but a tragic
+character. The ballad has the seed of tragedy in it, but in the lay
+the seed has sprung up in the dramatic eloquence of Brynhild's
+utterances before her death. The ballad is tragical, but in an
+abstract manner. The plot of the slighted woman and her vengeance,
+with the remorse of Hagen, is all true, and not exaggerated in motive.
+But while the motives are appreciated, it is not in the power of the
+poet to develop the exposition of them, to make them dramatically
+characteristic, as well as right in their general nature. It is just
+this dramatic ideal which is the ambition and inspiration of the other
+poet; the character of Brynhild has taken possession of his
+imagination, and requires to be expressed in characteristic speech. A
+whole poetical world is open to the poet of Brynhild, and to the other
+poets of the Northern heroic cycle. They have taken the first day's
+journey into the empire of Homer and Shakespeare; the forms of poetry
+that they employ are varied and developed by them so as to express as
+fully as possible the poetical conception of different individual
+characters. It is not easy to leave them without the impression that
+their poetry was capable of infinitely greater progress in this
+direction; that some at least of the poets of the North were "bearers
+of the torch" in their generation, not less than the poets of Provence
+or France who came after them and led the imagination of Christendom
+into another way. That is, it is possible to think of the poets of
+Sigurd and Brynhild as holding among the Northern nations of the tenth
+or eleventh century the place that is held in every generation by some
+set of authors who, for the time, are at the head of intellectual and
+literary adventure, who hold authority, from Odin or the Muses, to
+teach their contemporaries one particular kind of song, till the time
+comes when their vogue is exhausted, and they are succeeded by other
+masters and other schools. This commission has been held by various
+kinds of author since the beginning of history, and manifold are the
+lessons that have been recommended to the world by their authority;
+now epic, now courtly and idealist lyric, romantic drama, pedantic
+tragedy, funeral orations, analytical novels. They are not all
+amusing, and not all their prices are more than the rate of an old
+song. But they all have a value as trophies, as monuments of what was
+most important in their time, of the things in which the generations,
+wise and foolish, have put their trust and their whole soul. The
+ballads have not this kind of importance; the ballad poets are remote
+from the lists where the great champions overthrow one another, where
+poet takes the crown from poet. The ballads, by their very nature, are
+secluded and apart from the great literary enterprises; it is the
+beauty of them that they are exempt from the proclamations and the
+arguments, the shouting and the tumult, the dust and heat, that
+accompany the great literary triumphs and make epochs for the
+historians, as in the day of _Cléopatre_, or the day of _Hernani_. The
+ballad has no weight of responsibility upon it; it does not carry the
+intellectual light of its century; its authors are easily satisfied.
+In the various examples of the Teutonic alliterative poetry there is
+recognisable the effort and anxiety of poets who are not content with
+old forms, who have a poetical vocation to go on and find out new
+forms, who are on the search for the "one grace above the rest," by
+which all the chief poets are led. The remains of this poetry are so
+many experiments, which, in whatever respects they may have failed,
+yet show the work and energy of authors who are proud of their art, as
+well as the dignity of men who are familiar with greatness and great
+actions: in both which respects they differ from the ballad poets. The
+spell of the popular story, the popular ballad, is not quite the same
+as theirs. Theirs is more commanding; they are nearer to the strenuous
+life of the world than are the simple people who remember, over their
+fires of peat, the ancient stories of the wanderings of kings' sons.
+They have outgrown the stage of life for which the fables and old
+wives' tales are all-sufficient; they have begun to make a difference
+between fable and characters; they have entered on a way by which the
+highest poetical victories are attainable. The poetry of the old lays
+of the Volsungs, as compared with popular ballads and tales, is
+"weighty and philosophical"--full of the results of reflection on
+character. Nor have they with all this lost the inexplicable magic of
+popular poetry, as the poems of Helgi and Sigrun, and of the daughter
+of Angantyr, and others, may easily prove.
+
+
+IV
+
+THE STYLE OF THE POEMS
+
+The style of the poems, in what concerns their verse and diction, is
+not less distinctly noble than their spirit and temper. The
+alliterative verse, wherever it is found, declares itself as belonging
+to an elaborate poetical tradition. The alliterative line is
+rhetorically capable of a great amount of emphasis; it lends itself as
+readily as the "drumming decasyllabon" of the Elizabethan style to
+pompous declamation. Parallelism of phrases, the favourite rhetorical
+device, especially with the old English poets, is incompatible with
+tenuity of style; while the weight of the verse, as a rule, prevents
+the richness of phrasing from becoming too extravagant and
+frivolous.[32]
+
+[Footnote 32: Examples in Appendix, Note A.]
+
+The style of alliterative verse is not monotonous. Without reckoning
+the forms that deviate from the common epic measure, such as the
+Northern lyrical staves, there may be found in it as many varieties of
+style as in English blank verse from the days of _Gorboduc_ onward.
+
+In its oldest common form it may be supposed that the verse was not
+distinctly epic or lyric; lyric rather than epic, lyric with such
+amount of epic as is proper for psalms of triumph, or for the praise
+of a king, the kind of verse that might be used for any sort of
+_carmina_, such as for marking authorship and ownership on a sword or
+a horn, for epitaphs or spells, or for vituperative epigrams.
+
+In England and the Continent the verse was early adapted for
+continuous history. The lyrical and gnomic usages were not abandoned.
+The poems of _Widsith_ and _Deor's Lament_ show how the allusive and
+lyrical manner of referring to heroic legend was kept up in England.
+The general tendency, however, seems to have favoured a different kind
+of poetry. The common form of old English verse is fitted for
+narrative. The ideal of the poets is one that would have the sense
+"variously drawn out from one verse to another." When the verse is
+lyrical in tone, as in the _Dream of the Rood_, or the _Wanderer_, the
+lyrical passion is commonly that of mourning or regret, and the
+expression is elegiac and diffuse, not abrupt or varied. The verse,
+whether narrative or elegiac, runs in rhythmical periods; the sense is
+not "concluded in the couplet." The lines are mortised into one
+another; by preference, the sentences begin in the middle of a line.
+The parallelism of the old poetry, and its wealth of paraphrase,
+encourage deliberation in the sentences, though they are often
+interrupted by a short sentence, generally introduced to point a
+moral.
+
+The old Norse poetry, with many likenesses to the old English, had a
+different taste in rhetorical syntax. Instead of the long-drawn
+phrases of the English poetry, and an arrangement of sentences by
+which the metrical limits of the line were generally disguised, the
+Norse alliterative poetry adopted a mode of speech that allowed the
+line to ring out clearly, and gave full force to the natural emphasis
+of the rhythm.
+
+These two opposite rhetorical tendencies are illustrated also by the
+several variations upon the common rhythm that found favour in one
+region and the other. Where an English or a German alliterative poet
+wishes to vary from the common metre, he uses the lengthened line, an
+expansion of the simple line, which, from its volume, is less suitable
+for pointed expression, and more capable of pathos or solemnity, than
+the ordinary form of verse. The long line of the Saxon and English
+poets is not used in the Norse poetry; there the favourite verse,
+where the ordinary narrative line is discarded, is in the form of
+gnomic couplets, in which, as in the classical elegiac measure, a full
+line is succeeded by a truncated or broken rhythm, and with the same
+effect of clinching the meaning of the first line as is commonly given
+by the Greek or Latin pentameter. Of this favourite Northern measure
+there are only one or two casual and sporadic instances in English
+poetry; in the short dramatic lyric of the _Exeter Book_, interpreted
+so ingeniously by Mr. Bradley and Mr. Gollancz, and in the gnomic
+verses of the same collection.
+
+This difference of taste goes very far to explain the difference
+between English and Norse epic; to appreciate the difference of style
+is to understand the history of the early poetry. It was natural that
+the more equable form of the English and the Continental German
+narrative poetry should prove itself fit for extended and continuous
+epic narrative; it was inevitable that the Norse intolerance of tame
+expression, and of everything unimpassioned or unemphatic, should
+prevent the growth of any of the larger and slower kinds of poetry.
+
+The triumphs of alliterative poetry in the first or English kind are
+the long swelling passages of tragic monologue, of which the greatest
+is in the Saxon _Genesis_,--the speech of Satan after the fall from
+heaven. The best of the Northern poetry is all but lyrical; the poem
+of the Sibyl, the poems of Sigrun, Gudrun, Hervor.
+
+The nature of the two forms of poetry is revealed in their respective
+manners of going wrong. The decline of the old English poetry is shown
+by an increase of diffuseness and insipidity. The old Norse poetry was
+attacked by an evil of a different sort, the malady of false wit and
+over-decoration. The English poetry, when it loses strength and
+self-control, is prone to monotonous lamentation; the Norse poetry is
+tempted to overload itself with conceits.
+
+In the one there is excess of sentiment, in the other the contrary
+vice of frigidity, and a premeditated and ostentatious use of
+figurative expressions.
+
+The poem of _Beowulf_ has known the insidious approach and temptation
+of diffuse poetic melancholy. The Northern poems are corrupted by the
+vanity of metaphor. To evade the right term for everything has been
+the aim of many poetic schools; it has seldom been attained more
+effectually than in the poetry of the Norwegian tongue.
+
+Periphrastic epithets are part of the original and common stock of the
+Teutonic poetry. They form a large part of the vocabulary of common
+phrases which bear witness to the affinity existing among the remains
+of this poetry in all the dialects.[33]
+
+[Footnote 33: Compare the index to Sievers's edition of the _Hęliand_
+for illustrations of this community of poetical diction in old Saxon,
+English, Norse, and High German; and J. Grimm, _Andreas und Elene_
+(1840), pp. xxv.-xliv.]
+
+But this common device was differently applied in the end, by the two
+literatures, English and Icelandic, in which the old forms of verse
+held their ground longest against the rhyming forms. The tendency in
+England was to make use of the well-worn epithets, to ply the
+_Gradus_: the duller kind of Anglo-Saxon poetry is put together as
+Latin verses are made in school,--an old-fashioned metaphor is all the
+more esteemed for its age. The poets, and presumably their hearers,
+are best content with familiar phrases. In Iceland, on the other hand,
+there was an impatience of the old vocabulary, and a curiosity and
+search for new figures, that in the complexity and absurdity of its
+results is not approached by any school of "false wit" in the whole
+range of literature.
+
+Already in the older forms of Northern poetry it is plain that there
+is a tendency to lyrical emphasis which is unfavourable to the chances
+of long narrative in verse. Very early, also, there are symptoms of
+the familiar literary plague, the corruption of metaphor. Both these
+tendencies have for their result the new school of poetry peculiar to
+the North and the courts of the Northern kings and earls,--the Court
+poetry, or poetry of the Scalds, which in its rise and progress
+involved the failure of true epic. The German and English epic failed
+by exhaustion in the competition with Latin and Romance literature,
+though not without something to boast of before it went under. The
+Northern epic failed, because of the premature development of lyrical
+forms, first of all within itself, and then in the independent and
+rival modes of the Scaldic poetry.
+
+The Scaldic poetry, though later in kind than the poems of _Codex
+Regius_, is at least as old as the tenth century;[34] the latest of
+the epic poems, _Atlamál_ (the Greenland poem of Attila), and others,
+show marks of the influence of Court poetry, and are considerably
+later in date than the earliest of the Scalds.
+
+[Footnote 34: See _Bidrag til den ćldste Skaldedigtnings Historie_, by
+Dr. Sophus Bugge (1894).]
+
+The Court poetry is lyric, not epic. The aim of the Court poets was
+not the narrative or the dramatic presentation of the greater heroic
+legends; it was the elaborate decoration of commonplace themes, such
+as the praise of a king, by every possible artifice of rhyme and
+alliteration, of hard and exact construction of verse, and, above all,
+of far-sought metaphorical allusions. In this kind of work, in the
+praise of kings alive or dead, the poet was compelled to betake
+himself to mythology and mythical history, like the learned poets of
+other nations with their mythology of Olympus. In the mythology of
+Asgard were contained the stores of precious names and epithets by
+means of which the poems might be made to glitter and blaze.[35] It
+was for the sake of poets like these that Snorri wrote his _Edda_, and
+explained the mythical references available for the modern poetry of
+his time, though fortunately his spirit and talent were not limited to
+this didactic end, nor to the pedantries and deadly brilliance of
+fashionable verse. By the time of Snorri the older kind of poetry had
+become very much what Chaucer was to the Elizabethan sonneteers, or
+Spenser to the contemporaries of Pope. It was regarded with some
+amount of honour, and some condescension, but it had ceased to be the
+right kind of poetry for a "courtly maker."
+
+[Footnote 35: Compare _C.P.B._, ii. 447, Excursus on the Figures and
+Metaphors of old Northern Poetry.]
+
+The Northern poetry appears to have run through some of the same
+stages as the poetry of Greece, though with insufficient results in
+most of them. The epic poetry is incomplete, with all its nobility.
+The best things of the old poetry are dramatic--lyrical monologues,
+like the song of the Sibyl, and Gudrun's story to Theodoric, or
+dialogues like those of Helgi and Sigrun, Hervor and Angantyr. Before
+any adequate large rendering had been accorded to those tragic
+histories, the Northern poetry, in its impatience of length, had
+discovered the idyllic mode of expression and the dramatic monologue,
+in which there was no excuse for weakness and tameness, and, on the
+contrary, great temptation to excess in emphatic and figurative
+language. Instead of taking a larger scene and a more complex and
+longer story, the poets seem to have been drawn more and more to cut
+short the story and to intensify the lyrical passion of their dialogue
+or monologue. Almost as if they had known the horror of infinite
+flatness that is all about the literature of the Middle Ages, as if
+there had fallen upon them, in that Aleďan plain, the shadow of the
+enormous beast out of Aristotle's _Poetics_, they chose to renounce
+all superfluity, and throw away the makeshift wedges and supports by
+which an epic is held up. In this way they did great things, and
+_Volospá_ (the _Sibyl's Prophecy_) is their reward. To write out in
+full the story of the Volsungs and Niblungs was left to the prose
+compilers of the _Volsunga Saga_, and to the Austrian poet of the
+_Nibelungenlied_.
+
+The _Volospá_ is as far removed from the courtly odes and their manner
+and ingenuity as the _Marriage Hymn_ of Catullus from the _Coma
+Berenices_. The _Volospá_, however, has this in common with the
+mechanical odes, that equally with these it stands apart from epic,
+that equally with these it fuses epic material into an alien form. The
+sublimity of this great poem of the _Doom_ is not like the majesty or
+strength of epic. The voice is not the voice of a teller of stories.
+And it is here, not in true epic verse, that the Northern poetry
+attains its height.
+
+It is no ignoble form of poetry that is represented by the _Sibyl's
+Song_ and the _Lament of Gudrun_. But it was not enough for the
+ambition of the poets. They preferred the composition of correct and
+elaborate poems in honour of great men, with much expenditure of
+mythology and without passion;[36] one of the forms of poetry which
+may be truly said to leave nothing to be desired, the most artificial
+and mechanical poetry in the world, except possibly the
+closely-related kinds in the traditional elaborate verse of Ireland or
+of Wales.
+
+[Footnote 36: These may be found in the second volume of the _Corpus
+Poeticum Boreale_.]
+
+It was still possible to use this modern and difficult rhetoric,
+occasionally, for subjects like those of the freer epic; to choose a
+subject from heroic tradition and render it in the fashionable style.
+The _Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrok_[37] is the chief of those secondary
+dramatic idylls. It is marked off by difference of verse, for one
+thing, from the _Hamđismál_ and the _Atlakviđa_; and, besides this, it
+has the characteristic of imitative and conventional heroic
+literature--the unpersuasive and unconvincing force of the heroic
+romance, the rhetoric of Almanzor. The end of the poem is fine, but it
+does not ring quite true:--
+
+ The gods will welcome me; there is nothing to bewail in
+ death. I am ready to go; they are calling me home, the
+ maidens whom Odin has sent to call me. With gladness will I
+ drink the ale, set high among the gods. The hours of life
+ are gone over; laughing will I die.
+
+[Footnote 37: _C.P.B._, ii. 339.]
+
+It is not like the end of the sons of Gudrun; it is not of the same
+kind as the last words of Sorli, which are simpler, and infinitely
+more imaginative and true:--
+
+ We have fought; if we die to-day, if we die to-morrow, there
+ is little to choose. No man may speak when once the Fates
+ have spoken (_Hamđismál_, s.f.).
+
+It is natural that the _Song of Ragnar Lodbrok_ should be appreciated
+by modern authors. It is one of the documents responsible for the
+conventional Valkyria and Valhalla of the Romantic School, and for
+other stage properties, no longer new. The poem itself is in spirit
+rather more nearly related to the work of Tegnér or Oehlenschläger
+than to the _Volospá_. It is a secondary and literary version, a
+"romantic" version of ideas and images belonging to a past time, and
+studied by an antiquarian poet with an eye for historical
+subjects.[38]
+
+[Footnote 38: Translated in Percy's _Runic Poetry_ (1763), p. 27, and
+often since.]
+
+The progress of epic was not at an end in the rise of the new Court
+poetry that sounded sweeter in the ears of mortals than the old poems
+of _Sigurd_ and _Brynhild_. The conceits and the hard correctness of
+the Scalds did not satisfy all the curiosity or the imaginative
+appetite of their patrons. There still remained a desire for epic, or
+at least for a larger and freer kind of historical discourse. This was
+satisfied by the prose histories of the great men of Iceland, of the
+kings of Norway and the lords of the Isles; histories the nearest to
+true epic of all that have ever been spoken without verse. That the
+chief of all the masters of this art should have been Snorri
+Sturluson, the exponent and practitioner of the mystery of the Court
+poets, is among the pleasantest of historical paradoxes.
+
+The development of the Court poetry to all extremes of "false wit,"
+and of glaring pretence and artificiality of style, makes the contrast
+all the more vivid between its brocaded stiffness and the ease and
+freedom of the Sagas. But even apart from the Court poetry, it is
+clear that there was little chance for any development of the Northern
+heroic poetry into an Homeric fulness of detail. In the Norse poetry,
+as in Greek, the primitive forms of heroic dirges or hymns give place
+to narrative poetry; and that again is succeeded by a new kind of
+lyric, in which the ancient themes of the _Lament_ and the _Song of
+Praise_ are adorned with the new ideas and the new diction of poets
+who have come to study novelty, and have entered, though with far
+other arms and accoutrements, on the same course as the Greek lyric
+authors of dithyrambs and panegyrical odes. In this progress of poetry
+from the unknown older songs, like those of which Tacitus speaks, to
+the epic form as it is preserved in the "Elder Edda," and from the
+epic form to the lyrical form of the Scalds, the second stage is
+incomplete; the epic form is uncertain and half-developed. The rise of
+the Court poetry is the most obvious explanation of this failure. The
+Court poetry, with all its faults, is a completed form which had its
+day of glory, and even rather more than its share of good fortune. It
+is the characteristic and successful kind of poetry in Iceland and
+Norway, just as other kinds of elaborate lyric were cultivated, to the
+depreciation of epic, in Provence and in Italy. It was to the Court
+poet that the prizes were given; the epic form was put out of favour,
+generations before the fragments of it were gathered together and
+preserved by the collector from whose books they have descended to the
+extant manuscripts and the editions of the "Elder Edda."
+
+But at the same time it may be represented that the Court poetry was
+as much effect as cause of the depreciation of epic. The lyrical
+strain declared itself in the Northern epic poetry too strongly for
+any such epic work as either _Beowulf_ or the _Hęliand_. The bent was
+given too early, and there was no recovery possible. The Court poetry,
+in its rhetorical brilliance and its allusive phrases, as well as in
+the hardness and correctness of its verse, is carrying out to
+completion certain tastes and principles whose influence is manifest
+throughout the other orders of old Northern poetry; and there is no
+need to go to the Court poetry to explain the difference between the
+history of Northern and of English alliterative verse, though it is by
+means of the Court poetry that this difference may be brought into the
+strongest light. The contrast between the English liking for
+continuous discourse and the Norse liking for abrupt emphasis is
+already to be discerned in the oldest literary documents of the two
+nations.
+
+
+V
+
+THE PROGRESS OF EPIC
+
+VARIOUS RENDERINGS OF THE SAME STORY
+
+ Due (1) to accidents of tradition and impersonal causes:
+ (2) to calculation and selection of motives by the poets,
+ and intentional modification of traditional matter.
+
+_Beowulf_, as the poem stands, is quite a different sort of thing from
+the poems in the Copenhagen manuscript. It is given out by its scribes
+in all the glory of a large poem, handsomely furnished with a prelude,
+a conclusion, and divisions into several books. It has the look of a
+substantial epic poem. It was evidently regarded as something
+considerable, as a work of eminent virtue and respectability. The
+Northern poems, treasured and highly valued as they evidently were,
+belong to a different fashion. In the _Beowulf_ of the existing
+manuscript the fluctuation and variation of the older epic tradition
+has been controlled by editors who have done their best to establish a
+text of the poem. The book has an appearance of authority. There is
+little of this in the Icelandic manuscript. The Northern poems have
+evidently been taken as they were found. Imperfections of tradition,
+which in _Beowulf_ would have been glossed over by an editorial
+process, are here left staring at the reader. The English poem
+pretends to be a literary work of importance--a book, in short; while
+the Icelandic verses are plainly gathered from all quarters, and in
+such a condition as to defy the best intentions of the editor, who did
+his best to understand what he heard, but had no consistent policy of
+improvement or alteration, to correct the accidental errors and
+discrepancies of the oral communications.
+
+Further, and apart from the accidents of this particular book, there
+is in the poems, even when they are best preserved, a character of
+fluctuation and uncertainty, belonging to an older and less literary
+fashion of poetry than that of _Beowulf_.
+
+_Beowulf_ has been regarded by some as a composite epic poem made out
+of older and shorter poems. _Codex Regius_ shows that this hypothesis
+is dealing with an undoubted _vera causa_ when it talks of short lays
+on heroic subjects, and of the variations of treatment to be found in
+different lays on one and the same theme, and of the possibilities of
+contamination.
+
+Thus, in considering the story of Beowulf's descent under water, and
+the difficulties and contradictions of that story as it stands, Ten
+Brink has been led to suppose that the present text is made up of two
+independent versions, run together by an editor in a hazardous way
+without regard to the differences in points of detail, which still
+remain to the annoyance of the careful reader.
+
+There is no great risk in the assumption that there were different
+versions of the fight with Grendel's mother, which may have been
+carelessly put together into one version in spite of their
+contradictions. In the _Codex Regius_ there are three different
+versions of the death of the Niblungs, the _Atlakviđa_, _Atlamál_,
+and the _Lament of Oddrun_. The _Lament of Oddrun_ is vitally
+different from the other two poems, and these differ from one another,
+with regard to the motive of Atli's feud with Gunnar. It is possible
+for the human mind to imagine an editor, a literary man, capable of
+blending the poems in order to make a larger book. This would be
+something like the process which Ten Brink has suspected in the
+composition of this part of _Beowulf_. It is one thing, however, to
+detect the possibility of such misdemeanours; and quite another thing
+to suppose that it is by methods such as these that the bulk of the
+larger epic is swollen beyond the size of common lays or ballads. It
+is impossible, at any rate, by any reduction or analysis of _Beowulf_,
+to get rid of its stateliness of narrative; it would be impossible by
+any fusion or aggregation of the Eddic lays to get rid of their
+essential brevity. No accumulation of lays can alter the style from
+its trick of detached and abrupt suggestions to the slower and more
+equable mode.
+
+That there was a growth of epic among the Teutonic nations is what is
+proved by all the documents. This growth was of the same general kind
+as the progress of any of the great forms of literature--the Drama,
+the Novel. Successive generations of men, speaking the same or similar
+forms of language, made poetical experiments in a common
+subject-manner, trying different ways of putting things, and changing
+their forms of poetry according to local and personal variations of
+taste; so that the same story might be told over and over again, in
+different times, with different circumstances.
+
+In one region the taste might be all for compression, for increase of
+the tension, for suppression of the tamer intervals in the story. In
+another it might run to greater length and ease, and favour a gradual
+explication of the plot.
+
+The "Elder Edda" shows that contamination was possible. It shows that
+there might be frequent independent variations on the same theme, and
+that, apart from any editorial work, these versions might occasionally
+be shuffled and jumbled by mere accidents of recollection.
+
+Thus there is nothing contrary to the evidence in the theory that a
+redactor of _Beowulf_ may have had before him different versions of
+different parts of the poem, corresponding to one another, more or
+less, as _Atlamál_ corresponds to the _Atlakviđa_. This hypothesis,
+however, does not account for the difference in form between the
+English and the Northern poems. No handling of the _Atlamál_ or the
+_Atlakviđa_ could produce anything like the appearance of _Beowulf_.
+The contaminating editor may be useful as an hypothesis in certain
+particular cases. But the heroic poetry got on very well without him,
+generally speaking. It grew by a free and natural growth into a
+variety of forms, through the ambitions and experiments of poets.
+
+Variety is evident in the poems that lie outside the Northern group;
+_Finnesburh_ is of a different order from _Waldere_. It is in the
+Northern collection, however, that the variety is most evident. There
+the independent versions of the same story are brought together, side
+by side. The experiments of the old school are ranged there; and the
+fact that experiments were made, that the old school was not satisfied
+with its conventions, is perhaps the most legitimate inference, and
+one of the most significant, to be made by a reader of the poems.
+
+Variations on similar themes are found in all popular poetry; here
+again the poems of the _Edda_ present themselves as akin to ballads.
+Here again they are distinguished from ballads by their greater degree
+of ambition and self-consciousness. For it will not do to dismiss the
+Northern poems on the Volsung story as a mere set of popular
+variations on common themes. The more carefully they are examined, the
+less will be the part assigned to chance and imperfect recollection in
+producing the variety of the poems. The variation, where there are
+different presentations of the same subject, is not produced by
+accident or the casual and faulty repetition of a conventional type of
+poem, but by a poetical ambition for new forms. _Codex Regius_ is an
+imperfect monument of a time of poetical energy in which old forms
+were displaced by new, and old subjects refashioned by successive
+poets. As in the Athenian or the English drama the story of Oedipus or
+of Lear might be taken up by one playwright after another, so in the
+North the Northern stories were made to pass through changes in the
+minds of different poets.
+
+The analogy to the Greek and the English drama need not be forced.
+Without any straining of comparisons, it may be argued that the
+relation of the _Atlamál_ and _Atlakviđa_ is like the relation of
+Euripides to Aeschylus, and not so much like the variations of ballad
+tradition, in this respect, that the _Atlamál_ is a careful,
+deliberate, and somewhat conceited attempt to do better in a new way
+what has been done before by an older poet. The idylls of the
+heroines, Brynhild, Gudrun, Oddrun, are not random and unskilled
+variations; they are considerate and studied poems, expressing new
+conceptions and imaginations.
+
+It is true that this poetry is still, in many respects, in the
+condition of popular poetry and popular traditional stories. The
+difference of plot in some versions of the same subject appears to be
+due to the ordinary causes that produce the variants of popular
+tales,--defective memory, accidental loss of one point in the story,
+and change of emphasis in another. To causes such as these, to the
+common impersonal accidents of tradition, may perhaps be referred one
+of the strangest of all the alterations in the bearing of a story--the
+variation of plot in the tradition of the Niblungs.
+
+In the "Elder Edda" the death of the Niblungs is laid to the charge of
+Attila; their sister Gudrun does her best to save them; when she fails
+in this, she takes vengeance for them on her husband.
+
+In the German tradition, as in the version known to Saxo in the
+_Nibelungenlied_, in the Danish ballad of _Grimild's Revenge_ (which
+is borrowed from the German), the lines are laid quite differently.
+There it is their sister who brings about the death of the kings; it
+is the wife of Sigfred, of Sigfred whom they have killed, that exacts
+vengeance from her brothers Gunther and Hagene. Attila is here put
+aside. Gudrun's slaughter of her children is unrecorded; there is no
+motive for it when all her anger is turned against her brothers. This
+shifting of the centre of a story is not easy to explain. But,
+whatever the explanation may be, it seems probable that it lies
+somewhere within the range of popular tradition, that the change is
+due to some of the common causes of the transformation of stories, and
+not to a definite and calculated poetical modification. The tragical
+complications are so many in the story of the Niblungs that there
+could not fail to be variations in the traditional interpretation of
+motives, even without the assistance of the poets and their new
+readings of character.
+
+In some of the literary documents there may be found two kinds of
+variation from an original form of story,--variation due to those
+popular and indefinite causes, the variation of failing memory, on the
+one hand; and on the other, variation due to the ambition or conceit
+of an author with ideas of his own.
+
+A comparison of the _Atlakviđa_, the _Atlamál_, and the _Lamentation
+of Oddrun_ may at first suggest that we have here to deal with just
+such variants as are common wherever stories are handed on by oral
+tradition. Further consideration will more and more reduce the part
+allotted to oral maltreatment, and increase the part of intentional
+and artistic modification, in the variations of story to be found in
+these poems.
+
+All three poems are agreed in their ignorance of the variation which
+makes the wife of Sigfred into the avenger of his death. In all three
+it is Attila who brings about the death of the brothers of Gudrun.
+
+It seems to have been a constant part of the traditional story, as
+known to the authors of these three poems, that Attila, when he had
+the brothers of Gudrun in his power, gave order to cut out the heart
+of Hogni, and thereafter to throw Gunnar into the serpents' den.
+
+The _Atlakviđa_ presents an intelligible explanation of this; the
+other two poems leave this part of the action rather vague.
+
+In the _Atlakviđa_ the motive of Attila's original hatred is left at
+first unexplained, but comes out in the circumstances of the death of
+the Niblungs. When the Burgundian kings are seized and bound, they are
+called upon to buy themselves off with gold. It is understood in
+Gunnar's reply, that the gold of the Niblung treasure is what is
+sought for. He asks that the heart of Hogni may be brought to him.
+They bring him, instead, the heart of Hialli, which Gunnar detects at
+once as the heart of a coward. Then at last the heart of Hogni is cut
+out and brought to Gunnar; and then he defies the Huns, and keeps his
+secret.
+
+ Now is the hoard of the Niblungs all in my keeping alone,
+ for Hogni is dead: there was doubt while we two lived, but
+ now there is doubt no more. Rhine shall bear rule over the
+ gold of jealousy, the eager river over the Niblung's
+ heritage; the goodly rings shall gleam in the whirling
+ water, they shall not pass to the children of the Huns.
+
+Gunnar was thrown among the snakes, and there he harped upon his harp
+before his death came on him. The end of Gunnar is not told
+explicitly; the story goes on to the vengeance of Gudrun.
+
+In the _Oddrúnargrátr_ there is another motive for Attila's enmity to
+Gunnar: not the gold of the Niblungs, but the love that was between
+Gunnar and Oddrun (Oddrun was the sister of Attila and Brynhild). The
+death of Brynhild is alluded to, but that is not the chief motive. The
+gold of the Niblungs is not mentioned. Still, however, the death of
+Hogni precedes the death of Gunnar,--"They cut out the heart of Hogni,
+and his brother they set in the serpents' close." Gunnar played upon
+his harp among the serpents, and for a long time escaped them; but the
+old serpent came out at last and crawled to his heart. It is implied
+that the sound of his music is a charm for the serpents; but another
+motive is given by Oddrun, as she tells the story: Gunnar played on
+his harp for Oddrun, to be heard by her, so that she could come to
+help him. But she came too late.
+
+It might be inferred from this poem that the original story of the
+death of Hogni has been imperfectly recollected by the poet who
+touches lightly on it and gives no explanation here. It is fairer to
+suppose that it was passed over because it was irrelevant. The poet
+had chosen for his idyll the love of Gunnar and Oddrun, a part of the
+story which is elsewhere referred to among these poems, namely in the
+_Long Lay of Brynhild_ (l. 58). By his choice of this, and his
+rendering of it in dramatic monologue, he debarred himself from any
+emphatic use of the motive for Hogni's death. It cannot be inferred
+from his explanation of Gunnar's harp-playing that the common
+explanation was unknown to him. On the contrary, it is implied here,
+just as much as in _Atlakviđa_, that the serpents are kept from him by
+the music, until the old sleepless one gives him his death. But the
+poet, while he keeps this incident of the traditional version, is not
+particularly interested in it, except as it affords him a new occasion
+to return to his main theme of the love story. Gunnar's music is a
+message to Oddrun. This is an imaginative and dramatic adaptation of
+old material, not a mere lapse of memory, not a mere loss of the
+traditional bearings of the story.
+
+The third of these poems, the _Atlamál_, is in some respects the most
+remarkable of them all. In its plot it has more than the others, at
+the first reading, the appearance of a faulty recollection; for, while
+it makes a good deal of play with the circumstances of the death of
+Hogni, it misses, or appears to miss, the point of the story; the
+motive of Gunnar, which is evident and satisfactory in the
+_Atlakviđa_, is here suppressed or dropped. The gold of the Niblungs
+is not in the story at all; the motive of Attila appears to be anger
+at the death of his sister Brynhild, Gunnar's wife, but his motive is
+not much dwelt on. It is as if the author had forgotten the run of
+events, like a blundering minstrel.
+
+On the other hand, the poem in its style is further from all the
+manners of popular poetry, more affected and rhetorical, than any of
+the other pieces in the book. It is written in the _málaháttr_, a
+variety of the common epic measure, with a monotonous cadence; the
+sort of measure that commends itself to an ambitious and rhetorical
+poet with a fancy for correctness and regularity. The poem has its
+origin in an admiration for the character of Gudrun, and a desire to
+bring out more fully than in the older poems the tragic thoughts and
+passion of the heroine. Gudrun's anxiety for her brothers' safety, and
+her warning message to them not to come to the Court of the Huns, had
+been part of the old story. In the _Atlakviđa_ she sends them a token,
+a ring with a wolf's hair twisted round it, which is noticed by Hogni
+but not accepted by Gunnar. In the _Atlamál_ something more is made of
+this; her message here is written in runes, and these are falsified on
+the way by Attila's messenger, so that the warning is at first unread.
+But the confusion of the runes is detected by the wife of Hogni, and
+so the story opens with suspense and forebodings of the doom. The
+death of Hogni and Gunnar is explained in a new way, and always with
+the passion of Gudrun as the chief theme. In this story the fight of
+the Niblungs and the Huns is begun outside the doors of the hall.
+Gudrun hears the alarm and rushes out with a welcome to her
+brothers,--"that was their last greeting,"--and a cry of lamentation
+over their neglect of her runes. Then she tries to make peace, and
+when she fails in that, takes up a sword and fights for her brothers.
+It is out of rage and spite against Gudrun, and in order to tame her
+spirit, that Attila has the heart of Hogni cut out of him, and sends
+Gunnar to the serpents.
+
+All this change in the story is the result of meditation and not of
+forgetfulness. Right or wrong, the poet has devised his story in his
+own way, and his motives are easily discovered. He felt that the
+vengeance of Gudrun required to be more carefully and fully explained.
+Her traditional character was not quite consistent with the horrors of
+her revenge. In the _Atlamál_ the character of Gudrun is so conceived
+as to explain her revenge,--the killing of her children follows close
+upon her fury in the battle, and the cruelty of Attila is here a
+direct challenge to Gudrun, not, as in the _Atlakviđa_, a mere
+incident in Attila's search for the Niblung treasure. The cruelty of
+the death of Hogni in the _Atlakviđa_ is purely a matter of business;
+it is not of Attila's choosing, and apparently he favours the attempt
+to save Hogni by the sacrifice of Hialli the feeble man. In the
+_Atlamál_ it is to save Hogni from Attila that Hialli the cook is
+chased into a corner and held under the knife. This comic interlude is
+one of the liveliest passages of the poem. It serves to increase the
+strength of Hogni. Hogni begs them to let the creature go,--"Why
+should we have to put up with his squalling?" It may be observed that
+in this way the poet gets out of a difficulty. It is not in his design
+to have the coward's heart offered to Gunnar; he has dropped that part
+of the story entirely. Gunnar is not asked to give up the treasure,
+and has no reason to protect his secret by asking for the death of his
+brother; and there would be no point in keeping the incident for the
+benefit of Attila. That Gunnar should first detect the imposture, and
+should then recognise the heart of his brother, is a fine piece of
+heroic imagination of a primitive kind. It would have been wholly
+inept and spiritless to transfer this from Gunnar to Attila. The poet
+of _Atlamál_ shows that he understands what he is about. The more his
+work is scrutinised, the more evident becomes the sobriety of his
+judgment. His dexterity in the disposing of his incidents is proved in
+every particular. While a first reading of the poem and a first
+comparison with the story of _Atlakviđa_ may suggest the blundering
+and irresponsible ways of popular reciters, a very little attention
+will serve to bring out the difference and to justify this poet. He is
+not an improviser; his temptations are of another sort. He is the poet
+of a second generation, one of those who make up by energy of
+intelligence for their want of original and spontaneous imagination.
+It is not that he is cold or dull; but there is something wanting in
+the translation of his thoughts into speech. His metres are hammered
+out; the precision of his verse is out of keeping with the fury of his
+tragic purport. The faults are the faults of overstudy, the faults of
+correctness and maturity.
+
+The significance of the _Atlamál_ is considerable in the history of
+the Northern poetry. It may stand for the furthest mark in one
+particular direction; the epic poetry of the North never got further
+than this. If _Beowulf_ or _Waldere_ may perhaps represent the highest
+accomplishment of epic in old English verse, the _Atlamál_ has, at
+least, as good a claim in the other language. The _Atlamál_ is not the
+finest of the old poems. That place belongs, without any question, to
+the _Volospá_, the Sibyl's Song of the judgment; and among the others
+there are many that surpass the _Atlamál_ in beauty. But the _Atlamál_
+is complete; it is a work of some compass, diligently planned and
+elaborated. Further, although it has many of the marks of the new
+rhetoric, these do not change its character as a narrative poem. It
+is a narrative poem, not a poem of lyrical allusions, not an heroic
+ode. It is at once the largest and the most harmonious in construction
+of all the poems. It proves that the change of the Northern poetry,
+from narrative to the courtly lyric, was a change not made without
+fair opportunity to the older school to show what it was worth. The
+variety of the three poems of Attila, ending in the careful rhetoric
+of the _Atlamál_, is proof sufficient of the labour bestowed by
+different poets in their use of the epic inheritance. Great part of
+the history of the North is misread, unless account is taken of the
+artistic study, the invention, the ingenuity, that went to the making
+of those poems. This variety is not the confusion of barbarous
+tradition, or the shifts and experiments of improvisers. The prosody
+and the rhetorical furniture of the poems might prevent that
+misinterpretation. It might be prevented also by an observation of the
+way the matter is dealt with, even apart from the details of the
+language and the style. The proof from these two quarters, from the
+matter and from the style, is not easily impugned.
+
+So the first impression is discredited, and so it appears that the
+"Elder Edda," for all its appearance of disorder, haste, and hazard,
+really contains a number of specimens of art, not merely a heap of
+casual and rudimentary variants. The poems of the Icelandic manuscript
+assert themselves as individual and separate works. They are not the
+mere makings of an epic, the mere materials ready to the hand of an
+editor. It still remains true that they are defective, but it is true
+also that they are the work of artists, and of a number of artists
+with different aims and ideals. The earliest of them is long past the
+stage of popular improvisation, and the latest has the qualities of a
+school that has learned more art than is good for it.
+
+The defect of the Northern epic is that it allowed itself to be too
+soon restricted in its scope. It became too minute, too emphatic, too
+intolerant of the comfortable dilutions, the level intervals, between
+the critical moments.[39] It was too much affected by the vanities of
+the rival Scaldic poetry; it was overcome by rhetoric. But it cannot
+be said that it went out tamely.
+
+[Footnote 39: There is a natural affinity to Gray's poetry in the
+Icelandic poetry that he translated--compressed, emphatic, incapable
+of laxity.]
+
+
+VI
+
+_BEOWULF_
+
+The poem of _Beowulf_ has been sorely tried; critics have long been at
+work on the body of it, to discover how it is made. It gives many
+openings for theories of agglutination and adulteration. Many things
+in it are plainly incongruous. The pedigree of Grendel is not
+authentic; the Christian sentiments and morals are not in keeping with
+the heroic or the mythical substance of the poem; the conduct of the
+narrative is not always clear or easy to follow. These difficulties
+and contradictions have to be explained; the composition of the poem
+has to be analysed; what is old has to be separated from what is new
+and adventitious; and the various senses and degrees of "old" and
+"new" have to be determined, in the criticism of the poem. With all
+this, however, the poem continues to possess at least an apparent and
+external unity. It is an extant book, whatever the history of its
+composition may have been; the book of the adventures of Beowulf,
+written out fair by two scribes in the tenth century; an epic poem,
+with a prologue at the beginning, and a judgment pronounced on the
+life of the hero at the end; a single book, considered as such by its
+transcribers, and making a claim to be so considered.
+
+Before any process of disintegration is begun, this claim should be
+taken into account; the poem deserves to be appreciated as it stands.
+Whatever may be the secrets of its authorship, it exists as a single
+continuous narrative poem; and whatever its faults may be, it holds a
+position by itself, and a place of some honour, as the one extant poem
+of considerable length in the group to which it belongs. It has a
+meaning and value apart from the questions of its origin and its mode
+of production. Its present value as a poem is not affected by proofs
+or arguments regarding the way in which it may have been patched or
+edited. The patchwork theory has no power to make new faults in the
+poem; it can only point out what faults exist, and draw inferences
+from them. It does not take away from any dignity the book may possess
+in its present form, that it has been subjected to the same kind of
+examination as the _Iliad_. The poem may be reviewed as it stands, in
+order to find out what sort of thing passed for heroic poetry with the
+English at the time the present copy of the poem was written. However
+the result was obtained, _Beowulf_ is, at any rate, the specimen by
+which the Teutonic epic poetry must be judged. It is the largest
+monument extant. There is nothing beyond it, in that kind, in respect
+of size and completeness. If the old Teutonic epic is judged to have
+failed, it must be because _Beowulf_ is a failure.
+
+Taking the most cursory view of the story of _Beowulf_, it is easy to
+recognise that the unity of the plot is not like the unity of the
+_Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_. One is inclined at first to reckon _Beowulf_
+along with those epics of which Aristotle speaks, the _Heracleids_ and
+_Theseids_, the authors of which "imagined that because Heracles was
+one person the story of his life could not fail to have unity."[40]
+
+[Footnote 40: _Poet._ 1451 a.]
+
+It is impossible to reduce the poem of _Beowulf_ to the scale of
+Aristotle's _Odyssey_ without revealing the faults of structure in the
+English poem:--
+
+ A man in want of work goes abroad to the house of a certain
+ king troubled by Harpies, and having accomplished the
+ purification of the house returns home with honour. Long
+ afterwards, having become king in his own country, he kills
+ a dragon, but is at the same time choked by the venom of it.
+ His people lament for him and build his tomb.
+
+Aristotle made a summary of the Homeric poem, because he wished to
+show how simple its construction really was, apart from the episodes.
+It is impossible, by any process of reduction and simplification, to
+get rid of the duality in _Beowulf_. It has many episodes, quite
+consistent with a general unity of action, but there is something more
+than episodes, there is a sequel. It is as if to the _Odyssey_ there
+had been added some later books telling in full of the old age of
+Odysseus, far from the sea, and his death at the hands of his son
+Telegonus. The adventure with the dragon is separate from the earlier
+adventures. It is only connected with them because the same person is
+involved in both.
+
+It is plain from Aristotle's words that the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_
+were in this, as in all respects, above and beyond the other Greek
+epics known to Aristotle. Homer had not to wait for _Beowulf_ to serve
+as a foil to his excellence. That was provided in the other epic poems
+of Greece, in the cycle of Troy, in the epic stories of Theseus and
+Heracles. It seems probable that the poem of _Beowulf_ may be at least
+as well knit as the _Little Iliad_, the Greek cyclic poem of which
+Aristotle names the principal incidents, contrasting its variety with
+the simplicity of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_.[41]
+
+[Footnote 41: [Greek: toigaroun ek men Iliados kai Odysseias mia
+tragôidia poieitai hekateras ę duo monai, ek de Kypriôn pollai kai tęs
+mikras Iliados pleon oktô, hoion hoplôn krisis, Philoktętęs,
+Neoptolemos, Eurypylos, ptôcheia, Lakainai, Iliou persis, kai apoplous
+kai Sinôn kai Trôiades] (1459 b).]
+
+Indeed it is clear that the plan of _Beowulf_ might easily have been
+much worse, that is, more lax and diffuse, than it is. This meagre
+amount of praise will be allowed by the most grudging critics, if they
+will only think of the masses of French epic, and imagine the extent
+to which a French company of poets might have prolonged the narrative
+of the hero's life--the _Enfances_, the _Chevalerie_--before reaching
+the _Death of Beowulf_.
+
+At line 2200 in _Beowulf_ comes the long interval of time, the fifty
+years between the adventure at Heorot and the fight between Beowulf
+and the dragon. Two thousand lines are given to the first story, a
+thousand to the _Death of Beowulf_. Two thousand lines are occupied
+with the narrative of Beowulf's expedition, his voyage to Denmark, his
+fight with Grendel and Grendel's mother, his return to the land of the
+Gauts and his report of the whole matter to King Hygelac. In this part
+of the poem, taken by itself, there is no defect of unity. The action
+is one, with different parts all easily and naturally included between
+the first voyage and the return. It is amplified and complicated with
+details, but none of these introduce any new main interests. _Beowulf_
+is not like the _Heracleids_ and _Theseids_. It transgresses the
+limits of the Homeric unity, by adding a sequel; but for all that it
+is not a mere string of adventures, like the bad epic in Horace's _Art
+of Poetry_, or the innocent plays described by Sir Philip Sidney and
+Cervantes. A third of the whole poem is detached, a separate
+adventure. The first two-thirds taken by themselves form a complete
+poem, with a single action; while, in the orthodox epic manner,
+various allusions and explanations are introduced regarding the past
+history of the personages involved, and the history of other people
+famous in tradition. The adventure at Heorot, taken by itself, would
+pass the scrutiny of Aristotle or Horace, as far as concerns the lines
+of its composition.
+
+There is variety in it, but the variety is kept in order and not
+allowed to interfere or compete with the main story. The past history
+is disclosed, and the subordinate novels are interpolated, as in the
+_Odyssey_, in the course of an evening's conversation in hall, or in
+some other interval in the action. In the introduction of accessory
+matter, standing in different degrees of relevance to the main plot,
+the practice of _Beowulf_ is not essentially different from that of
+classical epic.
+
+In the _Iliad_ we are allowed to catch something of the story of the
+old time before Agamemnon,--the war of Thebes, Lycurgus, Jason,
+Heracles,--and even of things less widely notable, less of a concern
+to the world than the voyage of Argo, such as, for instance, the
+business of Nestor in his youth. In _Beowulf_, in a similar way, the
+inexhaustible world outside the story is partly represented by means
+of allusions and digressions. The tragedy of Finnesburh is sung by the
+harper, and his song is reported at some length, not merely referred
+to in passing. The stories of Thrytho, of Heremod, of Sigemund the
+Wćlsing and Fitela his son (Sigmund and Sinfiotli), are introduced
+like the stories of Lycurgus or of Jason in Homer. They are
+illustrations of the action, taken from other cycles. The fortunes of
+the Danish and Gautish kings, the fall of Hygelac, the feuds with
+Sweden, these matters come into closer relation with the story. They
+are not so much illustrations taken in from without, as points of
+attachment between the history of _Beowulf_ and the untold history all
+round it, the history of the persons concerned, along with Beowulf
+himself, in the vicissitudes of the Danish and Gautish kingdoms.
+
+In the fragments of _Waldere_, also, there are allusions to other
+stories. In _Waldere_ there has been lost a poem much longer and
+fuller than the _Lay of Hildebrand_, or any of the poems of the "Elder
+Edda"--a poem more like _Beowulf_ than any of those now extant. The
+references to Weland, to Widia Weland's son, to Hama and Theodoric,
+are of the same sort as the references in _Beowulf_ to the story of
+Froda and Ingeld, or the references in the _Iliad_ to the adventures
+of Tydeus.
+
+In the episodic passages of _Beowulf_ there are, curiously, the same
+degrees of relevance as in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_.
+
+Some of them are necessary to the proper fulness of the story, though
+not essential parts of the plot. Such are the references to Beowulf's
+swimming-match; and such, in the _Odyssey_, is the tale told to
+Alcinous.
+
+The allusions to the wars of Hygelac have the same value as the
+references in the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ to such portions of the
+tale of Troy, and of the return of the Greek lords, as are not
+immediately connected with the anger of Achilles, or the return of
+Odysseus. The tale of _Finnesburh_ in _Beowulf_ is purely an
+interlude, as much as the ballad of _Ares and Aphrodite_ in the
+_Odyssey_.
+
+Many of the references to other legends in the _Iliad_ are
+illustrative and comparative, like the passages about Heremod or
+Thrytho in _Beowulf_. "Ares suffered when Otus and Ephialtes kept him
+in a brazen vat, Hera suffered and Hades suffered, and were shot with
+the arrows of the son of Amphitryon" (_Il._ v. 385). The long
+parenthetical story of Heracles in a speech of Agamemnon (_Il._ xx.
+98) has the same irrelevance of association, and has incurred the same
+critical suspicions, as the contrast of Hygd and Thrytho, a fairly
+long passage out of a wholly different story, introduced in _Beowulf_
+on the very slightest of suggestions.
+
+Thus in _Beowulf_ and in the Homeric poems there are episodes that are
+strictly relevant and consistent, filling up the epic plan, opening
+out the perspective of the story; also episodes that without being
+strictly relevant are rightly proportioned and subordinated, like the
+interlude of Finnesburh, decoration added to the structure, but not
+overloading it, nor interfering with the design; and, thirdly,
+episodes that seem to be irrelevant, and may possibly be
+interpolations. All these kinds have the effect of increasing the mass
+as well as the variety of the work, and they give to _Beowulf_ the
+character of a poem which, in dealing with one action out of an heroic
+cycle, is able, by the way, to hint at and partially represent a great
+number of other stories.
+
+It is not in the episodes alone that _Beowulf_ has an advantage over
+the shorter and more summary poems. The frequent episodes are only
+part of the general liberality of the narrative.
+
+The narrative is far more cramped than in _Homer_; but when compared
+with the short method of the Northern poems, not to speak of the
+ballads, it comes out as itself Homeric by contrast. It succeeds in
+representing pretty fully and continuously, not by mere allusions and
+implications, certain portions of heroic life and action.
+
+The principal actions in _Beowulf_ are curiously trivial, taken by
+themselves. All around them are the rumours of great heroic and tragic
+events, and the scene and the personages are heroic and magnificent.
+But the plot in itself has no very great poetical value; as compared
+with the tragic themes of the Niblung legend, with the tale of
+Finnesburh, or even with the historical seriousness of the _Maldon_
+poem, it lacks weight. The largest of the extant poems of this school
+has the least important subject-matter; while things essentially and
+in the abstract more important, like the tragedy of Froda and Ingeld,
+are thrust away into the corners of the poem.
+
+In the killing of a monster like Grendel, or in the killing of a
+dragon, there is nothing particularly interesting; no complication to
+make a fit subject for epic. _Beowulf_ is defective from the first in
+respect of plot.
+
+The story of Grendel and his mother is one that has been told in
+myriads of ways; there is nothing commoner, except dragons. The
+killing of dragons and other monsters is the regular occupation of the
+heroes of old wives' tales; and it is difficult to give individuality
+or epic dignity to commonplaces of this sort. This, however, is
+accomplished in the poem of _Beowulf_. Nothing can make the story of
+Grendel dramatic like the story of Waldere or of Finnesburh. But the
+poet has, at any rate, in connexion with this simple theme, given a
+rendering, consistent, adequate, and well-proportioned, of certain
+aspects of life and certain representative characters in an heroic
+age.
+
+The characters in _Beowulf_ are not much more than types; not much
+more clearly individual than the persons of a comedy of Terence. In
+the shorter Northern poems there are the characters of Brynhild and
+Gudrun; there is nothing in _Beowulf_ to compare with them, although
+in _Beowulf_ the personages are consistent with themselves, and
+intelligible.
+
+Hrothgar is the generous king whose qualities were in Northern history
+transferred to his nephew Hrothulf (Hrolf Kraki), the type of peaceful
+strength, a man of war living quietly in the intervals of war.
+
+Beowulf is like him in magnanimity, but his character is less uniform.
+He is not one of the more cruel adventurers, like Starkad in the myth,
+or some of the men of the Icelandic Sagas. But he is an adventurer
+with something strange and not altogether safe in his disposition. His
+youth was like that of the lubberly younger sons in the fairy stories.
+"They said that he was slack." Though he does not swagger like a
+Berserk, nor "gab" like the Paladins of Charlemagne, he is ready on
+provocation to boast of what he has done. The pathetic sentiment of
+his farewell to Hrothgar is possibly to be ascribed, in the details of
+its rhetoric, to the common affection of Anglo-Saxon poetry for the
+elegiac mood; but the softer passages are not out of keeping with the
+wilder moments of _Beowulf_, and they add greatly to the interest of
+his character. He is more variable, more dramatic, than the king and
+queen of the Danes, or any of the secondary personages.
+
+Wealhtheo, the queen, represents the poetical idea of a noble lady.
+There is nothing complex or strongly dramatic in her character.
+
+Hunferth, the envious man, brought in as a foil to Beowulf, is not
+caricatured or exaggerated. His sourness is that of a critic and a
+politician, disinclined to accept newcomers on their own valuation. He
+is not a figure of envy in a moral allegory.
+
+In the latter part of the poem it is impossible to find in the
+character of Wiglaf more than the general and abstract qualities of
+the "loyal servitor."
+
+Yet all those abstract and typical characters are introduced in such a
+way as to complete and fill up the picture. The general impression is
+one of variety and complexity, though the elements of it are simple
+enough.
+
+With a plot like that of _Beowulf_ it might seem that there was danger
+of a lapse from the more serious kind of heroic composition into a
+more trivial kind. Certainly there is nothing in the plain story to
+give much help to the author; nothing in Grendel to fascinate or tempt
+a poet with a story made to his hand.
+
+The plot of _Beowulf_ is not more serious than that of a thousand
+easy-going romances of chivalry, and of fairy tales beyond all number.
+
+The strength of what may be called an epic tradition is shown in the
+superiority of _Beowulf_ to the temptations of cheap romantic
+commonplace. Beowulf, the hero, is, after all, something different
+from the giant-killer of popular stories, the dragon-slayer of the
+romantic schools. It is the virtue and the triumph of the poet of
+_Beowulf_ that when all is done the characters of the poem remain
+distinct in the memory, that the thoughts and sentiments of the poem
+are remembered as significant, in a way that is not the way of the
+common romance. Although the incidents that take up the principal part
+of the scene of _Beowulf_ are among the commonest in popular stories,
+it is impossible to mistake the poem for one of the ordinary tales of
+terror and wonder. The essential part of the poem is the drama of
+characters; though the plot happens to be such that the characters are
+never made to undergo a tragic ordeal like that of so many of the
+other Teutonic stories. It is not incorrect to say of the poem of
+_Beowulf_ that the main story is really less important to the
+imagination than the accessories by which the characters are defined
+and distinguished. It is the defect of the poem this should be so.
+There is a constitutional weakness in it.
+
+Although the two stories of _Beowulf_ are both commonplace, there is a
+difference between the story of Grendel and the story of the dragon.
+
+The story of the dragon is more of a commonplace than the other.
+Almost every one of any distinction, and many quite ordinary people in
+certain periods of history have killed dragons; from Hercules and
+Bellerophon to Gawain, who, on different occasions, narrowly escaped
+the fate of Beowulf; from Harald Hardrada (who killed two at least) to
+More of More Hall who killed the dragon of Wantley.
+
+The latter part of _Beowulf_ is a tissue of commonplaces of every
+kind: the dragon and its treasure; the devastation of the land; the
+hero against the dragon; the defection of his companions; the loyalty
+of one of them; the fight with the dragon; the dragon killed, and the
+hero dying from the flame and the venom of it; these are commonplaces
+of the story, and in addition to these there are commonplaces of
+sentiment, the old theme of this transitory life that "fareth as a
+fantasy," the lament for the glory passed away; and the equally common
+theme of loyalty and treason in contrast. Everything is commonplace,
+while everything is also magnificent in its way, and set forth in the
+right epic style, with elegiac passages here and there. Everything is
+commonplace except the allusions to matters of historical tradition,
+such as the death of Ongentheow, the death of Hygelac. With these
+exceptions, there is nothing in the latter part of _Beowulf_ that
+might not have been taken at almost any time from the common stock of
+fables and appropriate sentiments, familiar to every maker or hearer
+of poetry from the days of the English conquest of Britain, and long
+before that. It is not to be denied that the commonplaces here are
+handled with some discretion; though commonplace, they are not mean or
+dull.[42]
+
+[Footnote 42: It has been shown recently by Dr. Edward Sievers that
+Beowulf's dragon corresponds in many points to the dragon killed by
+Frotho, father of Haldanus, in Saxo, Book II. The dragon is not wholly
+commonplace, but has some particular distinctive traits. See _Berichte
+der Königl. Sächs. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften_, 6 Juli 1895.]
+
+The story of Grendel and his mother is also common, but not as common
+as the dragon. The function of this story is considerably different
+from the other, and the class to which it belongs is differently
+distributed in literature. Both are stories of the killing of
+monsters, both belong naturally to legends of heroes like Theseus or
+Hercules. But for literature there is this difference between them,
+that dragons belong more appropriately to the more fantastic kinds of
+narrative, while stories of the deliverance of a house from a
+pestilent goblin are much more capable of sober treatment and
+verisimilitude. Dragons are more easily distinguished and set aside as
+fabulous monsters than is the family of Grendel. Thus the story of
+Grendel is much better fitted than the dragon story for a composition
+like _Beowulf_, which includes a considerable amount of the detail of
+common experience and ordinary life. Dragons are easily scared from
+the neighbourhood of sober experience; they have to be looked for in
+the mountains and caverns of romance or fable. Whereas Grendel remains
+a possibility in the middle of common life, long after the last dragon
+has been disposed of.
+
+The people who tell fairy stories like the _Well of the World's End_,
+the _Knight of the Red Shield_, the _Castle East o' the Sun and West
+o' the Moon_, have no belief, have neither belief nor disbelief, in
+the adventures of them. But the same people have other stories of
+which they take a different view, stories of wonderful things more
+near to their own experience. Many a man to whom the _Well of the
+World's End_ is an idea, a fancy, has in his mind a story like that of
+Grendel which he believes, which makes him afraid. The bogle that
+comes to a house at night and throttles the goodman is a creature more
+hardy than the dragon, and more persevering. Stories like that of
+Beowulf and Grendel are to be found along with other popular stories
+in collections; but they are to be distinguished from them. There are
+popular heroes of tradition to this day who are called to do for
+lonely houses the service done by Beowulf for the house of Hrothgar.
+
+Peer Gynt (not Ibsen's Peer Gynt, who is sophisticated, but the
+original Peter) is a lonely deer-stalker on the fells, who is asked by
+his neighbour to come and keep his house for him, which is infested
+with trolls. Peer Gynt clears them out,[43] and goes back to his
+deer-stalking. The story is plainly one that touches the facts of life
+more nearly than stories of _Shortshanks_ or the _Blue Belt_. The
+trolls are a possibility.
+
+[Footnote 43: Asbjörnsen, _Norske Huldre-Eventyr og Folkesagn_. _At
+renske Huset_ is the phrase--"to cleanse the house." Cf. _Heorot is
+gefćlsod_, "Heorot is cleansed," in _Beowulf_.]
+
+The story of Uistean Mor mac Ghille Phadrig is another of the same
+sort.[44] It is not, like the _Battle of the Birds_ or _Conal Gulban_,
+a thing of pure fantasy. It is a story that may pass for true when the
+others have lost everything but their pure imaginative value as
+stories. Here, again, in the West Highlands, the champion is called
+upon like Beowulf and Peer Gynt to save his neighbours from a warlock.
+And it is matter of history that Bishop Gudmund Arason of Hólar in
+Iceland had to suppress a creature with a seal's head, Selkolla, that
+played the game of Grendel.[45]
+
+[Footnote 44: J.F. Campbell, _Tales of the West Highlands_, ii. p. 99.
+The reference to this story in _Catriona_ (p. 174) will be
+remembered.]
+
+[Footnote 45: _Biskupa Sögur_, i. p. 604.]
+
+There are people, no doubt, for whom Peer Gynt and the trolls, Uistean
+Mor and the warlock, even Selkolla that Bishop Gudmund killed, are as
+impossible as the dragon in the end of the poem of _Beowulf_. But it
+is certain that stories like those of Grendel are commonly believed in
+many places where dragons are extinct. The story of Beowulf and
+Grendel is not wildly fantastic or improbable; it agrees with the
+conditions of real life, as they have been commonly understood at all
+times except those of peculiar enlightenment and rationalism. It is
+not to be compared with the Phaeacian stories of the adventures of
+Odysseus. Those stories in the _Odyssey_ are plainly and intentionally
+in a different order of imagination from the story of the killing of
+the suitors. They are pure romance, and if any hearer of the _Odyssey_
+in ancient times was led to go in search of the island of Calypso, he
+might come back with the same confession as the seeker for the wonders
+of Broceliande,--_fol i alai_. But there are other wonderful things in
+the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ which are equally improbable to the
+modern rationalist and sceptic; yet by no means of the same kind of
+wonder as Calypso or the Sirens. Probably few of the earliest hearers
+of the _Odyssey_ thought of the Sirens or of Calypso as anywhere near
+them, while many of them must have had their grandmothers' testimony
+for things like the portents before the death of the suitors. Grendel
+in the poem of _Beowulf_ is in the same order of existence as these
+portents. If they are superstitions, they are among the most
+persistent; and they are superstitions, rather than creatures of
+romance. The fight with Grendel is not of the same kind of adventure
+as Sigurd at the hedge of flame, or Svipdag at the enchanted castle.
+And the episode of Grendel's mother is further from matter of fact
+than the story of Grendel himself. The description of the desolate
+water is justly recognised as one of the masterpieces of the old
+English poetry; it deserves all that has been said of it as a passage
+of romance in the middle of epic. Beowulf's descent under the water,
+his fight with the warlock's mother, the darkness of that "sea
+dingle," the light of the mysterious sword, all this, if less
+admirably worked out than the first description of the dolorous mere,
+is quite as far from Heorot and the report of the table-talk of
+Hrothgar, Beowulf, and Hunferth. It is also a different sort of thing
+from the fight with Grendel. There is more of supernatural incident,
+more romantic ornament, less of that concentration in the struggle
+which makes the fight with Grendel almost as good in its way as its
+Icelandic counterpart, the wrestling of Grettir and Glam.
+
+The story of _Beowulf_, which in the fight with Grendel has analogies
+with the plainer kind of goblin story, rather alters its tone in the
+fight with Grendel's mother. There are parallels in _Grettis Saga_,
+and elsewhere, to encounters like this, with a hag or ogress under
+water; stories of this sort have been found no less credible than
+stories of haunting warlocks like Grendel. But this second story is
+not told in the same way as the first. It has more of the fashion and
+temper of mythical fable or romance, and less of matter of fact. More
+particularly, the old sword, the sword of light, in the possession of
+Grendel's dam in her house under the water, makes one think of other
+legends of mysterious swords, like that of Helgi, and the "glaives of
+light" that are in the keeping of divers "gyre carlines" in the _West
+Highland Tales_. Further, the whole scheme is a common one in popular
+stories, especially in Celtic stories of giants; after the giant is
+killed his mother comes to avenge him.
+
+Nevertheless, the controlling power in the story of _Beowulf_ is not
+that of any kind of romance or fantastic invention; neither the
+original fantasy of popular stories nor the literary embellishments of
+romantic schools of poetry. There are things in _Beowulf_ that may be
+compared to things in the fairy tales; and, again, there are passages
+of high value for their use of the motive of pure awe and mystery. But
+the poem is made what it is by the power with which the characters are
+kept in right relation to their circumstances. The hero is not lost or
+carried away in his adventures. The introduction, the arrival in
+Heorot, and the conclusion, the return of Beowulf to his own country,
+are quite unlike the manner of pure romance; and these are the parts
+of the work by which it is most accurately to be judged.
+
+The adventure of Grendel is put in its right proportion when it is
+related by Beowulf to Hygelac. The repetition of the story, in a
+shorter form, and in the mouth of the hero himself, gives strength and
+body to a theme that was in danger of appearing trivial and fantastic.
+The popular story-teller has done his work when he has told the
+adventures of the giant-killer; the epic poet has failed, if he has
+done no more than this.
+
+The character and personage of Beowulf must be brought out and
+impressed on the audience; it is the poet's hero that they are bound
+to admire. He appeals to them, not directly, but with unmistakable
+force and emphasis, to say that they have beheld ("as may unworthiness
+define") the nature of the hero, and to give him their praises.
+
+The beauty and the strength of the poem of _Beowulf_, as of all true
+epic, depend mainly upon its comprehensive power, its inclusion of
+various aspects, its faculty of changing the mood of the story. The
+fight with Grendel is an adventure of one sort, grim, unrelieved,
+touching close upon the springs of mortal terror, the recollection or
+the apprehension of real adversaries possibly to be met with in the
+darkness. The fight with Grendel's mother touches on other motives;
+the terror is further away from human habitations, and it is
+accompanied with a charm and a beauty, the beauty of the Gorgon, such
+as is absent from the first adventure. It would have loosened the
+tension and broken the unity of the scene, if any such irrelevances
+had been admitted into the story of the fight with Grendel. The fight
+with Grendel's mother is fought under other conditions; the stress is
+not the same; the hero goes out to conquer, he is beset by no such
+apprehension as in the case of the night attack. The poet is at this
+point free to make use of a new set of motives, and here it is rather
+the scene than the action that is made vivid to the mind. But after
+this excursion the story comes back to its heroic beginning; and the
+conversation of Beowulf with his hosts in Denmark, and the report that
+he gives to his kin in Gautland, are enough to reduce to its right
+episodic dimensions the fantasy of the adventure under the sea. In the
+latter part of the poem there is still another distribution of
+interest. The conversation of the personages is still to be found
+occasionally carried on in the steady tones of people who have lives
+of their own, and belong to a world where the tunes are not all in one
+key. At the same time, it cannot be denied that the story of the
+_Death of Beowulf_ is inclined to monotony. The epic variety and
+independence are obliterated by the too obviously pathetic intention.
+The character of this part of the poem is that of a late school of
+heroic poetry attempting, and with some success, to extract the spirit
+of an older kind of poetry, and to represent in one scene an heroic
+ideal or example, with emphasis and with concentration of all the
+available matter. But while the end of the poem may lose in some
+things by comparison with the stronger earlier parts, it is not so
+wholly lost in the charms of pathetic meditation as to forget the
+martial tone and the more resolute air altogether. There was a danger
+that Beowulf should be transformed into a sort of Amadis, a mirror of
+the earlier chivalry; with a loyal servitor attending upon his death,
+and uttering the rhetorical panegyric of an abstract ideal. But this
+danger is avoided, at least in part. Beowulf is still, in his death, a
+sharer in the fortunes of the Northern houses; he keeps his history.
+The fight with the dragon is shot through with reminiscences of the
+Gautish wars: Wiglaf speaks his sorrow for the champion of the Gauts;
+the virtues of Beowulf are not those of a fictitious paragon king, but
+of a man who would be missed in the day when the enemies of the Gauts
+should come upon them.
+
+The epic keeps its hold upon what went before, and on what is to come.
+Its construction is solid, not flat. It is exposed to the attractions
+of all kinds of subordinate and partial literature,--the fairy story,
+the conventional romance, the pathetic legend,--and it escapes them
+all by taking them all up as moments, as episodes and points of view,
+governed by the conception, or the comprehension, of some of the
+possibilities of human character in a certain form of society. It does
+not impose any one view on the reader; it gives what it is the proper
+task of the higher kind of fiction to give--the play of life in
+different moods and under different aspects.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE ICELANDIC SAGAS
+
+
+I
+
+ICELAND AND THE HEROIC AGE
+
+The epic poetry of the Germans came to an end in different ways and at
+different seasons among the several nations of that stock. In England
+and the Continent it had to compete with the new romantic subjects and
+new forms of verse. In Germany the rhyming measures prevailed very
+early, but the themes of German tradition were not surrendered at the
+same time. The rhyming verse of Germany, foreign in its origin,
+continued to be applied for centuries in the rendering of German myths
+and heroic stories, sometimes in a style with more or less pretence to
+courtliness, as in the _Nibelungenlied_ and _Kudrun_; sometimes in
+open parade of the travelling minstrel's "public manners" and simple
+appetites. England had exactly the opposite fortune in regard to verse
+and subject-matter. In England the alliterative verse survived the
+changes of inflexion and pronunciation for more than five hundred
+years after _Maldon_, and uttered its last words in a poem written
+like the _Song of Byrhtnoth_ on a contemporary battle,--the poem of
+_Scottish Field_.[46]
+
+[Footnote 46: Ed. Robson, Chetham Society, 1855, from the Lyme MS.;
+ed. Furnivall and Hales, _Percy Folio Manuscript_, 1867.]
+
+ There was girding forth of guns, with many great stones;
+ Archers uttered out their arrows and eagerly they shotten;
+ They proched us with spears and put many over;
+ That the blood outbrast at their broken harness.
+ There was swinging out of swords, and swapping of heads,
+ We blanked them with bills through all their bright armour,
+ That all the dale dinned of the derf strokes.
+
+But while this poem of Flodden corresponds in its subject to the poem
+of _Maldon_, there is no such likeness between any other late
+alliterative poem and the older poems of the older language. The
+alliterative verse is applied in the fourteenth and fifteenth
+centuries to every kind of subject except those of Germanic tradition.
+England, however, has the advantage over Germany, that while Germany
+lost the old verse, England did not lose the English heroic subjects,
+though, as it happens, the story of King Horn and the story of
+Havelock the Dane are not told in the verse that was used for King
+Arthur and Gawain, for the tale of Troy and the wars of Alexander. The
+recent discovery of a fragment of the _Song of Wade_ is an admonition
+to be cautious in making the extant works of Middle English literature
+into a standard for all that has ceased to exist. But no new
+discovery, even of a Middle English alliterative poem of Beowulf or of
+Walter of Aquitaine, would alter the fact that the alliterative
+measure of English poetry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
+like the ancient themes of the German rhyming poems, is a survival in
+an age when the chief honours go to other kinds of poetry. The author
+of _Piers Plowman_ is a notable writer, and so are the poets of
+_Gawain_, and of the _Mort Arthure_, and of the _Destruction of Troy_;
+but Chaucer and not Langland is the poetical master of that age. The
+poems of the _Nibelungen_ and of _Kudrun_ are rightly honoured, but it
+was to the author of _Parzival_, and to the courtly lyrics of Walther
+von der Vogelweide, that the higher rank was given in the age of the
+Hohenstaufen, and the common fame is justified by history, so often as
+history chooses to have any concern with such things.
+
+In the lands of the old Northern speech the old heroic poetry was
+displaced by the new Court poetry of the Scalds. The heroic subjects
+were not, however, allowed to pass out of memory. The new poetry could
+not do without them, and required, and obtained, its heroic dictionary
+in the _Edda_. The old subjects hold their own, or something of their
+own, with every change of fashion. They were made into prose stories,
+when prose was in favour; they were the subjects of _Rímur_, rhyming
+Icelandic romances, when that form came later into vogue.[47] In
+Denmark they were paraphrased, many of them, by Saxo in his _History_;
+many of them became the subjects of ballads, in Denmark, Norway,
+Sweden, and the Faroes.
+
+[Footnote 47: See below, p. 283.]
+
+In this way some of the inheritance of the old German world was saved
+in different countries and languages, for the most part in ballads and
+chapbooks, apart from the main roads of literature. But these
+heirlooms were not the whole stock of the heroic age. After the
+failure and decline of the old poetry there remained an unexhausted
+piece of ground; and the great imaginative triumph of the Teutonic
+heroic age was won in Iceland with the creation of a new epic
+tradition, a new form applied to new subjects.
+
+Iceland did something more than merely preserve the forms of an
+antiquated life whose day was over. It was something more than an
+island of refuge for muddled and blundering souls that had found the
+career of the great world too much for them. The ideas of an
+old-fashioned society migrated to Iceland, but they did not remain
+there unmodified. The paradox of the history of Iceland is that the
+unsuccessful old ideas were there maintained by a community of people
+who were intensely self-conscious and exceptionally clear in mind.
+Their political ideas were too primitive for the common life of
+medieval Christendom. The material life of Iceland in the Middle Ages
+was barbarous when compared with the life of London or Paris, not to
+speak of Provence or Italy, in the same centuries. At the same time,
+the modes of thought in Iceland, as is proved by its historical
+literature, were distinguished by their freedom from extravagances,--from
+the extravagance of medieval enthusiasm as well as from the
+superstitions of barbarism. The life of an heroic age--that is, of an
+older stage of civilisation than the common European medieval
+form--was interpreted and represented by the men of that age
+themselves with a clearness of understanding that appears to be quite
+unaffected by the common medieval fallacies and "idolisms." This clear
+self-consciousness is the distinction of Icelandic civilisation and
+literature. It is not vanity or conceit. It does not make the
+Icelandic writers anxious about their own fame or merits. It is simply
+clear intelligence, applied under a dry light to subjects that in
+themselves are primitive, such as never before or since have been
+represented in the same way. The life is their own life; the record is
+that of a dispassionate observer.
+
+While the life represented in the Sagas is more primitive, less
+civilised, than the life of the great Southern nations in the Middle
+Ages, the record of that life is by a still greater interval in
+advance of all the common modes of narrative then known to the more
+fortunate or more luxurious parts of Europe. The conventional form of
+the Saga has none of the common medieval restrictions of view. It is
+accepted at once by modern readers without deduction or apology on the
+score of antique fashion, because it is in essentials the form with
+which modern readers are acquainted in modern story-telling; and more
+especially because the language is unaffected and idiomatic, not
+"quaint" in any way, and because the conversations are like the talk
+of living people. The Sagas are stories of characters who speak for
+themselves, and who are interesting on their own merits. There are
+good and bad Sagas, and the good ones are not all equally good
+throughout. The mistakes and misuses of the inferior parts of the
+literature do not, however, detract from the sufficiency of the common
+form, as represented at its best. The invention of the common form of
+the Saga is an achievement which deserves to be judged by the best in
+its kind. That kind was not exempt, any more than the Elizabethan
+drama or the modern novel, from the impertinences and superfluities of
+trivial authors. Further, there were certain conditions and
+circumstances about its origin that sometimes hindered in one way,
+while they gave help in another. The Saga is a compromise between
+opposite temptations, and the compromise is not always equitable.
+
+
+II
+
+MATTER AND FORM
+
+It is no small part of the force of the Sagas, and at the same time a
+difficulty and an embarrassment, that they have so much of reality
+behind them. The element of history in them, and their close relation
+to the lives of those for whom they were made, have given them a
+substance and solidity beyond anything else in the imaginative stories
+of the Middle Ages. It may be that this advantage is gained rather
+unfairly. The art of the Sagas, which is so modern in many things, and
+so different from the medieval conventions in its selection of matter
+and its development of the plot, is largely indebted to circumstances
+outside of art. In its rudiments it was always held close to the real
+and material interests of the people; it was not like some other arts
+which in their beginning are fanciful, or dependent on myth or legend
+for their subject-matter, as in the medieval schools of painting or
+sculpture generally, or in the medieval drama. Its imaginative methods
+were formed through essays in the representation of actual life; its
+first artists were impelled by historical motives, and by personal and
+local interests. The art of the Sagas was from the first "immersed in
+matter"; it had from the first all the advantage that is given by
+interests stronger and more substantial than those of mere
+literature; and, conversely, all the hindrance that such irrelevant
+interests provide, when "mere literature" attempts to disengage itself
+and govern its own course.
+
+The local history, the pedigrees of notable families, are felt as a
+hindrance, in a greater or less degree, by all readers of the Sagas;
+as a preliminary obstacle to clear comprehension. The Sagas differ in
+value, according to their use and arrangement of these matters, in
+relation to a central or imaginative conception of the main story and
+the characters engaged in it. The best Sagas are not always those that
+give the least of their space to historical matters, to the
+genealogies and family memoirs. From these the original life of the
+Sagas is drawn, and when it is cut off from these the Saga withers
+into a conventional and insipid romance. Some of the best Sagas are
+among those which make most of the history and, like _Njála_ and
+_Laxdćla_, act out their tragedies in a commanding way that carries
+along with it the whole crowd of minor personages, yet so that their
+minor and particular existences do not interfere with the story, but
+help it and give it substantiality. The tragedy of _Njal_, or of the
+_Lovers of Gudrun_, may be read and judged, if one chooses, in
+abstraction from the common background of Icelandic history, and in
+forgetfulness of its bearing upon the common fortunes of the people of
+the land; but these Sagas are not rightly understood if they are taken
+only and exclusively in isolation. The tragedies gain a very distinct
+additional quality from the recurrence of personages familiar to the
+reader from other Sagas. The relation of the Sagas to actual past
+events, and to the whole range of Icelandic family tradition, was the
+initial difficulty in forming an adequate method of story-telling; the
+particulars were too many, and also too real. But the reality of them
+was, at the same time, the initial impulse of the Sagas; and the best
+of the Sagas have found a way of saving the particulars of the family
+and local histories, without injury to the imaginative and poetical
+order of their narratives.
+
+The Sagas, with all the differences between them, have common
+features, but among these is not to be reckoned an equal consideration
+for the unity of action. The original matter of the oral traditions of
+Iceland, out of which the written Sagas were formed, was naturally
+very much made up of separate anecdotes, loosely strung together by
+associations with a district or a family. Some of the stories, no
+doubt, must have had by nature a greater unity and completeness than
+the rest:--history in the rough has very often the outlines of tragedy
+in it; it presents its authors with dramatic contrasts ready made
+(Richard II. and Bolingbroke, Lewis XI. and Charles the Bold,
+Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots); it provides real heroes. But there
+are many interesting things which are not well proportioned, and which
+have no respect for the unities; the hero is worth talking about
+whether his story is symmetrical or not. The simplest form of heroic
+narrative is that which puts together a number of adventures, such as
+may easily be detached and repeated separately, adventures like that
+of David and Goliath, Wallace with his fishing-rod, or Bruce in the
+robbers' house. Many of the Sagas are mere loose strings of
+adventures, of short stories, or idylls, which may easily be detached
+and remembered out of connexion with the rest of the series. In the
+case of many of these it is almost indifferent at what point they may
+be introduced in the Saga; they merely add some particulars without
+advancing the plot, if there be any plot. There are all varieties of
+texture in the Sagas, from the extreme laxity of those that look like
+mere collections of the anecdotes of a countryside (_Eyrbyggja_), to
+the definite structure of those in which all the particulars
+contribute to the main action (_Hrafnkels Saga_, _Bandamanna_, _Gísla
+Saga_).
+
+The loose assemblage of stories current in Iceland before the Sagas
+were composed in writing must, of course, have been capable of all
+kinds of variation. The written Sagas gave a check to oral variations
+and rearrangements; but many of them in extant alternative versions
+keep the traces of the original story-teller's freedom of selection,
+while all the Sagas together in a body acknowledge themselves
+practically as a selection from traditional report. Each one, the most
+complete as well as the most disorderly, is taken out of a mass of
+traditional knowledge relating to certain recognisable persons, of
+whom any one may be chosen for a time as the centre of interest, and
+any one may become a subordinate character in some one else's
+adventures. One Saga plays into the others, and introduces people
+incidentally who may be the heroes of other stories. As a result of
+this selective practice of the Sagas, it sometimes happens that an
+important or an interesting part of the record may be dropped by one
+Saga and picked up casually by another. Thus in the written Sagas, one
+of the best stories of the two Foster-brothers (or rather "Brothers by
+oath," _fratres jurati_) Thorgeir and Thormod the poet, is preserved
+not by their own proper history, _Fóstbrćđra Saga_, but in the story
+of Grettir the Strong; how they and Grettir lived a winter through in
+the same house without quarrelling, and how their courage was
+estimated by their host.[48]
+
+[Footnote 48: "Is it true, Thorgils, that you have entertained those
+three men this winter, that are held to be the most regardless and
+overbearing, and all of them outlaws, and you have handled them so
+that none has hurt another?" Yes, it was true, said Thorgils. Skapti
+said: "That is something for a man to be proud of; but what do you
+think of the three, and how are they each of them in courage?"
+Thorgils said: "They are all three bold men to the full; yet two of
+them, I think, may tell what fear is like. It is not in the same way
+with both; for Thormod fears God, and Grettir is so afraid of the dark
+that after dark he would never stir, if he had his own way; but I do
+not know that Thorgeir, my kinsman, is afraid of anything."--"You have
+read them well," says Skapti; and so their talk ended (_Grettis Saga_,
+c. 51).]
+
+This solidarity and interconnexion of the Sagas needs no explanation.
+It could not be otherwise in a country like Iceland; a community of
+neighbours (in spite of distances and difficulties of travelling)
+where there was nothing much to think about or to know except other
+people's affairs. The effect in the written Sagas is to give them
+something like the system of the _Comédie Humaine_. There are new
+characters in each, but the old characters reappear. Sometimes there
+are discrepancies; the characters are not always treated from the same
+point of view. On the whole, however, there is agreement. The
+character of Gudmund the Great, for example, is well drawn, with zest,
+and some irony, in his own Saga (_Ljósvetninga_); he is the prosperous
+man, the "rich glutton," fond of praise and of influence, but not as
+sound as he looks, and not invulnerable. His many appearances in other
+Sagas all go to strengthen this impression of the full-blown great man
+and his ambiguous greatness. So also Snorri the Priest, whose rise and
+progress are related in _Eyrbyggja_, appears in many other Sagas, and
+is recognised whenever he appears with the same certainty and the same
+sort of interest as attaches to the name of Rastignac, when that
+politician is introduced in stories not properly his own. Each
+separate mention of Snorri the Priest finds its place along with all
+the rest; he is never unequal to himself.
+
+It is in the short story, the episodic chapter, that the art of
+Icelandic narrative first defines itself. This is the original unity;
+it is here, in a limited, easily comprehensible subject-matter, that
+the lines are first clearly drawn. The Sagas that are least regular
+and connected are made up of definite and well-shaped single blocks.
+Many of the Sagas are much improved by being taken to pieces and
+regarded, not as continuous histories, but as collections of separate
+short stories. _Eyrbyggja_, _Vatnsdćla_, and _Ljósvetninga_ are
+collections of this sort--"Tales of the Hall." There is a sort of
+unity in each of them, but the place of Snorri in _Eyrbyggja_, of
+Ingimund in _Vatnsdćla_, and of Gudmund the Great in the history of
+the House of Ljósavatn, is not that of a tragic or epic hero who
+compels the episodes to take their right subordinate rank in a larger
+story. These Sagas break up into separate chapters, losing thereby
+none of the minor interests of story-telling, but doing without the
+greater tragic or heroic interest of the fables that have one
+predominant motive.
+
+Of more coherent forms of construction there are several different
+examples among the Sagas. In each of these cases it is the tragic
+conception, the tragic idea, of the kind long familiar to the Teutonic
+nations, that governs the separate passages of the traditional
+history.
+
+Tragic situations are to be found all through the Icelandic
+literature, only they are not always enough to make a tragedy. There
+is Nemesis in the end of Gudmund the Great, when his murdered enemy
+haunts him; but this is not enough to make his Saga an organic thing.
+The tragic problem of Alboin recurs, as was pointed out by the editors
+of _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_, in the prelude to _Vatnsdćla Saga_; but
+it stands by itself as one of the separate chapters in that history,
+which contains the plots of other tragedies also, without adopting any
+one of them as its single and overruling motive. These are instances
+of the way in which tragic imagination, or at any rate the knowledge
+and partial appreciation of tragic plots, may come short of
+fulfilment, and may be employed in a comparatively futile and wasteful
+form of literature. In the greater works, where the idea is fully
+realised, there is no one formal type. The Icelandic Sagas have
+different forms of success in the greater works, as well as different
+degrees of approximation to success in the more desultory and
+miscellaneous histories.
+
+_Njála_, which is the greatest of all the Sagas, does not make its
+effect by any reduction of the weight or number of its details. It
+carries an even greater burden of particulars than _Eyrbyggja_; it has
+taken up into itself the whole history of the south country of Iceland
+in the heroic age.
+
+The unity of _Njála_ is certainly not the unity of a restricted or
+emaciated heroic play. Yet with all its complexity it belongs to quite
+a different order of work from _Eyrbyggja_.
+
+It falls into three divisions, each of these a story by itself, with
+all three combining to form one story, apart from which they are
+incomplete. The first, the story of Gunnar, which is a tragedy by
+itself, is a necessary part of the whole composition; for it is also
+the story of the wisdom of Njal and the dignity of Bergthora, without
+which the second part would be insipid, and the great act of the
+burning of Njal's house would lose its depth and significance. The
+third part is the payment of a debt to Njal, Bergthora, and
+Skarphedinn, for whom vengeance is required; but it is also due even
+more to Flosi their adversary. The essence of the tragic situation
+lies in this, that the good man is in the wrong, and his adversary in
+the right. The third part is required to restore the balance, in order
+that the original wrong, Skarphedinn's slaughter of the priest of
+Whiteness, should not be thought to be avoided in the death of its
+author. _Njála_ is a work of large scale and liberal design; the
+beauty of all which, in the story, is that it allows time for the
+characters to assert themselves and claim their own, as they could not
+do in a shorter story, where they would be whirled along by the plot.
+The vengeance and reconciliation in the third part of _Njála_ are
+brought about by something more than a summary poetical justice of
+fines and punishments for misdeeds. It is a more leisurely, as well as
+a more poetical justice, that allows the characters to assert
+themselves for what they really are; the son of Lambi "filthy still,"
+and Flosi the Burner not less true in temper than Njal himself.
+
+_Njála_ and _Laxdćla_ are examples of two different ways in which
+inconvenient or distracting particulars of history or tradition might
+be reduced to serve the ends of imagination and the heroic design.
+_Njála_ keeps up, more or less, throughout, a continuous history of a
+number of people of importance, but always with a regard for the
+principal plot of the story. In _Laxdćla_ there is, on the other hand,
+a gradual approach to the tragedy of Kjartan, Bolli, and Gudrun; an
+historical prologue of the founding of Laxdale, and the lives of
+Kjartan's father and grandfather, before the chief part of the story
+begins. In _Njála_ the main story opens as soon as Njal appears; of
+prologue there is little more than is needed to prepare for the
+mischief of Hallgerda, who is the cause of the strain between the two
+houses of Lithend and Bergthorsknoll, and thereby the touchstone of
+the generosity of Njal. In _Laxdćla_, although the prologue is not
+irrelevant, there is a long delay before the principal personages are
+brought together. There is no mistake about the story when once it
+begins, and no question about the unity of the interest; Gudrun and
+Fate may divide it between them, if it be divisible. It is purely the
+stronger quality of this part of the book, in comparison with the
+earlier, that saves _Laxdćla_ from the defects of its construction; by
+the energy of the story of Kjartan, the early story of Laxdale is
+thrown back and left behind as a mere prelude, in spite of its length.
+
+The story of Egil Skallagrimsson, the longest of the biographical
+Sagas, shows exactly the opposite proportions to those of _Laxdćla_.
+The life of Egil is prefaced by the history of his grandfather,
+father, and uncle, Kveldulf, Skallagrim (Grim the Bald), and Thorolf.
+Unhappily for the general effect of the book, the life of Egil is told
+with less strength and coherence than the fate of his uncle. The most
+commanding and most tragic part of _Egla_ is that which represents
+Skallagrim and Thorolf in their relations to the tyranny of Harald the
+king; how Thorolf's loyalty was ill paid, and how Skallagrim his
+brother went in defiance to speak to King Harald. This, though it is
+only a prelude to the story of Egil, is one of the finest imaginative
+passages in the whole literature. The Saga has here been able to
+express, in a dramatic and imaginative form, that conflict of
+principles between the new monarchy and the old liberty which led to
+the Icelandic migration. The whole political situation, it might be
+said the whole early history of Iceland and Norway, is here summed up
+and personified in the conflict of will between the three characters.
+Thorolf, Harald the king, and Skallagrim play the drama of the
+Norwegian monarchy, and the founding of the Icelandic Commonwealth.
+After this compact and splendid piece of work the adventures of Egil
+Skallagrimsson appear rather ineffectual and erratic, in spite of some
+brilliant episodes.
+
+What was an author to do when his hero died in his bed, or survived
+all his feuds and enmities? or when a feud could not be wound up in
+one generation?
+
+_Vápnfirđinga Saga_ gives the history of two generations of feud, with
+a reconciliation at the end, thus obtaining a rounded unity, though at
+some cost of the personal interest in its transference from fathers to
+sons.
+
+_Víga-Glúms Saga_ is a story which, with the best intentions in the
+world, could not attain to tragedy like that of Gisli or of Grettir,
+because every one knew that Glum was a threatened man who lived long,
+and got through without any deadly injury. Glum is well enough fitted
+for the part of a tragic hero. He has the slow growth, the unpromising
+youth, the silence and the dangerous laughter, such as are recorded in
+the lives of other notable personages in heroic literature:--
+
+ Glum turned homeward; and a fit of laughing came on him. It
+ took him in this way, that his face grew pale, and there ran
+ tears from his eyes like hailstones: it was often so with
+ him afterwards, when bloodshed was in his mind.
+
+But although there are several feuds in the story of Glum or several
+incidents in a feud, somehow there is no tragedy. Glum dies quietly,
+aged and sightless. There is a thread of romantic destiny in his
+story; he keeps his good luck till he parts with the gifts of his
+grandfather Vigfus--the cloak, the spear, and the sword that Vigfus
+had given him in Norway. The prayer for Glum's discomfiture, which one
+of his early adversaries had offered to Frey, then takes effect, when
+the protecting luck has been given away. The fall of Glum is,
+however, nothing incurable; the change in his fortune is merely that
+he has to give up the land which he had extorted from his adversary
+long before, and that he ceases to be the greatest man in Eyjafirth,
+though continuing to be a man of importance still. His honour and his
+family are not hard hit, after all.
+
+The history of Glum, with its biographical unity, its interest of
+character, and its want of tragedy, is a form of story midway between
+the closer knit texture of _Gísla Saga_ and the laxity of construction
+in the stories without a hero, or with more than one, such as
+_Ljósvetninga_ or _Vatnsdćla_. It is a biography with no strong crisis
+in it; it might have been extended indefinitely. And, in fact, the
+existing form of the story looks as if it were rather carelessly put
+together, or perhaps abridged from a fuller version. The story in
+_Reykdćla_ of Viga Skuta, Glum's son-in-law and enemy, contains a
+better and fuller account of their dealings than _Glúma_, without any
+discrepancy, though the _Reykdćla_ version alludes to divergencies of
+tradition in certain points. The curious thing is that the _Reykdćla_
+version supplies information about Glum's character which supplements
+what is told more baldly in his own Saga. Both accounts agree about
+Glum's good nature, which is practised on by Skuta. Glum is constant
+and trustworthy whenever he is appealed to for help. The _Reykdćla_
+version gives a pretty confirmation of this view of Glum's character
+(c. 24), where Glum protects the old Gaberlunzie man, with the result
+that the old man goes and praises his kindness, and so lets his
+enemies know of his movements, and spoils his game for that time. This
+episode is related to _Glúma_, as the foster-brother episode of
+Grettir (c. 51), quoted above, is related to _Fóstbrćđra Saga_.
+
+If _Glúma_ is interesting and even fairly compact, in spite of its
+want of any great dramatic moment, on the other hand the tragic ending
+is not always enough to save a story from dissipation of interest. In
+the story of Glum's antagonist, Viga Skuta, in the second part of
+_Reykdćla Saga_, there is no proportion or composition; his adventures
+follow one upon the other, without development, a series of hazards
+and escapes, till he is brought down at last. In the earlier part of
+the same Saga (the story of Vemund, Skuta's cousin, and Askel, Skuta's
+father) there is more continuity in the chronicle of wrongs and
+revenges, and, if this story be taken by itself, more form and
+definite design. The two rivals are well marked out and opposed to one
+another, while the mischief-making Vemund is well contrasted with his
+uncle Askel, the just man and the peacemaker, who at the end is killed
+in one of his nephew's feuds, in the fight by the frozen river from
+which Vemund escapes, while his enemy is drowned and his best friend
+gets a death wound.
+
+There are two Sagas in which a biographical theme is treated in such a
+way that the story produces one single impressive and tragical effect,
+leaving the mind with a sense of definite and necessary movement
+towards a tragic conclusion,--the story of Grettir the Strong, and the
+story of Gisli the Outlaw. These stories have analogies to one
+another, though they are not cast in quite the same manner.
+
+In the life of Grettir there are many detached episodes, giving room
+for theories of adulteration such as are only too inevitable and
+certain in regard to the imbecile continuation of the story after
+Grettir's death and his brother's vengeance. The episodes in the main
+story are, however, not to be dismissed quite so easily as the
+unnecessary romance of the Lady Spes (_Grettis Saga_, cc. 90-95).
+While many of the episodes do little to advance the story, and some
+of them seem to have been borrowed from other Sagas without sufficient
+reason (cc. 25-27, from the _Foster-brothers_), most of them serve to
+accentuate the character of Grettir, or to deepen the sense of the
+mystery surrounding his life.
+
+The tragedy of Grettir is one of those which depend on Accident,
+interpreted by the author as Fate. The hero is a doomed man, like
+Gisli, who sees things clearly coming on, but is unable to get out of
+their way. In both _Gisli_ and _Grettir_ there is an accompaniment of
+mystery and fantasy--for Gisli in the songs of the dream woman, for
+Grettir in various touches unlike the common prose of the Sagas. The
+hopelessness of his ill fortune is brought out in a sober way in his
+dealings with the chiefs who are unable to protect him, and in the
+cheerless courage of his relations with the foster-brothers, when the
+three are all together in the house of Thorgils Arason. It is
+illustrated in a quite different and more fantastic way in the scenes
+of his wanderings among the mountains, in the mysterious quiet of
+Thorisdal, in his alliance with strange deliverers, outside of the
+common world and its society, in the curse of Glam under the
+moonlight. This last is one of the few scenes in the Sagas, though not
+the only one, when the effect depends on something more than the
+persons engaged in it. The moon with the clouds driving over counts
+for more than a mere indication of time or weather; it is essential to
+the story, and lends itself to the malignity of the adversary in
+casting the spell of fear upon Grettir's mind. The solitude of
+Drangey, in the concluding chapters of _Grettis Saga_, the cliffs, the
+sea and the storms are all much less exceptional; they are necessary
+parts of the action, more closely and organically related to the
+destiny of the hero. There, in the final scenes, although there is
+witchcraft practised against Grettir, it is not that, but the common
+and natural qualities of the foolishness of the thrall and the heroism
+of Grettir and his young brother on which the story turns. These are
+the humanities of Drangey, a strong contrast, in the art of narrative,
+to the moonlight spell of Glam. The notable thing is that the romantic
+and fantastic passages in Grettir are not obscurations of the tragedy,
+not irrelevant, but rather an expression by the way, and in an
+exceptional mood, of the author's own view of the story and his
+conviction that it is all one coherent piece. This certainly is the
+effect of the romantic interludes in _Gisli_, which is perhaps the
+most tragic of all the Sagas, or at any rate the most self-conscious
+of its tragic aim. In the story of Gisli there is an introduction and
+preparation, but there is no very great expense of historical
+preliminaries. The discrepancies here between the two extant
+redactions of the Saga seem to show that introductory chapters of this
+sort were regarded as fair openings for invention and decoration by
+editors, who had wits enough to leave the essential part of the story
+very much to itself. Here, when once the action has begun, it goes on
+to the end without a fault. The chief characters are presented at the
+beginning; Gisli and Thorkell his brother; Thorgrim the Priest and
+Vestein, their two brothers-in-law. A speech foretelling their
+disunion is reported to Gisli, and leads him to propose the oath of
+fellowship between the four; which proposal, meant to avert the omen,
+brings about its fulfilment. And so the story goes on logically and
+inevitably to the death of Gisli, who slew Thorgrim, and the
+passionate agony of Thordis, Thorgrim's wife and Gisli's sister.
+
+_Hrafnkels Saga_ is a tragic idyll, complete and rounded. It is
+different in its design from _Njála_ or _Laxdćla_, from the stories of
+Grettir and Gisli. It is a short story, well concentrated. For mere
+symmetry of design it might compete with any of the greater Icelandic
+works, not to speak of any modern fiction.
+
+Hrafnkel, the proud man, did a cruel thing "for his oath's sake";
+killed his shepherd Einar for riding on Freyfaxi, the horse that
+belonged to Frey the god, and to Hrafnkel his priest. To the father of
+Einar he made offers of compensation which were not accepted. Then the
+story, with much admirable detail (especially in the scenes at the
+Althing), goes on to show how Hrafnkel's pride was humbled by Einar's
+cousin. All through, however, Hrafnkel is represented as guilty of
+tragic terror, not of wickedness; he is punished more than is due, and
+in the end the balance is redressed, and his arrogant conqueror is
+made to accept Hrafnkel's terms. It is a story clearly and
+symmetrically composed; it would be too neat, indeed, if it were not
+that it still leaves some accounts outstanding at the end: the
+original error is wasteful, and the life of an innocent man is
+sacrificed in the clearing of scores between Hrafnkel and his
+adversary.
+
+The theory of a conglomerate epic may be applied to the Icelandic
+Sagas with some effect. It is plain on the face of them that they
+contain short stories from tradition which may correspond to the short
+lays of the epic theory, which do in fact resemble in many things
+certain of the lays of the "Elder Edda." Many of the Sagas, like
+_Eyrbyggja_, _Vatnsdćla_, _Svarfdćla_, are ill compacted, and easily
+broken up into separate short passages. On the other hand, these
+broken and variegated Sagas are wanting in dignity and impressiveness
+compared with some others, while those others have attained their
+dignity, not by choosing their episodic chapters merely, but by
+forcing their own original and commanding thought upon all their
+matter. This is the case, whether the form be that of the
+comprehensive, large, secure, and elaborate _Njála_; of _Laxdćla_,
+with its dilatory introduction changing to the eagerness and quickness
+of the story of Gudrun; of _Grettir_ and _Gisli_, giving shape in
+their several ways to the traditional accumulation of a hero's
+adventures; or, not less remarkable, the precision of _Hrafnkels Saga_
+and _Bandamanna_,[49] which appear to have discovered and fixed for
+themselves the canons of good imaginative narrative in short compass,
+and to have freed themselves, in a more summary way than _Njála_, from
+the encumbrances of traditional history, and the distracting interests
+of the antiquarian and the genealogist. These two stories, with that
+of Howard of Icefirth[50] and some others, might perhaps be taken as
+corresponding in Icelandic prose to the short epic in verse, such as
+the _Atlakviđa_. They show, at any rate, that the difficulties of
+reluctant subject-matter and of the manifold deliverances of tradition
+were not able, in all cases, to get the better of that sense of form
+which was revealed in the older poetic designs.
+
+[Footnote 49: See below, pp. 229 _sqq._]
+
+[Footnote 50: p. 216.]
+
+In their temper also, and in the quality of their heroic ideal, the
+Sagas are the inheritors of the older heroic poetry.
+
+
+III
+
+THE HEROIC IDEAL
+
+In the material conditions of Icelandic life in the "Saga Age" there
+was all the stuff that was required for heroic narrative. This was
+recognised by the story-tellers, and they made the most of it. It must
+be admitted that there is some monotony in the circumstances, but it
+may be contended that this is of no account in comparison with the
+results that are produced in the best Sagas out of trivial occasions.
+"Greatly to find quarrel in a straw" is the rule of their conduct. The
+tempers of the men are easily stirred; they have a general name[51]
+for the trial of a man's patience, applied to anything that puts a
+strain on him, or encroaches on his honour. The trial may come from
+anything--horses, sheep, hay, women, merchandise. From these follow
+any number of secondary or retaliatory insults, trespasses, and
+manslaughters. Anything almost is enough to set the play going. What
+the matter in dispute may be, is almost indifferent to the author of
+the story. Its value depends on the persons; it is what they choose to
+make it.
+
+[Footnote 51: _Skapraun_, lit. _test of condition_.]
+
+The Sagas differ from all other "heroic" literatures in the larger
+proportion that they give to the meannesses of reality. Their
+historical character, and their attempts to preserve an accurate
+memory of the past, though often freely modified by imagination, yet
+oblige them to include a number of things, gross, common, and
+barbarous, because they are part of the story. The Sagas differ one
+from another in this respect. The characters are not all raised to the
+height of Gunnar, Njal, Skarphedinn, Flosi, Bolli, Kjartan, Gisli. In
+many of the Sagas, and in many scenes, the characters are dull and
+ungainly. At the same time their perversity, the naughtiness, for
+example, of Vemund in _Reykdćla_, or of Thorolf the crank old man in
+_Eyrbyggja_, belongs to the same world as the lives of the more heroic
+personages. The Sagas take an interest in misconduct, when there is
+nothing better to be had, and the heroic age is frequently represented
+by them rather according to the rules of modern unheroic story-telling
+than of Bossu _on the Epic Poem_. The inequitable persons
+(_újafnađarmenn_) in the Sagas are not all of them as lordly as
+Agamemnon. For many readers this is an advantage; if the Sagas are
+thereby made inferior to Homer, they are all the closer to modern
+stories of "common life." The people of Iceland seem always to have
+been "at the auld work of the marches again," like Dandie Dinmont and
+Jock o' Dawstoncleugh, and many of their grievances and wrongs might
+with little change have been turned into subjects for Crabbe or Mr.
+Hardy. It requires no great stretch of fancy to see Crabbe at work on
+the story of Thorolf Bćgifot and his neighbour in _Eyrbyggja_; the old
+Thorolf, "curst with age," driven frantic by his homely neighbour's
+greater skill in the weather, and taking it out in a vicious trespass
+on his neighbour's hay; the neighbour's recourse to Thorolf's more
+considerate son Arnkell; Arnkell's payment of the damage, and summary
+method of putting accounts square again by seizure of his father's
+oxen; with the consequences of all this, which perhaps are somewhat
+too violent to be translated literally into the modern language of
+Suffolk or Wessex. Episodes of this type are common in the Sagas, and
+it is to them in a great measure that the Sagas owe their distinction
+from the common run of medieval narrative. But no appreciation of this
+"common life" in the Sagas can be just, if it ignores the essentially
+"heroic" nature of the moral laws under which the Icelandic narratives
+are conducted. Whether with good results or bad, is another question;
+but there can be no doubt that the Sagas were composed under the
+direction of an heroic ideal, identical in most respects with that of
+the older heroic poetry. This ideal view is revealed in different
+ways, as the Sagas have different ways of bringing their characters
+before the audience. In the best passages, of course, which are the
+most dramatic, the presuppositions and private opinions of the author
+are not immediately disclosed in the speeches of the characters. But
+the Sagas are not without their chorus; the general judgment of people
+about their leaders is often expressed; and although the action of the
+Sagas is generally sufficient to make its own impression and explain
+itself, the author's reading of his characters is frequently added.
+From the action and the commentary together, the heroic ideal comes
+out clearly, and it is plain that its effect on the Sagas was not
+merely an implicit and unconscious influence. It had risen into the
+consciousness of the authors of the Sagas; it was not far from
+definite expression in abstract terms. In this lay the danger. An
+ideal, defined or described in set terms, is an ideal without any
+responsibility and without any privilege. It may be picked up and
+traded on by any fool or hypocrite. Undefined and undivulged, it
+belongs only to those who have some original strength of imagination
+or will, and with them it cannot go wrong. But a definite ideal, and
+the terms of its definition, may belong to any one and be turned to
+any use. So the ideal of Petrarch was formulated and abused by the
+Petrarchists. The formula of Amadis of Gaul is derived from
+generations of older unformulated heroes, and implies the exhaustion
+of the heroic strain, in that line of descent. The Sagas have not come
+as far as that, but the latter days, that have seen Amadis, and the
+mechanical repetitions of Amadis, may find in the Sagas some
+resemblances and anticipations of the formal hero, though not yet
+enough to be dangerous.
+
+In all sound heroic literature there are passages that bring up the
+shadow of the sceptic,--passages of noble sentiment, whose phrases are
+capable of being imitated, whose ideas may make the fortune of
+imitators and pretenders. In the Teutonic epic poetry, as in Homer,
+there are many noble speeches of this sort, speeches of lofty
+rhetoric, about which the spirit of depreciation prompts a suspicion
+that perhaps they may be less weighty and more conventional than we
+think. False heroics are easy, and unhappily they have borrowed so
+much of the true, that the truth itself is sometimes put out of
+countenance by the likeness.
+
+In the English and the Icelandic heroic poetry there is some ground
+for thinking that the process of decline and the evolution of the
+false heroic went to some length before it was stopped. The older
+poems laid emphasis on certain qualities, and made them an example and
+an edification. "So ought a man to do," is a phrase common to the
+English and the Northern schools of epic. The point of honour comes
+to be only too well understood--too well, that is, for the work of the
+imagination. Possibly the latter part of _Beowulf_ is more abstract
+than it ought to be; at any rate, there are many of the secondary
+Anglo-Saxon poems which, like the old Saxon _Hęliand_, show an
+excessive use of the poetic formulas of courage and loyalty. The
+Icelandic poetry had also its spurious heroic phrases, by which
+something is taken away from the force of their more authentic
+originals.
+
+In the Sagas, as in the _Iliad_, in the _Song of Maldon_, in the
+_Death of Ermanaric_, there is a rhetorical element by which the ideas
+of absolute courage are expressed. Unhappily it is not always easy to
+be sure whether the phrases are of the first or the second growth; in
+most cases, the better opinion perhaps will be that they belong to a
+time not wholly unsophisticated, yet not in the stage of secondary and
+abstract heroic romance. The rhetoric of the Sagas, like the rhetoric
+of the "Poetic Edda," was taken too seriously and too greedily by the
+first modern discoverers of the old Northern literature. It is not,
+any more than the rhetoric of Homer, the immediate expression of the
+real life of an heroic age; for the good reason that it is literature,
+and literature just on the autumnal verge, and plainly capable of
+decay. The best of the Sagas were just in time to escape that touch of
+over-reflexion and self-consciousness which checks the dramatic life
+and turns it into matter of edification or sentiment. The best of them
+also give many indications to show how near they were to
+over-elaboration and refinement.
+
+Kjartan, for example, in _Laxdćla_ is represented in a way that
+sometimes brings him dangerously near the ideal hero. The story (like
+many of the other Sagas) plays about between the two extremes, of
+strong imagination applied dramatically to the subject-matter, on the
+one hand, and abstract ethical reflexion on the other. In the scene of
+Kjartan's encounter with Olaf Tryggvason in Norway[52] there is a
+typical example of the two kinds of operation. The scene and the
+dialogue are fully adequate to the author's intention, about which
+there can be no mistake. What he wishes to express is there expressed,
+in the most lively way, with the least possible encumbrance of
+explanation or chorus: the pride of Kjartan, his respect for his
+unknown antagonist in the swimming-match, his anxiety to keep clear of
+any submission to the king, with the king's reciprocal sense of the
+Icelander's magnanimity; no stroke in all this is other than right.
+While also it may be perceived that the author has brought into his
+story an ingredient of rhetoric. In this place it has its use and its
+effect; and, nevertheless, it is recognisable as the dangerous essence
+of all that is most different from sound narrative or drama.
+
+[Footnote 52: Translated in Appendix, Note B.]
+
+ Then said the king, "It is well seen that Kjartan is used to
+ put more trust in his own might than in the help of Thor and
+ Odin."
+
+This rings as true as the noble echo of it in the modern version of
+the _Lovers of Gudrun_:--
+
+ If neither Christ nor Odin help, why then
+ Still at the worst we are the sons of men.
+
+No amount of hacking work can take away the eloquence of this
+phrasing. Yet it is beyond question, that these phrases, like that
+speech of Sarpedon which has been borrowed by many a hero since, are
+of a different stuff from pure drama, or any pure imaginative work.
+By taking thought, they may be more nearly imitated than is possible
+in the case of any strong dramatic scene. The words of the king about
+Kjartan are like the words that are used to Earl Hakon, by Sigmund of
+the Faroes;[53] they are on their way to become, or they have already
+become, an ethical commonplace. In the place where they are used, in
+the debate between Kjartan and King Olaf, they have received the
+strong life of the individual persons between whom they pass, just as
+an actor may give life and character to any words that are put in his
+mouth. Yet elsewhere the phrase may occur as a commonplace
+formula--_hann trúđi á mátt sinn ok megin_ (he trusted in his own
+might and main)--applied generally to those Northern pagans who were
+known to be _securi adversus Deos_ at the time of the first preaching
+of Christendom in the North.
+
+[Footnote 53: "Tell me what faith you are of," said the earl. "I
+believe in my own strength," said Sigmund (_Fćreyinga Saga_).]
+
+All is well, however, so long as this heroic ideal is kept in its
+right relation, as one element in a complex work, not permitted to
+walk about by itself as a personage. This right subordination is
+observed in the Sagas, whereby both the heroic characters are kept out
+of extravagance (for neither Gunnar, Kari, nor Kjartan is an abstract
+creature), and the less noble or the more complex characters are
+rightly estimated. The Sagas, which in many things are ironical or
+reticent, do not conceal their standard of measurement or value, in
+relation to which characters and actions are to be appraised. They do
+not, on the other hand, allow this ideal to usurp upon the rights of
+individual characters. They are imaginative, dealing in actions and
+characters; they are not ethical or sentimental treatises, or mirrors
+of chivalry.
+
+
+IV
+
+TRAGIC IMAGINATION
+
+In their definite tragical situations and problems, the Sagas are akin
+to the older poetry of the Teutonic race. The tragical cases of the
+earlier heroic age are found repeated, with variations, in the Sagas.
+Some of the chief of these resemblances have been found and discussed
+by the editors of _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_. Also in many places where
+there is no need to look for any close resemblance in detail, there is
+to be seen the same mode of comprehending the tragical stress and
+contradiction as is manifested in the remains of the poetry. As in the
+older Germanic stories, so in the Sagas, the plot is often more than
+mere contest or adventure. As in _Finnesburh_ and _Waldere_, so in
+_Gísla Saga_ and _Njála_ and many other Icelandic stories, the action
+turns upon a debate between opposite motives of loyalty, friendship,
+kindred. Gisli kills his sister's husband; it is his sister who begins
+the pursuit of Gisli, his sister who, after Gisli's death, tries to
+avenge him. Njal has to stand by his sons, who have killed his friend.
+Gunnlaug and Hrafn, Kjartan and Bolli, are friends estranged by "Fate
+and their own transgression," like Walter and Hagena.
+
+The Sagas, being prose and having an historical tradition to take
+care of, are unable to reach the same intensity of passion as some of
+the heroic poems, the poems of _Helgi_ and of _Sigurd_. They are all
+the more epic, perhaps, on that account; more equable in their course,
+with this compensation for their quieter manner, that they have more
+room and more variety than the passionate heroic poems. These
+histories have also, as a rule, to do without the fantasies of such
+poetry as _Hervor and Angantyr_, or _Helgi and Sigrun_. The vision of
+the Queens of the Air, the return of Helgi from the dead, the
+chantings of Hervor "between the worlds," are too much for the plain
+texture of the Sagas. Though, as has already been seen in _Grettir_
+and _Gisli_, this element of fantastic beauty is not wholly absent;
+the less substantial graces of mythical romance, "fainter and
+flightier" than those of epic, are sometimes to be found even in the
+historical prose; the historical tragedies have their accompaniment of
+mystery. More particularly, the story of the _Death of Thidrandi whom
+the Goddesses slew_, is a prose counterpart to the poetry of Sigrun
+and Hervor.[54]
+
+[Footnote 54: It is summarised in Dasent's _Njal_, i. p. xx., and
+translated in Sephton's _Olaf Tryggvason_ (1895), pp. 339-341.]
+
+There are many other incidents in the Sagas which have the look of
+romance about them. But of a number of these the distinction holds
+good that has been already put forward in the case of _Beowulf_: they
+are not such wonders as lie outside the bounds of common experience,
+according to the estimate of those for whom the stories were told.
+Besides some wonderful passages that still retain the visionary and
+fantastic charm of myth and mythical romance, there are others in
+which the wonders are more gross and nearer to common life. Such is
+the story of the hauntings at Froda, in _Eyrbyggja_; the drowned man
+and his companions coming home night after night and sitting in their
+wet clothes till daybreak; such is the ghastly story of the funeral of
+Víga-Styrr in _Heiđarvíga Saga_. Things of that sort are no exceptions
+to common experience, according to the Icelandic judgment, and do not
+stand out from the history as something different in kind; they do not
+belong to the same order as the dream-poetry of Gisli or the vision of
+Thidrandi.
+
+The self-denial of the Icelandic authors in regard to myth and pure
+romance has secured for them, in exchange, everything that is
+essential to strong dramatic stories, independent of mythological or
+romantic attractions.
+
+Some of the Sagas are a reduction of heroic fable to the temper and
+conditions of modern prose. _Laxdćla_ is an heroic epic, rewritten as
+a prose history under the conditions of actual life, and without the
+help of any supernatural "machinery." It is a modern prose version of
+the Niblung tragedy, with the personages chosen from the life of
+Iceland in the heroic age, and from the Icelandic family traditions.
+It is not the only work that has reduced the Niblung story to terms of
+matter of fact. The story of Sigurd and Brynhild has been presented as
+a drama by Ibsen in his _Warriors in Helgeland_, with the names
+changed, with new circumstances, and with nothing remaining of the
+mythical and legendary lights that play about the fortunes of Sigurd
+in the Northern poems. The play relies on the characters, without the
+mysteries of Odin and the Valkyria. An experiment of the same sort had
+been made long before. In _Laxdćla_, Kjartan stands for Sigurd: Gudrun
+daughter of Osvifr, wife of Bolli, is in the place of Brynhild wife of
+Gunnar, driving her husband to avenge her on her old lover. That the
+authors of the Sagas were conscious at least in some cases of their
+relation to the poems is proved by affinities in the details of their
+language. In _Gísla Saga_, Thordis, sister of Gisli, has to endure the
+same sorrow as the wife of Sigurd in the poems; her husband, like
+Sigurd, is killed by her brother. One of the verses put in the mouth
+of Gisli in the story contrasts her with Gudrun, daughter of Giuki,
+who killed her husband (Attila) to avenge her brothers; whereas
+Thordis was waking up the pursuers of her brother Gisli to avenge her
+husband. With this verse in his head, it is impossible that the writer
+of the Saga can have overlooked the resemblance which is no less
+striking than the contrast between the two cases.
+
+The relation of the Sagas to the older poetry may be expressed in this
+way, perhaps, that they are the last stage in a progress from the
+earliest mythical imagination, and the earliest dirges and encomiums
+of the great men of a tribe, to a consistent and orderly form of
+narrative literature, attained by the direction of a critical faculty
+which kept out absurdities, without impairing the dramatic energy of
+the story. The Sagas are the great victory of the Humanities in the
+North, at the end of a long process of education. The Northern
+nations, like others, had to come to an understanding with themselves
+about their inherited myths, their traditional literary forms. One age
+after another helped in different ways to modify their beliefs, to
+change their literary taste. Practically, they had to find out what
+they were to think of the gods; poetically, what they were to put into
+their songs and stories. With problems of this sort, when a beginning
+has once been made, anything is possible, and there is no one kind of
+success. Every nation that has ever come to anything has had to go to
+school in this way. None has ever been successful right through;
+while, on the other hand, success does not mean the attainment of any
+definite end. There is a success for every stage in the progress, and
+one nation or literature differs from another, not by reason of an
+ultimate victory or defeat, but in the number of prizes taken by the
+way.
+
+As far as can be made out, the people of the Northern tongue got the
+better of the Western Teutons, in making far more than they out of the
+store of primeval fancies about the gods and the worlds, and in giving
+to their heroic poems both an intenser passion of expression and a
+more mysterious grace and charm. The Western Teutons in their heroic
+poetry seem, on the other hand, to have been steadier and less
+flighty. They took earlier to the line of reasonable and dignified
+narrative, reducing the lyrical element, perhaps increasing the gnomic
+or reflective proportions of their work. So they succeeded in their
+own way, with whatever success belongs to _Beowulf_, _Waldere_,
+_Byrhtnoth_, not to speak of the new essays they made with themes
+taken from the Church, in the poems of _Andreas_, _Judith_, and all
+the rest. Meanwhile the Northerners were having their own difficulties
+and getting over them, or out of them. They knew far more about the
+gods, and made poems about them. They had no patience, so that they
+could not dilute and expand their stories in the Western way. They saw
+no good in the leisurely methods; they must have everything emphatic,
+everything full of poetical meaning; hence no large poetry, but a
+number of short poems with no slackness in them. With these they had
+good reason to be content, as a good day's work in their day. But
+whatever advantage the fiery Northern poems may have over the slower
+verse of the Anglo-Saxons, they do not correspond to the same
+intellectual wants, and they leave out something which seems to have
+been attained in the Western poetry. The North had still to find out
+what could be done with simpler materials, and without the magical
+light of the companions of Sigrun. The Icelandic prose histories are
+the solution of this new problem, a problem which the English had
+already tried and solved in their own manner in the quieter passages
+of their epic poetry, and, above all, in the severity of the poem of
+_Maldon_.
+
+The Sagas are partly indebted to a spirit of negative criticism and
+restraint; a tendency not purely literary, corresponding, at any rate,
+to a similar tendency in practical life. The energy, the passion, the
+lamentation of the Northern poetry, the love of all the wonders of
+mythology, went along with practical and intellectual clearness of
+vision in matters that required cool judgment. The ironical correction
+of sentiment, the tone of the _advocatus diaboli_, is habitual with
+many of the Icelandic writers, and many of their heroes. "To see
+things as they really are," so that no incantation could transform
+them, was one of the gifts of an Icelandic hero,[55] and appears to
+have been shared by his countrymen when they set themselves to compose
+the Sagas.
+
+[Footnote 55: _Harđar Saga_, c. xi.]
+
+The tone of the Sagas is generally kept as near as may be to that of
+the recital of true history. Nothing is allowed any preponderance over
+the story and the speeches in it. It is the kind of story furthest
+removed from the common pathetic fallacies of the Middle Ages. The
+rationalist mind has cleared away all the sentimental and most of the
+superstitious encumbrances and hindrances of strong narrative.
+
+The history of the early Northern rationalism and its practical
+results is part of the general history of religion and politics. In
+some respects it may have been premature; in many cases it seems (as
+might be expected) to have gone along with hardness and sterility of
+mind, and to have left an inheritance of vacuity behind it. The
+curious and elaborate hardness of the Icelandic Court poetry may
+possibly be a sign of this same temper; in another way, the prevalent
+coolness of Northern piety, even before the Reformation, is scarcely
+to be dissociated from the coolness of the last days of heathendom.
+The spirited acuteness of Snorri the Priest and his contemporaries was
+succeeded by a moderate and unenthusiastic fashion of religion, for
+the most part equally remote from the extravagances and the glories of
+the medieval Church. But with these things the Sagas have little to
+do; where they are in relation to this common rationalist habit of
+mind, it is all to their good. The Sagas are not injured by any
+scepticism or coolness in the minds of their authors. The positive
+habit of mind in the Icelanders is enough to secure them against a
+good deal of the conventional dulness of the Middle Ages. It made them
+dissatisfied with anything that seemed wanting in vividness or
+immediate force; it led them to select, in their histories, such
+things as were interesting in themselves, and to present them
+definitely, without any drawling commonplaces, or any makeshift
+rhetorical substitutes for accurate vision and clear record. It did
+not hinder, but it directed and concentrated the imagination. The
+self-repression in the Sagas is bracing. It gives greater clearness,
+greater resonance; it does not cut out or renounce anything that is
+really worth keeping.
+
+If not the greatest charm of the Sagas, at any rate that which is
+perhaps most generally appreciated by modern readers is their economy
+of phrasing in the critical passages, the brevity with which the
+incidents and speeches are conveyed, the restriction of all
+commentary to the least available compass. Single phrases in the great
+scenes of the Sagas are full-charged with meaning to a degree hardly
+surpassed in any literature, certainly not in the literatures of
+medieval Europe. Half a dozen words will carry all the force of the
+tragedy of the Sagas, or render all the suspense and terror of their
+adventurous moments, with an effect that is like nothing so much as
+the effect of some of the short repressed phrases of Shakespeare in
+_Hamlet_ or _King Lear_. The effect is attained not by study of the
+central phrase so much as by the right arrangement and selection of
+the antecedents; that is, by right proportion in the narrative. It is
+in this way that the killing of Gunnar's dog, in the attack on
+Lithend, is made the occasion for one of the great strokes of
+narrative. The words of Gunnar, when he is roused by the dog's
+howl--"Sore art thou handled, Sam, my fosterling, and maybe it is
+meant that there is not to be long between thy death and mine!"--are a
+perfect dramatic indication of everything the author wishes to
+express--the coolness of Gunnar, and his contempt for his enemies, as
+well as his pity for his dog. They set everything in tune for the
+story of Gunnar's death which follows. It is in this way that the
+adventures of the Sagas are raised above the common form of mere
+reported "fightings and flockings," the common tedious story of raids
+and reprisals. This is one of the kinds of drama to be found in the
+Sagas, and not exclusively in the best of them. One of the conditions
+of this manner of composition and this device of phrasing is that the
+author shall be able to keep himself out of the story, and let things
+make their own impression. This is the result of the Icelandic habit
+of restraint. The intellectual coolness of the Sagas is a pride that
+keeps them from pathetic effusions; it does not impede the dramatic
+passion, it merely gives a lesson to the sensibilities and sympathies,
+to keep them out of the way when they are not wanted.
+
+This is one notable difference of temper and rhetoric between the
+Sagas and the old English poems. One of the great beauties of the old
+English poetry is its understanding of the moods of lamentation--the
+mood of Ossian it might be called, without much error in the name. The
+transience and uncertainty of the world, the memory of past good
+fortune, and of things lost,--with themes like these the Anglo-Saxon
+poets make some of their finest verse; and while this fashion of
+meditation may seem perhaps to have come too readily, it is not the
+worst poets who fall in with it. In the Icelandic poetry the notes of
+lamentation are not wanting, and it cannot be said that the Northern
+elegies are less sweet or less thrilling in their grief than those of
+England in the kindred forms of verse. It is enough to think of
+_Gudrun's Lament_ in the "Elder Edda," or of _Sonatorrek_, Egil
+Skallagrimsson's elegy on the death of his two sons. It was not any
+congenital dulness or want of sense that made the Sagas generally
+averse to elegy. No mere writer of Sagas was made of stronger temper
+than Egil, and none of them need have been ashamed of lamentation
+after Egil had lamented. But they saw that it would not do, that the
+fabric of the Saga was not made for excessive decoration of any kind,
+and least of all for parenthesis of elegy. The English heroic poetry
+is more relenting. _Beowulf_ is invaded by pathos in a way that often
+brings the old English verse very nearly to the tone of the great
+lament for Lancelot at the end of the _Morte d'Arthur_; which, no
+doubt, is justification enough for any lapse from the pure heroic. In
+the Sagas the sense of all the vanity of human wishes is expressed in
+a different way: the lament is turned into dramatic action; the
+author's sympathy is not shown in direct effusions, but in his
+rendering of the drama.[56] The best instance of this is the story of
+Howard of Icefirth.
+
+[Footnote 56: The pathos of Asdis, Grettir's mother, comes nearest to
+the tone of the old English laments, or of the Northern elegiac
+poetry, and may be taken as a contrast to the demeanour of Bjargey in
+_Hávarđar Saga_, and an exception to the general rule of the Sagas in
+this respect.]
+
+Howard's son Olaf, a high-spirited and generous young man, comes under
+the spite of a domineering gentleman, all the more because he does
+some good offices of his own free will for this tyrannical person.
+Olaf is attacked and killed by the bully and his friends; then the
+story goes on to tell of the vengeance of his father and mother. The
+grief of the old man is described as a matter of fact; he was lame and
+feeble, and took to his bed for a long time after his son's death.
+Then he roused himself, and he and his wife went to look for help, and
+finally were able to bring down their enemy. In all this there is no
+reflexion or commentary by the author. The pathos is turned into
+narrative; it is conveyed by means of the form of the story, the
+relation of the incidents to one another. The passion of the old
+people turns into resolute action, and is revealed in the perseverance
+of Bjargey, Olaf's mother, tracking out her enemy and coming to her
+kinsmen to ask for help. She rows her boat round her enemy's ship and
+finds out his plans; then she goes to her brothers' houses, one after
+another, and "borrows" avengers for her son. The repression and irony
+of the Icelandic character are shown in the style of her address to
+her brothers. "I have come to borrow your nets," she says to one, and
+"I have come to borrow your turf-spade," to another; all which is
+interpreted aright by the brothers, who see what her meaning is. Then
+she goes home to her husband; and here comes in, not merely irony, but
+an intentional rebuke to sentiment. Her husband is lying helpless and
+moaning, and she asks him whether he has slept. To which he answers in
+a stave of the usual form in the Sagas, the purport of which is that
+he has never known sleep since the death of Olaf his son. "'Verily
+that is a great lie,' says she, 'that thou hast never slept once these
+three years. But now it is high time to be up and play the man, if
+thou wilt have revenge for Olaf thy son; because never in thy days
+will he be avenged, if it be not this day.' And when he heard his
+wife's reproof he sprang out of bed on to the floor, and sang this
+other stave,"--of which the substance is still lamentation, but
+greatly modified in its effect by the action with which it is
+accompanied. Howard seems to throw off his age and feebleness as time
+goes on, and the height of his passion is marked by a note of his
+cheerfulness and gladness after he has killed his enemy. This is
+different from the method of _Beowulf_, where the grief of a father
+for his son is rendered in an elegy, with some beauty and some
+irrelevance, as if the charm of melancholy were too much for the
+story-teller.
+
+The hardness of the Sagas is sometimes carried too far for the taste
+of some readers, and there is room for some misgiving that in places
+the Sagas have been affected by the contrary vice from that of
+effusive pathos, namely, by a pretence of courage and endurance. In
+some of the Northern poetry, as in _Ragnar's Death-Song_,[57] there
+may be detected the same kind of insincere and exaggerated heroism as
+in the modern romantic imitations of old Northern sentiment, now
+fortunately less common than in the great days of the Northern
+romantic movement at the beginning of this century. The old Northern
+poetry seems to have become at one stage too self-conscious of the
+literary effect of magnanimity, too quick to seize all the literary
+profit that was to be made out of the conventional Viking. The Viking
+of the modern romantic poets has been the affliction of many in the
+last hundred years; none of his patrons seem to have guessed that he
+had been discovered, and possibly had begun to be a bore, at a time
+when the historical "Viking Age" had scarcely come to its close. There
+is little in the Icelandic Sagas to show any affinity with his forced
+and ostentatious bravery; but it may be suspected that here and there
+the Sagas have made some use of the theatrical Viking, and have thrown
+their lights too strongly on their death scenes. Some of the most
+impressive passages of the Sagas are those in which a man receives a
+death-wound with a quaint remark, and dies forthwith, like Atli in the
+story of Grettir, who was thrust through as he stood at his door, and
+said, "Those broad spears are in fashion now," as he went down. This
+scene is one of the best of its kind; there is no fault to be found
+with it. But there are possibly too many scenes and speeches of the
+same sort; enough to raise the suspicion that the situation and the
+form of phrase were becoming a conventional device, like some of the
+"machines" in the secondary Sagas, and in the too-much-edited parts of
+the better ones. This suspicion is not one that need be scouted or
+choked off. The worser parts and baser parts of the literature are to
+be detected by any means and all means. It is well in criticism,
+however, to supplement this amputating practice by some regard for
+the valid substances that have no need of it, and in this present case
+to look away from the scenes where there is suspicion of journey work
+and mechanical processes to the masterpieces that set the standard;
+more especially to the story of the burning of Njal, which more than
+any other is full of the peculiar strength and quality of the Sagas.
+
+[Footnote 57: _Vide supra_, p. 140, and _infra_, p. 295.]
+
+The beauty of _Njála_, and especially of the chapters about Njal's
+death, is the result of a harmony between two extremes of sentiment,
+each of which by itself was dangerous, and both of which have here
+been brought to terms with each other and with the whole design of the
+work. The ugliness of Skarphedinn's demeanour might have turned out to
+be as excessive as the brutalities of _Svarfdćla_ or _Ljósvetninga
+Saga_; the gentleness of Njal has some affinities with the gentleness
+of the martyrs. Some few passages have distinctly the homiletic or
+legendary tone about them:--
+
+ Then Flosi and his men made a great pile before each of the
+ doors, and then the women-folk who were inside began to weep
+ and to wail.
+
+ Njal spoke to them, and said: "Keep up your hearts, nor
+ utter shrieks, for this is but a passing storm, and it will
+ be long before you have another such; and put your faith in
+ God, and believe that He is so merciful that He will not let
+ us burn both in this world and the next."
+
+ Such words of comfort had he for them all, and others still
+ more strong (c. 128, Dasent's translation).
+
+It is easy to see in what school the style of this was learned, and of
+this other passage, about Njal after his death:--
+
+ Then Hjallti said, "I shall speak what I say with all
+ freedom of speech. The body of Bergthora looks as it was
+ likely she would look, and still fair; but Njal's body and
+ visage seem to me so bright that I have never seen any dead
+ man's body so bright as this" (c. 131).
+
+At the other extreme are the heathenish manners of Skarphedinn, who,
+in the scene at the Althing, uses all the bad language of the old
+"flytings" in the heroic poetry,[58] who "grins" at the attempts to
+make peace, who might easily, by a little exaggeration and change of
+emphasis, have been turned into one of the types of the false heroic.
+
+[Footnote 58: Pp. 96, 113, above.]
+
+Something like this has happened to Egil, in another Saga, through
+want of balance, want of comprehensive imagination in the author. In
+_Njála_, where no element is left to itself, the picture is complete
+and full of variety. The prevailing tone is neither that of the homily
+nor that of the robustious Viking; it is the tone of a narrative that
+has command of itself and its subject, and can play securely with
+everything that comes within its scope.
+
+In the death of Njal the author's imagination has found room for
+everything,--for the severity and the nobility of the old Northern
+life, for the gentleness of the new religion, for the irony in which
+the temper of Skarphedinn is made to complement and illustrate the
+temper of Njal.
+
+ Then Flosi went to the door and called out to Njal, and said
+ he would speak with him and Bergthora.
+
+ Now Njal does so, and Flosi said: "I will offer thee, master
+ Njal, leave to go out, for it is unworthy that thou shouldst
+ burn indoors."
+
+ "I will not go out," said Njal, "for I am an old man, and
+ little fitted to avenge my sons, but I will not live in
+ shame."
+
+ Then Flosi said to Bergthora: "Come thou out, housewife, for
+ I will for no sake burn thee indoors."
+
+ "I was given away to Njal young," said Bergthora, "and I
+ have promised him this, that we should both share the same
+ fate."
+
+ After that they both went back into the house.
+
+ "What counsel shall we now take?" said Bergthora.
+
+ "We will go to our bed," says Njal, "and lay us down; I have
+ long been eager for rest."
+
+ Then she said to the boy Thord, Kari's son: "Thee will I
+ take out, and thou shalt not burn in here."
+
+ "Thou hast promised me this, grandmother," says the boy,
+ "that we should never part so long as I wished to be with
+ thee; but methinks it is much better to die with thee and
+ Njal than to live after you."
+
+ Then she bore the boy to her bed, and Njal spoke to his
+ steward and said:--
+
+ "Now shalt thou see where we lay us down, and how I lay us
+ out, for I mean not to stir an inch hence, whether reek or
+ burning smart me, and so thou wilt be able to guess where to
+ look for our bones."
+
+ He said he would do so.
+
+ There had been an ox slaughtered, and the hide lay there.
+ Njal told the steward to spread the hide over them, and he
+ did so.
+
+ So there they lay down both of them in their bed, and put
+ the boy between them. Then they signed themselves and the
+ boy with the cross, and gave over their souls into God's
+ hand, and that was the last word that men heard them utter.
+
+ Then the steward took the hide and spread it over them, and
+ went out afterwards. Kettle of the Mark caught hold of him
+ and dragged him out; he asked carefully after his
+ father-in-law Njal, but the steward told him the whole
+ truth. Then Kettle said:--
+
+ "Great grief hath been sent on us, when we have had to share
+ such ill-luck together."
+
+ Skarphedinn saw how his father laid him down and how he laid
+ himself out, and then he said:--
+
+ "Our father goes early to bed, and that is what was to be
+ looked for, for he is an old man."
+
+The harmonies of _Laxdćla_ are somewhat different from those of the
+history of Njal, but here again the elements of grace and strength, of
+gentleness and terror, are combined in a variety of ways, and in such
+a way as to leave no preponderance to any one exclusively. Sometimes
+the story may seem to fall into the exemplary vein of the "antique
+poet historicall"; sometimes the portrait of Kjartan may look as if it
+were designed, like the portrait of Amadis or Tirant the White, "to
+fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle
+discipline." Sometimes the story is involved in the ordinary business
+of Icelandic life, and Kjartan and Bolli, the Sigurd and Gunnar of the
+tragedy, are seen engaged in common affairs, such as make the alloy of
+heroic narrative in the _Odyssey_. The hero is put to the proof in
+this way, and made to adapt himself to various circumstances.
+Sometimes the story touches on the barbarism and cruelty, which were
+part of the reality familiar to the whole of Iceland in the age of the
+Sturlungs, of which there is more in the authentic history of the
+Sturlungs than in the freer and more imaginative story of Kjartan. At
+one time the story uses the broad and fluent form of narrative,
+leaving scene after scene to speak for itself; at other times it
+allows itself to be condensed into a significant phrase. Of these
+emphatic phrases there are two especially, both of them speeches of
+Gudrun, and the one is the complement of the other: the one in the
+tone of irony, Gudrun's comment on the death of Kjartan, a repetition
+of Brynhild's phrase on the death of Sigurd;[59] the other Gudrun's
+confession to her son at the end of the whole matter.
+
+[Footnote 59: Then Brynhild laughed till the walls rang again: "Good
+luck to your hands and swords that have felled the goodly prince"
+(_Brot Sgkv._ 10; cf. p. 103 above).]
+
+ Gudrun meets her husband coming back, and says: "A good
+ day's work and a notable; I have spun twelve ells of yarn,
+ and you have slain Kjartan Olaf's son."
+
+ Bolli answers: "That mischance would abide with me, without
+ thy speaking of it."
+
+ Said Gudrun: "I reckon not that among mischances; it seemed
+ to me thou hadst greater renown that winter Kjartan was in
+ Norway, than when he came back to Iceland and trampled thee
+ under foot. But the last is best, that Hrefna will not go
+ laughing to bed this night."
+
+ Then said Bolli in great wrath: "I know not whether she will
+ look paler at this news than thou, and I doubt thou mightest
+ have taken it no worse if we had been left lying where we
+ fought, and Kjartan had come to tell of it."
+
+ Gudrun saw that Bolli was angry, and said: "Nay, no need of
+ words like these; for this work I thank thee; there is an
+ earnest in it that thou wilt not thwart me after."
+
+This is one of the crises of the story, in which the meaning of Gudrun
+is brought out in a short passage of dialogue, at the close of a
+section of narrative full of adventure and incident. In all that
+precedes, in the relations of Gudrun to Kjartan before and after her
+marriage with Bolli, as after the marriage of Kjartan and Hrefna, the
+motives are generally left to be inferred from the events and actions.
+Here it was time that Gudrun should speak her mind, or at least the
+half of her mind.
+
+Her speech at the end of her life is equally required, and the two
+speeches are the complement of one another. Bolli her son comes to see
+her and sits with her.
+
+ The story tells that one day Bolli came to Helgafell; for
+ Gudrun was always glad when he came to see her. Bolli sat
+ long with his mother, and there was much talk between them.
+ At last Bolli said: "Mother, will you tell me one thing? It
+ has been in my mind to ask you, who was the man you loved
+ best?"
+
+ Gudrun answers: "Thorkell was a great man and a lordly; and
+ no man was goodlier than Bolli, nor of gentler breeding;
+ Thord Ingwin's son was the most discreet of them all, a wise
+ man in the law. Of Thorvald I make no reckoning."
+
+ Then says Bolli: "All this is clear, all the condition of
+ your husbands as you have told; but it has not yet been told
+ whom you loved best. You must not keep it secret from me
+ longer."
+
+ Gudrun answers: "You put me hard to it, my son; but if I am
+ to tell any one, I will rather tell you than another."
+
+ Bolli besought her again to tell him. Then said Gudrun: "I
+ did the worst to him, the man that I loved the most."
+
+ "Now may we believe," says Bolli, "that there is no more to
+ say."
+
+ He said that she had done right in telling him what he
+ asked.
+
+ Gudrun became an old woman, and it is said that she lost her
+ sight. She died at Helgafell, and there she rests.
+
+This is one of the passages which it is easy to quote, and also
+dangerous. The confession of Gudrun loses incalculably when detached
+from the whole story, as also her earlier answer fails, by itself, to
+represent the meaning and the art of the Saga. They are the two keys
+that the author has given; neither is of any use by itself, and both
+together are of service only in relation to the whole story and all
+its fabric of incident and situation and changing views of life.
+
+
+V
+
+COMEDY
+
+The Poetical Justice of Tragedy is observed, and rightly observed, in
+many of the Sagas and in the greater plots. Fate and Retribution
+preside over the stories of Njal and his sons, and the _Lovers of
+Gudrun_. The story of Gisli works itself out in accordance with the
+original forebodings, yet without any illicit process in the logic of
+acts and motives, or any intervention of the mysterious powers who
+accompany the life of Gisli in his dreams. Even in less consistent
+stories the same ideas have a part; the story of Gudmund the Mighty,
+which is a series of separate chapters, is brought to an end in the
+Nemesis for Gudmund's injustice to Thorkell Hake. But the Sagas claim
+exemption from the laws of Tragedy, when poetical Justice threatens to
+become tyrannical. Partly by the nature of their origin, no doubt, and
+their initial dependence on historical recollections of actual
+events,[60] they are driven to include a number of things that might
+disappoint a well-educated gallery of spectators; the drama is not
+always worked out, or it may be that the meaning of a chapter or
+episode lies precisely in the disappointment of conventional
+expectations.
+
+[Footnote 60: _Vide supra_, p. 193 (the want of tragedy in _Víga-Glúms
+Saga_).]
+
+There is only one comedy, or at most two, among the Sagas--the story
+of the Confederates (_Bandamanna Saga_) with an afterpiece, the short
+story of Alecap (_Olkofra Ţáttr_). The composition of the Sagas,
+however, admits all sorts of comic passages and undignified
+characters, and it also quietly unravels many complications that seem
+to be working up for a tragic ending. The dissipation of the storm
+before it breaks is, indeed, so common an event that it almost becomes
+itself a convention of narrative in the Sagas, by opposition to the
+common devices of the feud and vengeance. There is a good instance of
+this paradoxical conclusion in _Arons Saga_ (c. 12), an authentic
+biography, apparently narrating an actual event. The third chapter of
+_Glúma_ gives another instance of threatened trouble passing away.
+Ivar, a Norwegian with a strong hatred of Icelanders, seems likely to
+quarrel with Eyolf, Glum's father, but being a gentleman is won over
+by Eyolf's bearing. This is a part of the Saga where one need not
+expect to meet with any authentic historical tradition. The story of
+Eyolf in Norway is probably mere literature, and shows the working of
+the common principles of the Saga, as applied by an author of fiction.
+The sojourn of Grettir with the two foster-brothers is another
+instance of a dangerous situation going off without result. The whole
+action of _Vápnfirđinga Saga_ is wound up in a reconciliation, which
+is a sufficient close; but, on the other hand, the story of Glum ends
+in a mere exhaustion of the rivalries, a drawn game. One of the later
+more authentic histories, the story of Thorgils and Haflidi, dealing
+with the matters of the twelfth century and not with the days of
+Gunnar, Njal, and Snorri the Priest, is a story of rivalry passing
+away, and may help to show how the composers of the Sagas were
+influenced by their knowledge and observation of things near their
+own time in their treatment of matters of tradition.
+
+Even more striking than this evasion of the conventional plot of the
+blood-feud, is the freedom and variety in respect of the minor
+characters, particularly shown in the way they are made to perplex the
+simple-minded spectator. To say that all the characters in the Sagas
+escape from the limitations of mere typical humours might be to say
+too much; but it is obvious that simple types are little in favour,
+and that the Icelandic authors had all of them some conception of the
+ticklish and dangerous variability of human dispositions, and knew
+that hardly any one was to be trusted to come up to his looks, for
+good or evil. Popular imagination has everywhere got at something of
+this sort in its views of the lubberly younger brother, the ash-raker
+and idler who carries off the princess. Many of the heroes of the
+Sagas are noted to have been slow in their growth and unpromising,
+like Glum, but there are many more cases of change of disposition in
+the Sagas than can be summed up under this old formula. There are
+stories of the quiet man roused to action, like Thorarin in
+_Eyrbyggja_, where it is plain that the quietness was strength from
+the first. A different kind of courage is shown by Atli, the
+poor-spirited prosperous man in _Hávarđar Saga_, who went into hiding
+to escape being dragged into the family troubles, but took heart and
+played the man later on. One of the most effective pieces of comedy in
+the Sagas is the description of his ill-temper when he is found out,
+and his gradual improvement. He comes from his den half-frozen, with
+his teeth chattering, and nothing but bad words for his wife and her
+inconvenient brother who wants his help. His wife puts him to bed, and
+he comes to think better of himself and the world; the change of his
+mind being represented in the unobtrusive manner which the Sagas
+employ in their larger scenes.
+
+One of the most humorous and effective contradictions of the popular
+judgment is that episode in _Njála_, where Kari has to trust to the
+talkative person whose wife has a low opinion of him. It begins like
+farce: any one can see that Bjorn has all the manners of the
+swaggering captain; his wife is a shrew and does not take him at his
+own valuation. The comedy of Bjorn is that he proves to be something
+different both from his own Bjorn and his wife's Bjorn. He is the
+idealist of his own heroism, and believes in himself as a hero. His
+wife knows better; but the beauty of it all is that his wife is wrong.
+His courage, it is true, is not quite certain, but he stands his
+ground; there is a small particle of a hero in him, enough to save
+him. His backing of Kari in the fight is what many have longed to see,
+who have found little comfort in the discomfiture of Bobadil and
+Parolles, and who will stand to it that the chronicler has done less
+than justice to Sir John Falstaff both at Gadshill and Shrewsbury.
+Never before Bjorn of _Njála_ was there seen on any theatre the person
+of the comfortable optimist, with a soul apparently damned from the
+first to a comic exposure and disgrace, but escaping this because his
+soul has just enough virtue to keep him steady. The ordeal of Bjorn
+contains more of the comic spirit than all the host of stage cowards
+from Pyrgopolinices to Bob Acres, precisely because it introduces
+something more than the simple humour, an essence more spiritual and
+capricious.
+
+Further, the partnership of Kari and Bjorn, and Kari's appreciation of
+his idealist companion, go a long way to save Kari from a too
+exclusive and limited devotion to the purpose of vengeance. There is
+much to be said on behalf of this Bjorn. His relations with Kari
+prevent the hero of the latter part of the book from turning into a
+mere hero. The humorous character of the squire brings out something
+new in the character of the knight, a humorous response; all which
+goes to increase the variety of the story, and to widen the difference
+between this story and all the monotonous and abstract stories of
+chivalrous adventures.
+
+The Sagas have comedy in them, comic incidents and characters, because
+they have no notion of the dignity of abstract and limited heroics;
+because they cannot understand the life of Iceland otherwise than in
+full, with all its elements together. The one intentionally comic
+history, _Bandamanna Saga_, "The Confederates," which is exceptional
+in tone and plot, is a piece of work in which what may be called the
+form or spirit or idea of the heroic Saga is brought fully within
+one's comprehension by means of contrast and parody. _Bandamanna Saga_
+is a complete work, successful in every detail; as an artistic piece
+of composition it will stand comparison with any of the Sagas. But it
+is comedy, not tragedy; it is a mock-heroic, following the lines of
+the heroic model, consistently and steadily, and serving as a
+touchstone for the vanity of the heroic age. It is worth study, for
+Comedy is later and therefore it would seem more difficult than
+Tragedy, and this is the first reasonable and modern comedy in the
+history of modern Europe. Further, the method of narrative, and
+everything in it except the irony, belong to all the Sagas in common;
+there is nothing particularly new or exceptional in the style or the
+arrangement of the scenes; it is not so much a parody or a
+mock-heroic, as an heroic work inspired with comic irony. It is not a
+new kind of Saga, it is the old Saga itself put to the ordeal by the
+Comic Muse, and proving its temper under the severest of all strains.
+
+This is the story of the Confederates.--There was a man named Ufeig
+who lived in Midfirth, a free-handed man, not rich, who had a son
+named Odd. The father and son disagreed, and Odd, the son, went off to
+make his own fortune, and made it, without taking any further notice
+of his father. The two men are contrasted; Ufeig being an unsuccessful
+man and a humorist, too generous and too careless to get on in the
+world, while Odd, his son, is born to be a prosperous man. The main
+plot of the story is the reconciliation of the respectable son and the
+prodigal father, which is brought about in the most perfect and
+admirable manner.
+
+Odd got into trouble. He had a lawsuit against Uspak, a violent person
+whom he had formerly trusted, who had presumed too much, had been
+disgraced, and finally had killed the best friend of Odd in one of the
+ways usual in such business in the Sagas. In the course of the lawsuit
+a slight difficulty arose--one of Odd's jurymen died, and another had
+to be called in his place. This was informal, but no one at first made
+anything of it; till it occurred to a certain great man that Odd was
+becoming too strong and prosperous, and that it was time to put him
+down. Whereupon he went about and talked to another great man, and
+half persuaded him that this view was the right one; and then felt
+himself strong enough to step in and break down the prosecution by
+raising the point about the formation of the jury. Odd went out of the
+court without a word as soon as the challenge was made.
+
+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
+_Laxdćla_.
+
+ 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
+_Laxdćla_, 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 _Laxdćla_ 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
+_Laxdćla_.
+
+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
+_Laxdćla_, 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_, _Vatnsdćla_, _Flóamanna_,
+_Svarfdćla_, 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 Ćlfric. 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 _Fóstbrćđra_ 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: "Ţví at ekki var hjarta hans seen
+fóarn í fugli: ekki var ţat blóđfullt svá at ţat skylfi af hrćzlu,
+heldr var ţat herdt af enum hćsta höfuđsmiđ 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 _Fóstbrćđra 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 _Laxdćla_; 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 _Laxdćla_, 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
+_Laxdćla_ 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 _Laxdćla_ 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 _Fćreyinga 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE OLD FRENCH EPIC
+
+(_Chansons de Geste_)
+
+
+It appears to be generally the case in all old epic literature, and it
+is not surprising, that the existing specimens come from the end of
+the period of its greatest excellence, and generally represent the
+epic fashion, not quite at its freshest and best, but after it has
+passed its culmination, and is already on the verge of decline. This
+condition of things is exemplified in _Beowulf_; and the Sagas also,
+here and there, show signs of over-refinement and exhaustion. In the
+extant mass of old French epic this condition is enormously
+exaggerated. The _Song of Roland_ itself, even in its earliest extant
+form, is comparatively late and unoriginal; while the remainder of
+French epic poetry, in all its variety, is much less authentic than
+_Roland_, sensibly later, and getting rapidly and luxuriantly worse
+through all the stages of lethargy.
+
+It is the misfortune of French epic that so much should have been
+preserved of its "dotages," so little of the same date and order as
+the _Song of Roland_, and nothing at all of the still earlier
+epic--the more original _Roland_ of a previous generation. The
+exuberance, however, of the later stages of French epic, and its long
+persistence in living beyond its due time, are proof of a certain
+kind of vitality. The French epic in the twelfth century, long after
+its best days were over, came into the keenest and closest rivalry
+with the younger romantic schools in their first vigour. Fortune has
+to some extent made up for the loss of the older French poems by the
+preservation of endless later versions belonging in date to the
+exciting times of the great romantic revolution in literature. Feeble
+and drowsy as they often are, the late-born hosts of the French epic
+are nevertheless in the thick of a great European contest, matched not
+dishonourably against the forces of Romance. They were not the
+strongest possible champions of the heroic age, but they were _there_,
+in the field, and in view of all spectators. At this distance of time,
+we can see how much more fully the drift of the old Teutonic world was
+caught and rendered by the imagination of Iceland; how much more there
+is in Grettir or Skarphedinn than in Ogier the Dane, or Raoul de
+Cambrai, or even Roland and Oliver. But the Icelandic work lay outside
+of the consciousness of Europe, and the French epic was known
+everywhere. There are no such masterpieces in the French epic as in
+the Icelandic prose. The French epic, to make up for that, has an
+exciting history; it lived by antagonism, and one may look on and see
+how the _chansons de geste_ were fighting for their life against the
+newer forms of narrative poetry. In all this there is the interest of
+watching one of the main currents of history, for it was nothing less
+than the whole future imaginative life of Europe that was involved in
+the debate between the stubborn old epic fashion and the new romantic
+adventurers.
+
+The _chansons de geste_ stand in a real, positive, ancestral relation
+to all modern literature; there is something of them in all the poetry
+of Europe. The Icelandic histories can make no such claim. Their
+relation to modern life is slighter, in one sense; more spiritual, in
+another. They are not widely known, they have had no share in
+establishing the forms or giving vogue to the commonplaces of modern
+literature. Now that they are published and accessible to modern
+readers, their immediate and present worth, for the friends of
+Skarphedinn and Gunnar, is out of all proportion to their past
+historical influence. They have anticipated some of the literary
+methods which hardly became the common property of Europe till the
+nineteenth century; even now, when all the world reads and writes
+prose stories, their virtue is unexhausted and unimpaired. But this
+spiritual affinity with modern imaginations and conversations, across
+the interval of medieval romance and rhetoric, is not due to any
+direct or overt relation. The Sagas have had no influence; that is the
+plain historical fact about them.
+
+The historical influence and importance of the _chansons de geste_, on
+the other hand, is equally plain and evident. Partly by their
+opposition to the new modes of fiction, and partly by compliance with
+their adversaries, they belong to the history of those great schools
+of literature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries from which all
+modern imaginations in prose and rhyme are descended. The "dolorous
+rout" of Roncesvalles, and not the tragedy of the Niblungs, still less
+the history of Gunnar or of Njal, is the heroic origin of modern
+poetry; it is remembered and renowned, [Greek: pasi melousa], among
+the poets who have given shape to modern imaginative literature, while
+the older heroics of the Teutonic migration are forgotten, and the
+things of Iceland are utterly unknown.
+
+French epic has some great advantages in comparison with the epic
+experiments of Teutonic verse. For one thing, it exists in great
+quantity; there is no want of specimens, though they are not all of
+the best sort or the best period. Further, it has no difficulty, only
+too much ease, in keeping a long regular course of narrative. Even
+_Beowulf_ appears to have attained to its epic proportions by a
+succession of efforts, and with difficulty; it labours rather heavily
+over the longer epic course. _Maldon_ is a poem that runs freely, but
+here the course is shorter, and it carries much less weight. The
+Northern poems of the "Elder Edda" never attain the right epic scale
+at all; their abrupt and lyrical manner is the opposite of the epic
+mode of narration. It is true that the _chansons de geste_ are far
+from the perfect continuity of the Homeric narrative. _Roland_ is
+described by M. Gaston Paris in terms not unlike those that are
+applied by Ten Brink in his criticism of _Beowulf_:--
+
+ "On peut dire que la _Chanson de Roland_ (ainsi que toutes
+ nos plus anciennes chansons de geste) se développe non pas,
+ comme les počmes homériques, par un courant large et
+ ininterrompu, non pas, comme le _Nibelungenlied_, par des
+ battements d'ailes égaux et lents, mais par un suite
+ d'explosions successives, toujours arrętées court et
+ toujours reprenant avec soudaineté" (_Litt. fr. au moyen
+ âge_, p. 59).
+
+_Roland_ is a succession of separate scenes, with no gradation or
+transition between them. It still bears traces of the lyrical origins
+of epic. But the narrative, though broken, is neither stinted nor
+laboured; it does not, like _Beowulf_, give the impression that it has
+been expanded beyond the convenient limits, and that the author is
+scant of breath. And none of the later _chansons de geste_ are so
+restricted and reserved in their design as _Roland_; most of them are
+diffuse and long. The French and the Teutonic epics are at opposite
+extremes of style.
+
+The French epics are addressed to the largest conceivable
+audience.[69] They are plain and simple, as different as possible from
+the allusive brevity of the Northern poems. Even the plainest of the
+old English poems, even _Maldon_, has to employ the poetical diction,
+the unprosaic terms and figures of the Teutonic School. The
+alliterative poetry down to its last days has a vocabulary different
+from that of prose, and much richer. The French epic language is not
+distinguished and made difficult in this way; it is "not prismatic but
+diaphanous." Those who could understand anything could understand it,
+and the _chansons de geste_ easily found currency in the market-place,
+when they were driven by the new romances from their old place of
+honour in "bower and hall." The Teutonic poetry, even at its simplest,
+must have required more attention in its hearers than the French,
+through the strangeness and the greater variety of its vocabulary. It
+is less familiar, less popular. Whatever dignity may be acquired by
+the French epic is not due to any special or elaborate convention of
+phrase. Where it is weak, its poverty is not disguised, as in the
+weaker portions of Teutonic poetry, by the ornaments and synonyms of
+the _Gradus_. The commonplaces of French epic are not imposing.[70]
+With this difference between the French and the Teutonic conventions,
+there is all the more interest in a comparison of the two kinds, where
+they come into comparison through any resemblance of their subjects or
+their thought, as in _Byrhtnoth_ and _Roland_.
+
+[Footnote 69: G. Paris, Preface to _Histoire de la littérature
+française_, edited by L. Petit de Julleville.]
+
+[Footnote 70: See the preface to _Raoul de Cambrai_, ed. Paul Meyer
+(Anc. Textes), for examples of such _chevilles_; and also _Aimeri de
+Narbonne_, p. civ.]
+
+The French epics have generally a larger political field, more
+numerous armies, and more magnificent kings, than the Teutonic. In the
+same degree, their heroism is different from that of the earlier
+heroic age. The general motives of patriotism and religion, France and
+Christendom, prevent the free use of the simpler and older motives of
+individual heroism. The hero of the older sort is still there, but his
+game is hindered by the larger and more complex political conditions
+of France; or if these are evaded, still the mere size of the country
+and numbers of the fighting-men tell against his importance; he is
+dwarfed by his surroundings. The limitation of the scenes in the poems
+of _Beowulf_, _Ermanaric_, and _Attila_ throws out the figures in
+strong relief. The mere extent of the stage and the number of the
+supernumeraries required for the action of most of the French stories
+appear to have told against the definiteness of their characters; as,
+on the other hand, the personages in _Beowulf_, without much
+individual character of their own, seem to gain in precision and
+strength from the smallness of the scene in which they act. There is
+less strict economy in the _chansons de geste_.
+
+Apart from this, there is real and essential vagueness in their
+characters; their drama is rudimentary. The simplicity of the French
+epic style, which is addressed to a large audience and easily
+intelligible, is not capable of much dramatic subtlety. It can be made
+to express a variety of actions and a variety of moods, but these are
+generally rendered by means of common formulas, without much dramatic
+insight or intention. While the fragments of Teutonic epic seem to
+give evidence of a growing dramatic imagination, and the Northern
+poems, especially, of a series of experiments in character, the French
+epic imagination appears to have remained content with its
+established and abstract formulas for different modes of sentiment
+and passion. It would not be easy to find anything in French epic that
+gives the same impression of discovery and innovation, of the search
+for dramatic form, of the absorption of the poet's mind in the pursuit
+of an imaginary character, as is given, again and again, by the
+Northern poems of the Volsung cycle. Yet the _chansons de geste_ are
+often true and effective in their outlines of character, and include a
+quantity of "humours and observation," though their authors seem to
+have been unable to give solidity to their sketches.
+
+The weakness of the drama in the French epics, even more than their
+compliance with foreign romance in the choice of incidents or
+machinery, is against their claim to be reckoned in the higher order
+of heroic narrative. They are romantic by the comparative levity of
+their imagination; the story, with them, is too much for the
+personages. But it is still the problem of heroic character that
+engages them, however feebly or conventionally they may deal with it.
+They rely, like the Teutonic epic and the Sagas, on situations that
+test the force of character, and they find those situations in the
+common conditions of an heroic age, subject of course to the
+modifications of the comparatively late period and late form of
+society to which they belong. _Roland_ is a variation on the one
+perpetual heroic theme; it has a grander setting, a grander
+accompaniment, than _Byrhtnoth_ or _Waldere_, but it is essentially
+the old story of the heroic age,--no knight-errantry, but the last
+resistance of a man driven into a corner.
+
+The greatness of the poem of _Roland_ is that of an author who knows
+his own mind, who has a certain mood of the heroic imagination to
+express, and is at no loss for his instrument or for the lines of his
+work.
+
+The poem, as has been already noted, has a general likeness in its
+plan to the story of Finnesburh as told in _Beowulf_, and to the poems
+of the death of Attila. The plot falls into two parts, the second part
+being the vengeance and expiation.
+
+Although the story is thus not absolutely simple, like the adventures
+of Beowulf, no epic has a more magnificent simplicity of effect. The
+other personages, Charlemagne, Ganelon, Oliver, King Marsile, have to
+Roland nothing like the importance of Agamemnon, Ajax, Diomede, or
+Hector, as compared with Achilles in the _Iliad_. The poem is almost
+wholly devoted to the praise and glorification of a single hero; it
+retains very much of the old manners of the earlier stages of epic
+poetry, before it ceased to be lyric. It is a poem in honour of a
+chieftain.
+
+At the same time, this lyrical tone in _Roland_ and this pathetic
+concentration of the interest on one personage do not interfere with
+the epic plan of the narrative, or disturb the lines of the
+composition. The central part of the poem is on the Homeric scale; the
+fighting, the separate combats, are rendered in an Homeric way.
+_Byrhtnoth_ and _Roland_ are the works that have given the best
+medieval counterpart to the battles of Homer. There is more of a
+crisis and a climax in _Roland_ than in the several battles of the
+_Iliad_, and a different sort of climax from that of _Byrhtnoth_.
+Everything leads to the agony and heroic death of Roland, and to his
+glory as the unyielding champion of France and Christendom. It is not
+as in the _Iliad_, where different heroes have their day, or as at
+Maldon, where the fall of the captain leads to the more desperate
+defence and the more exalted heroism of his companions. Roland is the
+absolute master of the _Song of Roland_. No other heroic poetry
+conveys the same effect of pre-eminent simplicity and grandeur. There
+is hardly anything in the poem except the single mood; its simplicity
+is overpowering, a type of heroic resistance for all the later poets
+of Europe. This impressive effect is aided, it is true, by an infusion
+of the lyrical tone and by playing on the pathetic emotions. Roland is
+ideal and universal, and the story of his defeat, of the blast of his
+horn, and the last stroke of Durendal, is a kind of funeral march or
+"heroic symphony" into which a meaning may be read for every new hero,
+to the end of the world; for any one in any age whose _Mood is the
+more as the Might lessens_. Yet although Roland has this universal or
+symbolical or musical meaning--unlike the more individual personages
+in the Sagas, who would resent being made into allegories--the total
+effect is mainly due to legitimate epic means. There is no stinting of
+the epic proportions or suppression of the epic devices. The _Song of
+Roland_ is narrative poetry, a model of narrative design, with the
+proper epic spaces well proportioned, well considered, and filled with
+action. It may be contrasted with the _Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrok_,
+which is an attempt to get the same sort of moral effect by a process
+of lyrical distillation from heroic poetry; putting all the strongest
+heroic motives into the most intense and emphatic form. There is
+something lyrical in _Roland_, but the poem is not governed by lyrical
+principles; it requires the deliberation and the freedom of epic; it
+must have room to move in before it can come up to the height of its
+argument. The abruptness of its periods is not really an interruption
+of its even flight; it is an abruptness of detail, like a broken sea
+with a larger wave moving under it; it does not impair or disguise the
+grandeur of the movement as a whole.
+
+There are other poems among the _chansons de geste_ which admit of
+comparison with _Roland_, though _Roland_ is supreme; other epics in
+which the simple motives of heroism and loyalty are treated in a
+simple and noble way, without any very strong individual character
+among the personages. Of these rather abstract expositions of the
+heroic ideal, some of the finest are to be found in the cycle of
+William of Orange, more especially in the poems relating the exploits
+of William and his nephew Vivian, and the death of Vivian in the
+battle against the Moors--
+
+ En icel jor que la dolor fu grans
+ Et la bataille orible en Aliscans.
+
+Like _Roland_, the poem of _Aliscans_ is rather lyrical in its effect,
+reiterating and reinforcing the heroic motives, making an impression
+by repetition of one and the same mood; a poem of the glorification of
+France. It shows, at the same time, how this motive might be degraded
+by exaggeration and amplification. There are too many Moors in it (as
+also in _Roland_), and the sequel is reckless and extravagant, where
+William of Orange rides to the king's court for help and discovers an
+ally in the enormous scullion of the king's kitchen, Rainouart, the
+Morgante of French epic. Rainouart, along with William of Orange, was
+seen by Dante in Paradise. In his gigantic and discourteous way he was
+one of the champions of Christendom, and his manners are interesting
+as a variation from the conventional heroic standards. But he takes up
+too much room; he was not invented by the wide and comprehensive epic
+imagination which finds a place for many varieties of mankind in its
+story, but by some one who felt that the old epic forms were growing
+thin and unsatisfactory, and that there was need of some violent
+diversion to keep the audiences awake. This new device is not
+abandoned till Rainouart has been sent to Avalon--the epic form and
+spirit losing themselves in a misappropriation of Romance. These
+excursions are of course not to be ascribed to the central authors of
+the cycle of William of Orange; but already even in the most heroic
+parts of the cycle there are indications of the flagging imagination,
+the failure of the old motives, which gave an opening to these wild
+auxiliary forces. Where the epic came to trust too much to the mere
+heroic sentiment, to the moral of _Roland_, to the contrast of knight
+and infidel, there was nothing for it but either to have recourse to
+the formal heroics of Camoens or Tasso,--for which the time had not
+yet come,--or to be dissolved altogether in a medley of adventures,
+and to pass from its old station in the front of literature to those
+audiences of the market-place that even now, in some parts of the
+world, have a welcome for Charlemagne and his peers.[71]
+
+[Footnote 71: _Historia Verdadera de Carlo Magno y los doce Pares de
+Francia_: Madrid, 4to (1891), a chap-book of thirty-two pages.]
+
+Those of the French epics in which the motives of _Roland_ are in some
+form or other repeated, in which the defence of Christendom is the
+burden, are rightly considered the best representatives of the whole
+body. But there are others in which with less dignity of theme there
+is more freedom, and in which an older epic type, more akin to the
+Teutonic, nearer in many ways to the Icelandic Sagas, is preserved,
+and for a long time maintains itself distinct from all the forms of
+romance and the romantic schools. It is not in _Roland_ or in
+_Aliscans_ that the epic interest in character is most pronounced and
+most effective. Those among the _chansons de geste_ which make least
+of the adventures in comparison with the personages, which think more
+of the tragic situation than of rapid changes of scene and incident,
+are generally those which represent the feuds and quarrels between the
+king and his vassals, or among the great houses themselves; the
+anarchy, in fact, which belongs to an heroic age and passes from
+experience into heroic literature. There is hardly any of the
+_chansons de geste_ in which this element of heroic anarchy is not to
+be found in a greater or less degree. In _Roland_, for example, though
+the main action is between the French and the Moors, it is jealousy
+and rivalry that bring about the catastrophe, through the treason of
+Ganelon. This sort of jealousy, which is subordinate in _Roland_,
+forms the chief motive of some of the other epics. These depend for
+their chief interest on the vicissitudes of family quarrels almost as
+completely as the Sagas. These are the French counterparts of
+_Eyrbyggja_, and of the stories of Glum or Gisli. In France, as in
+Iceland, the effect of the story is produced as much by the energy of
+the characters as by the interest of adventures. Only in the French
+epic, while they play for larger stakes, the heroes are incomparably
+less impressive. The imagination which represents them is different in
+kind from the Icelandic, and puts up with a very indefinite and
+general way of denoting character. Though the extant poems are late,
+some of them have preserved a very elementary psychology and a very
+simple sort of ethics, the artistic formulas and devices of a
+rudimentary stage which has nothing to correspond to it in the extant
+Icelandic prose.
+
+_Raoul de Cambrai_ in its existing form is a late poem; it has gone
+through the process of translation from assonance into rhyme, and like
+_Huon of Bordeaux_, though by a different method, it has been fitted
+with a romantic continuation. But the first part of the poem
+apparently keeps the lines of an older and more original version. The
+story is not one of the later cyclic fabrications; it has an
+historical basis and is derived from the genuine epic tradition of
+that tenth-century school which unfortunately is only known through
+its descendants and its influence. _Raoul de Cambrai_, though in an
+altered verse and later style, may be taken as presenting an old story
+still recognisable in most of its original features, especially in its
+moral.
+
+Raoul de Cambrai, a child at his father's death, is deprived of his
+inheritance. To make up for this he is promised, later, the first fief
+that falls vacant, and asserts his claim in a way that brings him into
+continual trouble,--a story with great opportunities for heroic
+contrasts and complications. The situation is well chosen; it is
+better than that of the story of Glum, which is rather like
+it[72]--the right is not all on one side. Raoul has a just cause, but
+cannot make it good; he is driven to be unjust in order to come by his
+own. Violence and excess in a just cause will make a tragic history;
+there is no fault to be found with the general scheme or principle in
+this case. It is in the details that the barbarous simplicity of the
+author comes out. For example, in the invasion of the lands on which
+he has a claim, Raoul attacks and burns a nunnery, and in it the
+mother of his best friend and former squire, Bernier. The injured man,
+his friend, is represented as taking it all in a helpless dull
+expostulatory way. The author has no language to express any
+imaginative passion; he can only repeat, in a muffled professional
+voice, that it was really a very painful and discreditable affair. The
+violent passions here are those of the heroic age in its most
+barbarous form; more sudden and uncontrolled even than the anger of
+Achilles. But with all their vehemence and violence there is no real
+tragic force, and when the hero is killed by his friend, and the
+friend is sorry afterwards, there is nothing but the mere formal and
+abstract identity of the situation to recall to mind the tragedy of
+Kjartan and Bolli.
+
+[Footnote 72: Glum, like Raoul, is a widow's son deprived of his
+rights.]
+
+_Garin le Loherain_ is a story with a similar plot,--the estrangement
+and enmity of old friends, "sworn companions." Though no earlier than
+_Raoul de Cambrai_, though belonging in date to the flourishing period
+of romance, it is a story of the older heroic age, and its contents
+are epic. Its heroes are unsophisticated, and the incidents,
+sentiments, and motives are primitive and not of the romantic school.
+The story is much superior to _Raoul de Cambrai_ in speed and
+lightness; it does not drag at the critical moments; it has some
+humour and some grace. Among other things, its gnomic passages
+represent very fairly the dominant heroic ideas of courage and good
+temper; it may be appealed to for the humanities of the _chansons de
+geste_, expressed in a more fluent and less emphatic shape than
+_Roland_. The characters are taken very lightly, but at least they are
+not obtuse and awkward. If there is not much dramatic subtlety, there
+is a recognition and appreciation of different aspects of the same
+character. The story proceeds like an Icelandic Saga, through
+different phases of a long family quarrel, springing from a
+well-marked origin; foreshadowed and accompanied, as in many of the
+Sagas, by the hereditary felonious character of the one party, which
+yet is not blackened too much nor wholly unrelieved.
+
+As in many of the Icelandic stories, there is a stronger dramatic
+interest in the adversary, the wrong side, than in the heroes. As with
+Kari and Flosi in _Njála_, as with Kjartan and Bolli in _Laxdćla_, and
+with Sigmund and Thrond of Gata in _Fćreyinga Saga_, so in the story
+of Garin it is Fromont the enemy whose case is followed with most
+attention, because it is less simple than that of the heroes, Garin of
+Lorraine and Begon his brother. The character of Fromont shows the
+true observation, as well as the inadequate and sketchy handling, of
+the French epic school. Fromont is in the wrong; all the trouble
+follows from his original misconduct, when he refused to stand by
+Garin in a war of defence against the Moors:--
+
+ Iluec comence li grans borroflemens.
+
+But Fromont's demeanour afterwards is not that of a traitor and a
+felon, such as his father was. He belongs to a felonious house; he is
+the son of Hardré, one of the notorious traitors of French epic
+tradition; but he is less than half-hearted in his own cause, always
+lamentable, perplexed, and peevish, always trying to be just, and
+always dragged further into iniquity by the mischief-makers among his
+friends. This idea of a distracted character is worked out as well as
+was possible for a poet of that school, in a passage of narrative
+which represents more than one of the good qualities of French epic
+poetry,--the story of the death of Begon, and the vengeance exacted
+for him by his brother Garin. This episode shows how the French poets
+could deal with matter like that of the Sagas. The story is well told,
+fluently and clearly; it contains some fine expressions of heroic
+sentiment, and a good fight, as well as the ineffectual sorrows and
+good intentions of the anti-hero Fromont, with all the usual tissue of
+violence which goes along with a feud in heroic narrative, when the
+feud is regarded as something impersonal and fatal, outside the wishes
+of the agents in it.
+
+It may be said here that although the story of Garin and of the feud
+between the house of Lorraine and their enemies is long drawn out and
+copious in details, it is not confused, but falls into a few definite
+episodes of warfare, with intervals of truce and apparent
+reconciliation. Of these separate acts in the tragedy, the _Death of
+Begon_ is the most complete in itself; the most varied, as well as the
+most compact. The previous action is for a modern taste too much
+occupied with the commonplaces of epic warfare, Homeric combats in the
+field, such as need the heroic motives of Maldon or Roncesvalles to
+make them interesting. In the story of the _Death of Begon_ there is a
+change of scene from the common epic battlefield; the incidents are
+not taken from the common stock of battle-poetry, and the Homeric
+supernumeraries are dismissed.
+
+This episode[73] begins after an interval in the feud, and tells how
+Begon one day thought of his brother Garin whom he had not seen for
+seven years and more (the business of the feud having been slack for
+so long), and how he set out for the East country to pay his brother a
+visit, with the chance of a big boar-hunt on the way. The opening
+passage is a very complete and lively selection from the experience
+and the sentiments of the heroic age; it represents the old heroic
+temper and the heroic standard of value, with, at the same time, a
+good deal of the gentler humanities.
+
+[Footnote 73: _Garin le Loherain_, ed. Paulin Paris (1833-35), vol.
+ii. pp. 217-272.]
+
+ One day Begon was in his castle of Belin; at his side was
+ the Duchess Beatrice, and he kissed her on the mouth: he saw
+ his two sons coming through the hall (so the story runs).
+ The elder was named Gerin and the younger Hernaudin; the one
+ was twelve and the other was ten years old, and with them
+ went six noble youths, running and leaping with one another,
+ playing and laughing and taking their sport.
+
+ The Duke saw them and began to sigh, and his lady questioned
+ him:--
+
+ "Ah, my Lord Duke, why do you ponder thus? Gold and silver
+ you have in your coffers; falcons on their perch, and furs
+ of the vair and the grey, and mules and palfreys; and well
+ have you trodden down your enemies: for six days' journey
+ round you have no neighbour so stout but he will come to
+ your levy."
+
+ Said the Duke: "Madame, you have spoken true, save in one
+ thing. Riches are not in the vair and the grey, nor in
+ money, nor in mules and horses, but riches are in kinsmen
+ and friends: the heart of a man is worth all the gold in the
+ land. Do you not remember how I was assailed and beset at
+ our home-coming? and but for my friends how great had been
+ my shame that day! Pepin has set me in these marches where I
+ have none of my near friends save Rigaut and Hervi his
+ father; I have no brother but one, Garin the Lothering, and
+ full seven years are past and gone that I have not seen him,
+ and for that I am grieved and vexed and ill at ease. Now I
+ will set off to see my brother Garin, and the child Girbert
+ his son that I have never seen. Of the woods of Vicogne and
+ of St. Bertin I hear news that there is a boar there; I will
+ run him down, please the Lord, and will bring the head to
+ Garin, a wonder to look upon, for of its like never man
+ heard tell."
+
+Begon's combined motives are all alike honest, and his rhetoric is as
+sound as that of Sarpedon or of Gunnar. Nor is there any reason to
+suppose, any more than in the case of Byrhtnoth, that what is striking
+in the poem is due to its comparative lateness, and to its
+opportunities of borrowing from new discoveries in literature. If that
+were so, then we might find similar things among the newer fashions
+of the contemporary twelfth-century literature; but in fact one does
+not find in the works of the romantic school the same kind of humanity
+as in this scene. The melancholy of Begon at the thought of his
+isolation--"Bare is back without brother behind it"--is an adaptation
+of a common old heroic motive which is obscured by other more showy
+ideas in the romances. The conditions of life are here essentially
+those of the heroic age, an age which has no particular ideas of its
+own, which lives merely on such ideas as are struck out in the
+collision of lawless heavy bodies, in that heroic strife which is the
+parent of all things, and, among the rest, of the ideas of loyalty,
+fellowship, fair dealing, and so on. There is nothing romantic or
+idealist in Begon; he is merely an honest country gentleman, rather
+short of work.
+
+He continues in the same strain, after the duchess has tried to
+dissuade him. She points out to him the risk he runs by going to hunt
+on his enemy's marches,--
+
+ C'est en la marche Fromont le poësti,
+
+--and tells him of her foreboding that he will never return alive. His
+answer is like that of Hector to Polydamas:--
+
+ Diex! dist il, dame, merveilles avez dit:
+ Ja mar croiroie sorciere ne devin;
+ Par aventure vient li biens el paďs,
+ Je ne lairoie, por tot l'or que Diex fist,
+ Que je n'i voise, que talens m'en est prins.
+
+The hunting of the boar is as good as anything of its kind in history,
+and it is impossible to read it without wishing that it had been
+printed a few years earlier to be read by Sir Walter Scott. He would
+have applauded as no one else can this story of the chase and of the
+hunter separated from his companions in the forest. There is one line
+especially in the lament for Begon after his death which is enough by
+itself to prove the soundness of the French poet's judgment, and his
+right to a welcome at Abbotsford: "This was a true man; his dogs loved
+him":--
+
+ Gentis hons fu, moult l'amoient si chien.
+
+Begon came by his death in the greenwood. The forester found him there
+and reported him to Fromont's seneschal, who called out six of his men
+to go and take the poacher; and along with them went Thibaut,
+Fromont's nephew, an old rival of Begon. Begon set his back to an
+aspen tree and killed four of the churls and beat off the rest, but
+was killed himself at last with an arrow.
+
+The four dead men were brought home and Begon's horse was led away:--
+
+ En une estable menerent le destrier
+ Fronce et hennit et si grate des pies
+ Que nus de char ne li ouse aprochier.
+
+Begon was left lying where he fell and his three dogs came back to
+him:--
+
+ Seul ont Begon en la forest laissié:
+ Et jouste lui revindrent si trois chien,
+ Hulent et braient com fuissent enragié.
+
+This most spirited passage of action and adventure shows the poet at
+his best; it is the sort of thing that he understands, and he carries
+it through without a mistake. It is followed by an attempt at another
+theme where something more is required of the author, and his success
+is not so perfect. He is drawn into the field of tragic emotion. Here,
+though his means are hardly sufficient for elaborate work, he sketches
+well. The character of Fromont when the news of his opponent's death
+is brought to him comes out as something of a different value from the
+sheer barbarism of _Raoul de Cambrai_. The narrative is light and
+wanting in depth, but there is no untruth and no dulness in the
+conception, and the author's meaning is perfectly clear. Fromont is
+different from the felons of his own household. Fromont is the
+adversary, but he is a gentleman. Even when he knows no more of the
+event than that a trespasser has been killed in the forest, he sends
+his men to bring in the body;--
+
+ Frans hons de l'autre doient avoir pitié
+
+--and when he sees who it is (_vif l'ot véu, mort le reconnut bien_)
+he breaks out into strong language against the churls who have killed
+the most courteous knight that ever bore arms. Mingled with this
+sentiment is the thought of all the trouble to come from the revival
+of the feud, but his vexation does not spring from mere self-interest.
+Fromondin his son is also angry with Thibaut his cousin; Thibaut ought
+to be flayed alive for his foul stroke. But while Fromondin is
+thinking of the shame of the murder which will be laid to the account
+of his father's house, Fromont's thought is more generous, a thought
+of respect and regret for his enemy. The tragedy of the feud continues
+after this; as before, Fromont is involved by his irrepressible
+kinsmen, and nothing comes of his good thoughts and intentions.
+
+ Our wills and fates do so contrary run,
+ Our thoughts are ours, the ends none of our own.
+
+This moral axiom is understood by the French author, and in an
+imaginative, not a didactic way, though his imagination is not strong
+enough to make much of it.
+
+In this free, rapid, and unforced narrative, that nothing might be
+wanting of the humanities of the French heroic poetry, there is added
+the lament for Begon, by his brother and his wife. Garin's lament is
+what the French epic can show in comparison with the famous lament for
+Lancelot at the end of the _Mort d'Arthur_:--
+
+ Ha! sire Begues, li Loherains a dit
+ Frans chevaliers, corajeus et hardis!
+ Fel et angris contre vos anemis
+ Et dols et simples a trestoz vos amis!
+ Tant mar i fustes, biaus frčres, biaus amis!
+
+Here the advantage is with the English romantic author, who has
+command of a more subtle and various eloquence. On the other hand, the
+scene of the grief of the Duchess Beatrice, when Begon is brought to
+his own land, and his wife and his sons come out to meet him, shows a
+different point of view from romance altogether, and a different
+dramatic sense. The whole scene of the conversation between Beatrice
+and Garin is written with a steady hand; it needs no commentary to
+bring out the pathos or the dramatic truth of the consolation offered
+by Garin.
+
+ She falls fainting, she cannot help herself; and when she
+ awakens her lamenting is redoubled. She mourns over her
+ sons, Hernaudin and Gerin: "Children, you are orphans; dead
+ is he that begot you, dead is he that was your
+ stay!"--"Peace, madame," said Garin the Duke, "this is a
+ foolish speech and a craven. You, for the sake of the land
+ that is in your keeping, for your lineage and your lordly
+ friends--some gentle knight will take you to wife and
+ cherish you; but it falls to me to have long sorrow. The
+ more I have of silver and fine gold, the more will be my
+ grief and vexation of spirit. Hernaudin and Gerin are my
+ nephews; it will be mine to suffer many a war for them, to
+ watch late, and to rise up early."--"Thank you, uncle,"
+ said Hernaudin: "Lord! why have I not a little habergeon of
+ my own? I would help you against your enemies!" The Duke
+ hears him, and takes him in his arms and kisses the child.
+ "By God, fair nephew, you are stout and brave, and like my
+ brother in face and mouth, the rich Duke, on whom God have
+ mercy!" When this was said, they go to bury the Duke in the
+ chapel beyond Belin; the pilgrims see it to this day, as
+ they come back from Galicia, from St. James.[74]
+
+[Footnote 74: One of the frequent morals of French epic (repeated also
+by French romance) is the vanity of overmuch sorrow for the dead.
+
+ [Greek: alla chrę ton men katathaptein hos ke thanęsin
+ nęlea thymon echontas, ep' ęmati dakrysantas.]
+
+ (Odysseus speaking) _Il._ xix. 228.
+
+ "Laissiez ester," li quens Guillaumes dit;
+ "Tout avenra ce que doit avenir;
+ Li mort as mors, li vif voissent as vis;
+ Duel sor dolor et joie sor joďr
+ Ja nus frans hons nel devroit maintenir."
+ Les cors enportent, les out en terre mis.
+
+ _Garin_, i. p. 262.]
+
+_Roland_, _Raoul de Cambrai_, and _Garin le Loherain_ represent three
+kinds of French heroic poetry. _Roland_ is the more purely heroic
+kind, in which the interest is concentrated on the passion of the
+hero, and the hero is glorified by every possible means of patriotism,
+religion, and the traditional ethics of battle, with the scenery and
+the accompaniments all chosen so as to bring him into relief and give
+him an ideal or symbolical value, like that of the statues of the
+gods. _Raoul_ and _Garin_, contrasted with _Roland_, are two varieties
+of another species; namely, of the heroic poetry which (like the
+_Odyssey_ and the Icelandic stories) represents the common life of an
+heroic age, without employing the ideal motives of great causes,
+religious or patriotic, and without giving to the personages any
+great representative or symbolical import. The subjects of _Raoul_ and
+_Garin_ belong to the same order. The difference between them is that
+the author of the first is only half awake to the chances offered by
+his theme. The theme is well chosen, not disabled, like so many
+romantic plots, by an inherent fallacy of ethics or imagination; a
+story that shapes itself naturally, if the author has the wit to see
+it. The author of _Raoul de Cambrai_, unhappily, has "no more wit than
+a Christian or an ordinary man," and leaves his work encumbered with
+his dulness of perception; an evidence of the fertility of the heroic
+age in good subjects, and of the incompetence of some of the artists.
+_Garin_, on the other hand, shows how the common subject-matter might
+be worked up by a man of intelligence, rather discursive than
+imaginative, but alive to the meaning of his story, and before
+everything a continuous narrator, with the gift of natural sequence in
+his adventures. He relates as if he were following the course of
+events in his own memory, with simplicity and lucidity, qualities
+which were not beyond the compass of the old French verse and diction.
+He does not stop to elaborate his characters; he takes them perhaps
+too easily. But his lightness of spirit saves him from the untruth of
+_Raoul de Cambrai_; and while his ethics are the commonplaces of the
+heroic age, these commonplaces are not mere formulas or cant; they are
+vividly realised.
+
+There is no need to multiply examples in order to prove the capacity
+of French epic for the same kind of subjects as those of the Sagas;
+that is, for the representation of strenuous and unruly life in a
+comprehensive and liberal narrative, noble in spirit and not much
+hampered by conventional nobility or dignity.
+
+_Roland_ is the great achievement of French epic, and there are other
+poems, also, not far removed from the severity of _Roland_ and
+inspired by the same patriotic and religious ardour. But the poem of
+_Garin of Lorraine_ (which begins with the defence of France against
+the infidels, but very soon passes to the business of the great
+feud--its proper theme), though it is lacking in the political
+motives, not to speak of the symbolical imagination of _Roland_, is
+significant in another way, because though much later in date, though
+written at a time when Romance was prevalent, it is both archaic in
+its subject and also comprehensive in its treatment. It has something
+like the freedom of movement and the ease which in the Icelandic Sagas
+go along with similar antique subjects. The French epic poetry is not
+all of it made sublime by the ideas of _Roland_; there is still scope
+for the free representation of life in different moods, with character
+as the dominant interest.
+
+It should not be forgotten that the French epic has room for comedy,
+not merely in the shape of "comic relief," though that unhappily is
+sometimes favoured by the _chansons de geste_, and by the romances as
+well, but in the "humours" inseparable from all large and unpedantic
+fiction.
+
+A good deal of credit on this account may be claimed for Galopin, the
+reckless humorist of the party of Garin of Lorraine, and something
+rather less for Rigaut the Villain Unwashed, another of Garin's
+friends. This latter appears to be one of the same family as Hreidar
+the Simple, in the Saga of Harald Hardrada; a figure of popular
+comedy, one of the lubbers who turn out something different from their
+promise. Clumsy strength and good-nature make one of the most
+elementary compounds, and may easily be misused (as in _Rainouart_)
+where the author has few scruples and no dramatic consistency. Galopin
+is a more singular humorist, a ribald and a prodigal, yet of gentle
+birth, and capable of good service when he can be got away from the
+tavern.
+
+There are several passages in the _chansons de geste_ where, as with
+_Rainouart_, the fun is of a grotesque and gigantic kind, like the fun
+to be got out of the giants in the Northern mythology, and the trolls
+in the Northern popular tales. The heathen champion Corsolt in the
+_Coronemenz Looďs_ makes good comedy of this sort, when he accosts the
+Pope: "Little man! why is your head shaved?" and explains to him his
+objection to the Pope's religion: "You are not well advised to talk to
+me of God: he has done me more wrong than any other man in the world,"
+and so on.[75]
+
+[Footnote 75:
+
+ Respont li reis: "N'iés pas bien enseigniez,
+ Qui devant mei oses de Deu plaidier;
+ C'est l'om el mont qui plus m'a fait irier:
+ Mon pere ocist une foldre del ciel:
+ Tot i fu ars, ne li pot l'en aidier.
+ Quant Deus l'ot mort, si fist que enseigniez;
+ El ciel monta, ça ne voit repairier;
+ Ge nel poeie sivre ne enchalcier,
+ Mais de ses omes me sui ge puis vengiez;
+ De cels qui furent levé et baptisié
+ Ai fait destruire plus de trente miliers,
+ Ardeir en feu et en eve neier;
+ Quant ge la sus ne puis Deu guerreier,
+ Nul de ses omes ne vueil ça jus laissier,
+ Et mei et Deu n'avons mais que plaidier:
+ Meie est la terre et siens sera li ciels."
+
+ _l.c._, l. 522.
+
+The last verse expresses the same sentiment as the answer of the
+Emperor Henry when he was told to beware of God's vengeance: "Celum
+celi Domino, terram autem dedit filiis hominum" (Otton. Frising.
+_Gesta Frid._ i. 11).]
+
+Also, in a less exaggerated way, there is some appreciation of the
+humour to be found in the contrast between the churl and the knight,
+and their different points of view; as in the passage of the _Charroi
+de Nismes_ where William of Orange questions the countryman about the
+condition of the city under its Saracen masters, and is answered with
+information about the city tolls and the price of bread.[76] It must
+be admitted, however, that this slight passage of comedy is far
+outdone by the conversation in the romance of _Aucassin and
+Nicolette_, between Aucassin and the countryman, where the author of
+that story seems to get altogether beyond the conventions of his own
+time into the region of Chaucer, or even somewhere near the forest of
+Arden. The comedy of the _chansons de geste_ is easily satisfied with
+plain and robust practical jokes. Yet it counts for something in the
+picture, and it might be possible, in a detailed criticism of the
+epics, to distinguish between the comic incidents that have an
+artistic value and intention, and those that are due merely to the
+rudeness of those common minstrels who are accused (by their rivals in
+epic poetry) of corrupting and debasing the texts.
+
+[Footnote 76:
+
+ Li cuens Guillaumes li comença ŕ dire:
+ --Diva, vilain, par la loi dont tu vives
+ Fus-tu a Nymes, la fort cité garnie?
+ --Oďl, voir, sire, le paaige me quistrent;
+ Ge fui trop poures, si nel poi baillier mie.
+ Il me lessčrent por mes enfanz qu'il virent.
+ --Di moi, vilain, des estres de la vile.
+ Et cil respont:--Ce vos sai-ge bien dire
+ Por un denier .ii. granz pains i véismes;
+ La denerée vaut .iii. en autre vile:
+ Moult par est bone, se puis n'est empirie.
+ --Fox, dist Guillaume, ce ne demant-je mie,
+ Mčs des paiens chevaliers de la vile,
+ Del rei Otrant et de sa compaignie.
+
+ _l.c._, ll. 903-916.]
+
+There were many ways in which the French epic was degraded at the
+close of its course--by dilution and expansion, by the growth of a
+kind of dull parasitic, sapless language over the old stocks, by the
+general failure of interest, and the transference of favour to other
+kinds of literature. Reading came into fashion, and the minstrels lost
+their welcome in the castles, and had to betake themselves to more
+vulgar society for their livelihood. At the same time, epic made a
+stand against the new modes and a partial compliance with them; and
+the _chansons de geste_ were not wholly left to the vagrant reciters,
+but were sometimes copied out fair in handsome books, and held their
+own with the romances.
+
+The compromise between epic and romance in old French literature is
+most interesting where romance has invaded a story of the simpler kind
+like _Raoul de Cambrai_. Stories of war against the infidel, stories
+like those of William of Orange, were easily made romantic. The poem
+of the _Prise d'Orange_, for example, an addition to this cycle, is a
+pure romance of adventure, and a good one, though it has nothing of
+the more solid epic in it. Where the action is carried on between the
+knights of France and the Moors, one is prepared for a certain amount
+of wonder; the palaces and dungeons of the Moors are the right places
+for strange things to happen, and the epic of the defence of France
+goes easily off into night excursions and disguises: the Moorish
+princess also is there, to be won by the hero. All this is natural;
+but it is rather more paradoxical to find the epic of family feuds,
+originally sober, grave, and business-like, turning more and more
+extravagant, as it does in the _Four Sons of Aymon_, which in its
+original form, no doubt, was something like the more serious parts of
+_Raoul de Cambrai_ or of the _Lorrains_, but which in the extant
+version is expanded and made wonderful, a story of wild adventures,
+yet with traces still of its origin among the realities of the heroic
+age, the common matters of practical interest to heroes.
+
+The case of _Huon of Bordeaux_ is more curious, for there the original
+sober story has been preserved, and it is one of the best and most
+coherent of them all,[77] till it is suddenly changed by the sound of
+Oberon's horn and passes out of the real world altogether.
+
+[Footnote 77: Cf. Auguste Longnon, "L'élément historique de Huon de
+Bordeaux," _Romania_, viii.]
+
+The lines of the earlier part of the story are worth following, for
+there is no better story among the French poems that represent the
+ruder heroic age--a simple story of feudal rivalries and jealousies,
+surviving in this strange way as an introduction to the romance of
+_Oberon_.
+
+The Emperor Charlemagne, one hundred and twenty-five years old, but
+not particularly reverend, holds a court at Paris one Whitsuntide and
+asks to be relieved of his kingdom. His son Charlot is to succeed him.
+Charlot is worthless, the companion of traitors and disorderly
+persons; he has made enough trouble already in embroiling Ogier the
+Dane with the Emperor. Charlemagne is infatuated and will have his son
+made king:--
+
+ Si m'aďt Diex, tu auras si franc fiet
+ Com Damediex qui tot puet justicier
+ Tient Paradis de regne droiturier!
+
+Then the traitor Amaury de la Tor de Rivier gets up and brings forward
+the case of Bordeaux, which has rendered no service for seven years,
+since the two brothers, Huon and Gerard, were left orphans. Amaury
+proposes that the orphans should be dispossessed. Charlemagne agrees
+at once, and withdraws his assent again (a painful spectacle!) when
+it is suggested to him that Huon and his brother have omitted their
+duties in pure innocence, and that their father Sewin was always
+loyal.
+
+Messengers are sent to bring Huon and Gerard to Paris, and every
+chance is to be given them of proving their good faith to the Emperor.
+
+This is not what Amaury the traitor wants; he goes to Charlot and
+proposes an ambuscade to lie in wait for the two boys and get rid of
+them; his real purpose being to get rid of the king's son as well as
+of Huon of Bordeaux.
+
+The two boys set out, and on the way fall in with the Abbot of Clugni,
+their father's cousin, a strong-minded prelate, who accompanies them.
+Outside Paris they come to the ambush, and the king's son is
+despatched by Amaury to encounter them. What follows is an admirable
+piece of narrative. Gerard rides up to address Charlot; Charlot rides
+at him as he is turning back to report to Huon and the Abbot, and
+Gerard who is unarmed falls severely wounded. Then Huon, also unarmed,
+rides at Charlot, though his brother calls out to him: "I see helmets
+flashing there among the bushes." With his scarlet mantle rolled round
+his arm he meets the lance of Charlot safely, and with his sword, as
+he passes, cuts through the helmet and head of his adversary.
+
+This is good enough for Amaury, and he lets Huon and his party ride on
+to the city, while he takes up the body of Charlot on a shield and
+follows after.
+
+Huon comes before the Emperor and tells his story as far as he knows
+it; he does not know that the felon he has killed is the Emperor's
+son. Charlemagne gives solemn absolution to Huon. Then appears Amaury
+with a false story, making Huon the aggressor. Charlemagne forgets
+all about the absolution and snatches up a knife, and is with
+difficulty calmed by his wise men.
+
+The ordeal of battle has to decide between the two parties; there are
+elaborate preparations and preliminaries, obviously of the most vivid
+interest to the audience. The demeanour of the Abbot of Clugni ought
+not to be passed over: he vows that if Heaven permits any mischance to
+come upon Huon, he, the Abbot, will make it good on St. Peter himself,
+and batter his holy shrine till the gold flies.
+
+In the combat Huon is victorious; but unhappily a last treacherous
+effort of his enemy, after he has yielded and confessed, makes Huon
+cut off his head in too great a hurry before the confession is heard
+by the Emperor or any witnesses:--
+
+ Le teste fist voler ens el larris:
+ Hues le voit, mais ce fu sans jehir.
+
+ The head went flying over the lea, but it had no more words
+ to speak.
+
+Huon is not forgiven by the Emperor; the Emperor spares his life,
+indeed, but sends him on a hopeless expedition.
+
+And there the first part of the story ends. The present version is
+dated in the early part of the reign of St. Louis; it is contemporary
+with Snorri Sturluson and Sturla his nephew, and exhibits, though not
+quite in the Icelandic manner, the principal motives of early unruly
+society, without much fanciful addition, and with a very strong hold
+upon the tragic situation, and upon the types of character. As in
+_Raoul de Cambrai_, right and wrong are mixed; the Emperor has a real
+grievance against Huon, and Huon, with little fault of his own, is put
+apparently in the wrong. The interests involved are of the strongest
+possible. There was not a single lord among those to whom the
+minstrel repeated his story who did not know that he might have to
+look out for encroachments and injustice--interference at any
+rate--from the king, and treachery from his neighbours. No one hoped
+to leave his castles and lands in peace to his son, who did not also
+fear that his son might be left defenceless and his lands exposed to
+competition; a fear most touchingly expressed in the lament of William
+of Poitiers, when he set out on the first Crusade.[78]
+
+[Footnote 78: "Pos de chantar m'es pres talens:"--Raynouard, _Choix
+des poésies des Troubadours_, iv. p. 83; Bartsch, _Chrestomathie
+provençale_.]
+
+Whatever general influences of law or politics or social economy are
+supposed to be at work in the story of _Huon of Bordeaux_,--and all
+this earlier part of it is a story of feudal politics and legal
+problems,--these influences were also present in the real world in
+which the maker and the hearers of the poem had their life. It is
+plain and serious dealing with matter of fact.
+
+But after the ordeal of battle in which Huon kills the traitor, the
+tone changes with great abruptness and a new story begins.
+
+The commission laid upon Huon by the implacable and doting Emperor is
+nothing less than that which afterwards was made a byword for all
+impossible enterprises--"to take the Great Turk by the beard." He is
+to go to Babylon and, literally, to beard the Admiral there, and carry
+off the Admiral's daughter. The audience is led away into the wide
+world of Romance. Huon goes to the East by way of Rome and
+Brindisi--naturally enough--but the real world ends at Brindisi;
+beyond that everything is magical.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+ROMANCE
+
+AND THE OLD FRENCH ROMANTIC SCHOOLS
+
+
+Romance in many varieties is to be found inherent in Epic and in
+Tragedy; for some readers, possibly, the great and magnificent forms
+of poetry are most attractive when from time to time they forget their
+severity, and when the tragic strength is allowed to rest, as in the
+fairy interludes of the _Odyssey_, or the similes of the clouds,
+winds, and mountain-waters in the _Iliad_. If Romance be the name for
+the sort of imagination that possesses the mystery and the spell of
+everything remote and unattainable, then Romance is to be found in the
+old Northern heroic poetry in larger measure than any epic or tragic
+solemnity, and in no small measure also even in the steady course of
+the Icelandic histories. Possibly Romance is in its best place here,
+as an element in the epic harmony; perhaps the romantic mystery is
+most mysterious when it is found as something additional among the
+graver and more positive affairs of epic or tragic personages. The
+occasional visitations of the dreaming moods of romance, in the middle
+of a great epic or a great tragedy, are often more romantic than the
+literature which is nothing but romance from beginning to end. The
+strongest poets, Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, have along with their
+strong reasoning enough of the lighter and fainter grace and charm to
+be the despair of all the "romantic schools" in the world. In the
+Icelandic prose stories, as has been seen already, there is a similar
+combination. These stories contain the strongest imaginative work of
+the Middle Ages before Dante. Along with this there is found in them
+occasionally the uncertain and incalculable play of the other, the
+more airy mode of imagination; and the romance of the strong Sagas is
+more romantic than that of the medieval works which have no other
+interest to rely upon, or of all but a very few.
+
+One of the largest and plainest facts of medieval history is the
+change of literature in the twelfth century, and the sudden and
+exuberant growth and progress of a number of new poetical forms;
+particularly the courtly lyric that took shape in Provence, and passed
+into the tongues of Italy, France, and Germany, and the French romance
+which obeyed the same general inspiration as the Provençal poetry, and
+was equally powerful as an influence on foreign nations. The French
+Romantic Schools of the twelfth century are among the most definite
+and the most important appearances even in that most wonderful age;
+though it is irrational to contrast them with the other great
+historical movements of the time, because there is no real separation
+between them. French romance is part of the life of the time, and the
+life of the twelfth century is reproduced in French romance.
+
+The rise of these new forms of story makes an unmistakable difference
+between the age that preceded them and everything that comes after.
+They are a new, fresh, and prosperous beginning in literature, and
+they imply the failure of the older manner of thought, the older
+fashion of imagination, represented in the epic literature of France,
+not to speak of the various Teutonic forms of heroic verse and prose
+that are related to the epic of France only by a remote common
+ancestry, and a certain general likeness in the conditions of "heroic"
+life.
+
+The defeat of French epic, as has been noted already, was slow and
+long resisted; but the victory of romance was inevitable. Together
+with the influence of the Provençal lyric idealism, it determined the
+forms of modern literature, long after the close of the Middle Ages.
+The change of fashion in the twelfth century is as momentous and
+far-reaching in its consequences as that to which the name
+"Renaissance" is generally appropriated. The later Renaissance,
+indeed, in what concerns imaginative literature, makes no such abrupt
+and sudden change of fashion as was made in the twelfth century. The
+poetry and romance of the Renaissance follow naturally upon the
+literature of the Middle Ages; for the very good reason that it was
+the Middle Ages which began, even in their dark beginnings, the modern
+study of the humanities, and in the twelfth century made a remarkable
+and determined effort to secure the inheritance of ancient poetry for
+the advantage of the new tongues and their new forms of verse. There
+is no such line of division between Ariosto and Chrestien of Troyes as
+there is between Chrestien and the primitive epic.
+
+The romantic schools of the twelfth century are the result and
+evidence of a great unanimous movement, the origins of which may be
+traced far back in the general conditions of education and learning,
+in the influence of Latin authors, in the interchange of popular
+tales. They are among the most characteristic productions of the most
+impressive, varied, and characteristic period in the Middle Ages; of
+that century which broke, decisively, with the old "heroic"
+traditions, and made the division between the heroic and the
+chivalric age. When the term "medieval" is used in modern talk, it
+almost always denotes something which first took definite shape in the
+twelfth century. The twelfth century is the source of most of the
+"medieval" influences in modern art and literature, and the French
+romances of that age are the original authorities for most of the
+"Gothic" ornaments adopted in modern romantic schools.
+
+The twelfth-century French romances form a definite large group, with
+many ranks and divisions, some of which are easily distinguished,
+while all are of great historical interest.
+
+One common quality, hardly to be mistaken, is that which marks them
+all as belonging to a romantic _school_, in almost all the modern
+senses of that term. That is to say, they are not the spontaneous
+product of an uncritical and ingenuous imagination; they are not the
+same sort of thing as the popular stories on which many of them are
+founded; they are the literary work of authors more or less
+sophisticated, on the look-out for new sensations and new literary
+devices. It is useless to go to those French books in order to catch
+the first fresh jet of romantic fancy, the "silly sooth" of the golden
+age. One might as well go to the _Légende des Sičcles_. Most of the
+romance of the medieval schools is already hot and dusty and fatigued.
+It has come through the mills of a thousand active literary men, who
+know their business, and have an eye to their profits. Medieval
+romance, in its most characteristic and most influential form, is
+almost as factitious and professional as modern Gothic architecture.
+The twelfth-century dealers in romantic commonplaces are as fully
+conscious of the market value of their goods as any later poet who has
+borrowed from them their giants and enchanters, their forests and
+their magic castles; and these and similar properties are used in the
+twelfth century with the same kind of literary sharpness, the same
+attention to the demands of the "reading public," as is shown by the
+various poets and novelists who have waited on the successes, and
+tried to copy the methods, of Goethe, Scott, or Victor Hugo. Pure
+Romance, such as is found in the old Northern poems, is very rare in
+the French stories of the twelfth century; the magical touch and the
+sense of mystery, and all the things that are associated with the name
+romance, when that name is applied to the _Ancient Mariner_, or _La
+Belle Dame sans Merci_, or the _Lady of Shalott_, are generally absent
+from the most successful romances of the great medieval romantic age,
+full though they may be of all the forms of chivalrous devotion and
+all the most wonderful romantic machines. Most of them are as
+different from the true irresistible magic of fancy as _Thalaba_ from
+_Kubla Khan_. The name "romantic school" is rightly applicable to them
+and their work, for almost the last thing that is produced in a
+"romantic school" is the infallible and indescribable touch of
+romance. A "romantic school" is a company for the profitable working
+of Broceliande, an organised attempt to "open up" the Enchanted
+Ground; such, at least, is the appearance of a great deal of the
+romantic literature of the early part of the nineteenth century, and
+of its forerunner in the twelfth. There is this difference between the
+two ages, that the medieval romanticists are freer and more original
+than the moderns who made a business out of tales of terror and
+wonder, and tried to fatten their lean kine on the pastures of
+"Gothic" or of Oriental learning.
+
+The romance-writers of the twelfth century, though they did much to
+make romance into a mechanic art, though they reduced the game to a
+system and left the different romantic combinations and conventions
+within the reach of almost any 'prentice hand, were yet in their way
+original explorers. Though few of them got out of their materials the
+kind of effect that appeals to us now most strongly, and though we
+think we can see what they missed in their opportunities, yet they
+were not the followers of any great man of their own time, and they
+chose their own way freely, not as bungling imitators of a greater
+artist. It is a disappointment to find that romance is rarely at its
+finest in the works that technically have the best right in the world
+to be called by that name. Nevertheless, the work that is actually
+found there is interesting in its own way, and historically of an
+importance which does not need to be emphasised.
+
+The true romantic interest is very unequally distributed over the
+works of the Middle Ages, and there is least of it in the authors who
+are most representative of the "age of chivalry." There is a
+disappointment prepared for any one who looks in the greater romantic
+authors of the twelfth century for the music of the _Faery Queene_ or
+_La Belle Dame sans Merci_. There is more of the pure romantic element
+in the poems of Brynhild, in the story of Njal, in the _Song of
+Roland_, than in the famous romances of Chrestien of Troyes or any of
+his imitators, though they have all the wonders of the Isle of Britain
+at their command, though they have the very story of Tristram and the
+very mystery of the Grail to quicken them and call them out. Elegance,
+fluency, sentiment, romantic adventures are common, but for words like
+those of Hervor at the grave of her father, or of the parting between
+Brynhild and Sigurd, or of Helgi and Sigrun, it would be vain to
+search in the romances of Benoit de Sainte More or of Chrestien. Yet
+these are the masters of the art of romance when it was fresh and
+strong, a victorious fashion.
+
+If the search be continued further, the search for that kind of
+imaginative beauty which these authors do not give, it will not be
+unsuccessful. The greater authors of the twelfth century have more
+affinity to the "heroic romance" of the school of the _Grand Cyrus_
+than to the dreams of Spenser or Coleridge. But, while this is the
+case with the most distinguished members of the romantic school, it is
+not so with all the rest. The magic that is wanting to the clear and
+elegant narrative of Benoit and Chrestien will be found elsewhere; it
+will be found in one form in the mystical prose of the _Queste del St.
+Graal_--a very different thing from Chrestien's _Perceval_--it will be
+found, again and again, in the prose of Sir Thomas Malory; it will be
+found in many ballads and ballad burdens, in _William and Margaret_,
+in _Binnorie_, in the _Wife of Usher's Well_, in the _Rime of the
+Count Arnaldos_, in the _Königskinder_; it will be found in the most
+beautiful story of the Middle Ages, _Aucassin and Nicolette_; one of
+the few perfectly beautiful stories in the world, about which there is
+no need, in England at any rate, to say anything in addition to the
+well-known passages in which it has been praised. _Aucassin and
+Nicolette_ cannot be made into a representative medieval romance:
+there is nothing else like it; and the qualities that make it what it
+is are the opposite of the rhetorical self-possession, the correct and
+deliberate narrative of Chrestien and his school. It contains the
+quintessence of romantic imagination, but it is quite unlike the most
+fashionable and successful romances.
+
+There are several stages in the history of the great Romantic School,
+as well as several distinct sources of interest. The value of the
+best works of the school consists in their representation of the
+passion of love. They turn the psychology of the courtly amatory poets
+into narrative. Chaucer's address to the old poets,--"Ye lovers that
+can make of sentiment,"--when he complains that they have left little
+for him to glean in the field of poetry, does not touch the lyrical
+poets only. The narrative poetry of the courteous school is equally
+devoted to the philosophy of love. Narrative poets like Chrestien,
+when they turn to lyric, can change their instrument without changing
+the purport of their verse; lyric or narrative, it has the same
+object, the same duty. So also, two hundred years later, Chaucer
+himself or Froissart may use narrative or lyric forms indifferently,
+and observe the same "courteous" ideal in both.
+
+In the twelfth-century narratives, besides the interest of the
+love-story and all its science, there was the interest of adventure,
+of strange things; and here there is a great diversity among the
+authors, and a perceptible difference between earlier and later usage.
+Courteous sentiment, running through a succession of wonderful
+adventures, is generally enough to make a romance; but there are some
+notable varieties, both in the sentiment and in the incidents. The
+sentiment comes later in the history of literature than the
+adventures; the conventional romantic form of plot may be said to have
+been fixed before the romantic sentiment was brought to its furthest
+refinement. The wonders of romantic story are more easily traced to
+their origin, or at least to some of their earlier forms, than the
+spirit of chivalrous idealism which came in due time to take
+possession of the fabulous stories, and gave new meanings to the lives
+of Tristram and Lancelot.
+
+Variety of incident, remoteness of scene, and all the incredible
+things in the world, had been at the disposal of medieval authors long
+before the French Romantic Schools began to define themselves. The
+wonders of the East, especially, had very early come into literature;
+and the Anglo-Saxon _Epistle of Alexander_ seems to anticipate the
+popular taste for Eastern stories, just as the Anglo-Saxon version of
+_Apollonius of Tyre_ anticipates the later importation of Greek
+romance, and the appropriation of classical rhetoric, in the twelfth
+and thirteenth centuries; as the grace and brightness of the old
+English poems of St. Andrew or St. Helen seem to anticipate the
+peculiar charm of some of the French poems of adventures. In French
+literature before the vogue of romance can be said to have begun, and
+before the epic form had lost its supremacy, the poem of the
+_Pilgrimage of Charlemagne_, one of the oldest extant poems of the
+heroic cycle, is already far gone in subjection to the charm of mere
+unqualified wonder and exaggeration--rioting in the wonders of the
+East, like the Varangians on their holiday, when they were allowed a
+free day to loot in the Emperor's palace.[79] The poem of
+Charlemagne's journey to Constantinople is unrefined enough, but the
+later and more elegant romances deal often in the same kind of matter.
+Mere furniture counts for a good deal in the best romances, and they
+are full of descriptions of riches and splendours. The story of Troy
+is full of details of various sorts of magnificence; the city of Troy
+itself and "Ylion," its master-tower, were built by Priam out of all
+kinds of marble, and covered with sculpture all over. Much further on
+in Benoit's poem (l. 14,553) Hector is brought home wounded to a room
+which is described in 300 lines, with particulars of its remarkable
+decorations, especially its four magical images. The tomb of
+Penthesilea (l. 25,690) is too much for the author:--
+
+ Sepolture ot et monument
+ Tant que se _Plenius_ fust vis
+ Ou _cil qui fist Apocalis_
+ Nel vos sauroient il retraire:
+ Por ço si m'en dei gie bien taire:
+ N'en dirai plus, que n'oseroie;
+ Trop halte chose envaďroie.
+
+[Footnote 79: See the account of the custom in the _Saga of Harald
+Hardrada_, c. 16. "Harald entrusted to Jarizleif all the gold that he
+had sent from Micklegarth, and all sorts of precious things: so much
+wealth all together, as no man of the North Lands had ever seen before
+in one man's hands. Harald had thrice come in for the palace-sweeping
+(_Polotasvarf_) while he was in Micklegarth. It is the law there that
+when the Greek king dies, the Varangians shall have a sweep of the
+palace; they go over all the king's palaces where his treasures are,
+and every man shall have for his own what falls to his hand"
+(_Fornmanna Sögur_, vi. p. 171).]
+
+Pliny and the author of the Apocalypse are here acknowledged as
+masters and authorities in the art of description. In other places of
+the same work there is a very liberal use of natural history such as
+is common in many versions of the history of Alexander. There is, for
+example, a long description of the precious clothes of Briseide
+(Cressida) at her departure, especially of her mantle, which had been
+given to Calchas by an Indian poet in Upper India. It was made by
+nigromancy, of the skin of the beast _Dindialos_, which is hunted in
+the shadowless land by the savage people whose name is _Cenocefali_;
+and the fringes of the mantle were not of the sable, but of a "beast
+of price" that dwells in the water of Paradise:--
+
+ Dedans le flum de Paradis
+ Sont et conversent, ço set l'on
+ Se c'est vrais que nos en lison.
+
+Calchas had a tent which had belonged to Pharaoh:--
+
+ Diomedes tant la conduit
+ Qu'il descendi al paveillon
+ Qui fu al riche Pharaon,
+ Cil qui noa en la mer roge.
+
+In such passages of ornamental description the names of strange people
+and of foreign kings have the same kind of value as the names of
+precious stones, and sometimes they are introduced on their own
+account, apart from the precious work of Arabian or Indian artists. Of
+this sort is the "dreadful sagittary," who is still retained in
+Shakespeare's _Troilus and Cressida_ on the ultimate authority (when
+it comes to be looked into) of Benoit de Sainte More.[80]
+
+[Footnote 80:
+
+ Il ot o lui un saietaire
+ Qui molt fu fels et deputaire:
+ Des le nombril tot contreval
+ Ot cors en forme de cheval:
+ Il n'est riens nule s'il volsist
+ Que d'isnelece n'ateinsist:
+ Cors, chiere, braz, a noz semblanz
+ Avoit, mes n'ert pas avenanz.
+
+ l. 12,207.]
+
+A quotation by M. Gaston Paris (_Hist. litt. de la France_, xxx. p.
+210), from the unpublished romance of _Ider_ (Edeyrn, son of Nudd),
+shows how this fashion of rich description and allusion had been
+overdone, and how it was necessary, in time, to make a protest against
+it. Kings' pavilions were a favourite subject for rhetoric, and the
+poet of _Ider_ explains that he does not approve of this fashion,
+though he has pavilions of his own, and can describe them if he likes,
+as well as any one:--
+
+ Tels diz n'a fors savor de songe,
+ Tant en acreissent les paroles:
+ Mes jo n'ai cure d'iperboles:
+ _Yperbole_ est chose non voire,
+ Qui ne fu et qui n'est a croire,
+ C'en est la difinicion:
+ Mes tant di de cest paveillon
+ Qu'il n'en a nul soz ciel qu'il vaille.
+
+ Many poets give themselves pains to describe gardens and
+ pavilions and other things, and think they are beautifying
+ their work, but this is all dreaming and waste of words; I
+ will have no such hyperbole. (_Hyperbole_ means by
+ definition that which is untrue and incredible.) I will only
+ say of this pavilion that there was not its match under
+ heaven.
+
+The author, by his definition of _hyperbole_[81] in this place,
+secures an ornamental word with which he consoles himself for his
+abstinence in other respects. This piece of science is itself
+characteristic of the rhetorical enterprise of the Romantic School; of
+the way in which Pliny, Isidore, and other encyclopaedic authors were
+turned into decorations. The taste for such things is common in the
+early and the later Middle Ages; all that the romances did was to give
+a certain amount of finish and neatness to the sort of work that was
+left comparatively rude by the earlier pedants. There many be
+discovered in some writers a preference for classical subjects in
+their ornamental digressions, or for the graceful forms of allegory,
+such as in the next century were collected for the Garden of the Rose,
+and still later for the _House of Fame_. Thus Chrestien seems to
+assert his superiority of taste and judgment when, instead of
+Oriental work, he gives Enid an ivory saddle carved with the story of
+Aeneas and Dido (_Erec_, l. 5337); or when, in the same book, Erec's
+coronation mantle, though it is fairy work, bears no embroidered
+designs of Broceliande or Avalon, but four allegorical figures of the
+quadrivial sciences, with a reference by Chrestien to Macrobius as his
+authority in describing them. One function of this Romantic School,
+though not the most important, is to make an immediate literary profit
+out of all accessible books of learning. It was a quick-witted school,
+and knew how to turn quotations and allusions. Much of its art, like
+the art of _Euphues_, is bestowed in making pedantry look attractive.
+
+[Footnote 81: Chaucer, who often yields to the temptations of
+"Hyperbole" in this sense of the word, lays down the law against
+impertinent decorations, in the rhetorical instruction of Pandarus to
+Troilus, about Troilus's letter to Cressida (B. ii. l. 1037):--
+
+ Ne jompre eek no discordaunt thing yfere
+ As thus, to usen termes of phisyk;
+ In loves termes hold of thy matere
+ The forme alwey, and do that it be lyk;
+ For if a peyntour wolde peynte a pyk
+ With asses feet, and hede it as an ape,
+ It cordeth naught; so nere it but a jape.]
+
+The narrative material imported and worked up in the Romantic School
+is, of course, enormously more important than the mere decorations
+taken out of Solinus or Macrobius. It is not, however, with the
+principal masters the most important part of their study. Chrestien,
+for example, often treats his adventures with great levity in
+comparison with the serious psychological passages; the wonder often
+is that he should have used so much of the common stuff of adventures
+in poems where he had a strong commanding interest in the sentiments
+of the personages. There are many irrelevant and unnecessary
+adventures in his _Erec_, _Lancelot_, and _Yvain_, not to speak of his
+unfinished _Perceval_; while in _Cliges_ he shows that he did not rely
+on the commonplaces of adventure, on the regular machinery of romance,
+and that he might, when he chose, commit himself to a novel almost
+wholly made up of psychology and sentiment. Whatever the explanation
+be in this case, it is plain enough both that the adventures are of
+secondary value as compared with the psychology, in the best
+romances, and that their value, though inferior, is still
+considerable, even in some of the best work of the "courtly makers."
+
+The greatest novelty in the twelfth-century narrative materials was
+due to the Welsh; not that the "matter of Britain" was quite
+overwhelming in extent, or out of proportion to the other stores of
+legend and fable. "The matter of Rome the Great" (not to speak again
+of the old epic "matter of France" and its various later romantic
+developments) included all known antiquity, and it was recruited
+continually by new importations from the East. The "matter of Rome,"
+however, the tales of Thebes and Troy and the wars of Alexander, had
+been known more or less for centuries, and they did not produce the
+same effect as the discovery of the Celtic stories. Rather, it may be
+held that the Welsh stories gave a new value to the classical
+authorities, and suggested new imaginative readings. As Chaucer's
+_Troilus_ in our own time has inspired a new rendering of the _Life
+and Death of Jason_, so (it would seem) the same story of Jason got a
+new meaning in the twelfth century when it was read by Benoit de
+Sainte More in the light of Celtic romance. Then it was discovered
+that Jason and Medea were no more, and no less, than the adventurer
+and the wizard's daughter, who might play their parts in a story of
+Wales or Brittany. The quest of the Golden Fleece and the labours of
+Jason are all reduced from the rhetoric of Ovid, from their classical
+dignity, to something like what their original shape may have been
+when the story that now is told in Argyll and Connaught of the _King's
+Son of Ireland_ was told or chanted, ages before Homer, of a king's
+son of the Greeks and an enchantress beyond sea. Something indeed, and
+that of the highest consequence, as will be seen, was kept by Benoit
+from his reading of the _Metamorphoses_; the passion of Medea,
+namely. But the story itself is hardly distinguishable in kind from
+_Libeaux Desconus_. It is not easy to say how far this treatment of
+Jason may be due to the Welsh example of similar stories, and how far
+to the general medieval disrespect for everything in the classics
+except their matter. The Celtic precedents can scarcely have been
+without influence on this very remarkable detection of the "Celtic
+element" in the voyage of the Argonauts, while at the same time Ovid
+ought not to be refused his share in the credit of medieval romantic
+adventure. Virgil, Ovid, and Statius are not to be underrated as
+sources of chivalrous adventure, even in comparison with the
+unquestioned riches of Wales or Ireland.
+
+There is more than one distinct stage in the progress of the Celtic
+influence in France. The culmination of the whole thing is attained
+when Chrestien makes the British story of the capture and rescue of
+Guinevere into the vehicle of his most finished and most courtly
+doctrine of love, as shown in the examples of Lancelot and the Queen.
+Before that there are several earlier kinds of Celtic romance in
+French, and after that comes what for modern readers is more
+attractive than the typical work of Chrestien and his school,--the
+eloquence of the old French prose, with its languor and its
+melancholy, both in the prose _Lancelot_ and in the _Queste del St.
+Graal_ and _Mort Artus_. In Chrestien everything is clear and
+positive; in these prose romances, and even more in Malory's English
+rendering of his "French book," is to be heard the indescribable
+plaintive melody, the sigh of the wind over the enchanted ground, the
+spell of pure Romance. Neither in Chrestien of Troyes, nor yet in the
+earlier authors who dealt more simply than he with their Celtic
+materials, is there anything to compare with this later prose.
+
+In some of the earlier French romantic work, in some of the lays of
+Marie de France, and in the fragments of the poems about Tristram,
+there is a kind of simplicity, partly due to want of skill, but in its
+effect often impressive enough. The plots made use of by the medieval
+artists are some of them among the noblest in the world, but none of
+the poets were strong enough to bring out their value, either in
+translating _Dido_ and _Medea_, or in trying to educate Tristram and
+other British heroes according to the manners of the Court of
+Champagne. There are, however, differences among the misinterpretations
+and the failures. No French romance appears to have felt the full
+power of the story of Tristram and Iseult; no French poet had his mind
+and imagination taken up by the character of Iseult as more than one
+Northern poet was possessed by the tragedy of Brynhild. But there were
+some who, without developing the story as Chaucer did with the story
+of Troilus, at least allowed it to tell itself clearly. The Celtic
+magic, as that is described in Mr. Arnold's _Lectures_, has scarcely
+any place in French romance, either of the earlier period or of the
+fully-developed and successful chivalrous order, until the time of the
+prose books. The French poets, both the simpler sort and the more
+elegant, appear to have had a gift for ignoring that power of
+vagueness and mystery which is appreciated by some of the prose
+authors of the thirteenth century. They seem for the most part to have
+been pleased with the incidents of the Celtic stories, without
+appreciating any charm of style that they may have possessed. They
+treated them, in fact, as they treated Virgil and Ovid; and there is
+about as much of the "Celtic spirit" in the French versions of
+_Tristram_, as there is of the genius of Virgil in the _Roman
+d'Eneas_. In each case there is something recognisable of the original
+source, but it has been translated by minds imperfectly responsive. In
+dealing with Celtic, as with Greek, Latin, or Oriental stories, the
+French romancers were at first generally content if they could get the
+matter in the right order and present it in simple language, like
+tunes played with one finger. One great advantage of this procedure is
+that the stories are intelligible; the sequence of events is clear,
+and where the original conception has any strength or beauty it is not
+distorted, though the colours may be faint. This earlier and more
+temperate method was abandoned in the later stages of the Romantic
+School, when it often happened that a simple story was taken from the
+"matter of Britain" and overlaid with the chivalrous conventional
+ornament, losing its simplicity without being developed in respect of
+its characters or its sentiment. As an example of the one kind may be
+chosen the _Lay of Guingamor_, one of the lays of Marie de France;[82]
+as an example of the other, the Dutch romance of Gawain (_Walewein_),
+which is taken from the French and exhibits the results of a common
+process of adulteration. Or, again, the story of _Guinglain_, as told
+by Renaud de Beaujeu with an irrelevant "courtly" digression, may be
+compared with the simpler and more natural versions in English
+(_Libeaux Desconus_) and Italian (_Carduino_), as has been done by M.
+Gaston Paris; or the _Conte du Graal_ of Chrestien with the English
+_Sir Perceval of Galles_.
+
+[Footnote 82: Not included in the editions of her works (Roquefort,
+Warnke); edited by M. Gaston Paris in the eighth volume of _Romania_
+along with the lays of _Doon_, _Tidorel_, and _Tiolet_.]
+
+_Guingamor_ is one of the best of the simpler kind of romances. The
+theme is that of an old story, a story which in one form and another
+is extant in native Celtic versions with centuries between them. In
+essentials it is the story of Ossian in the land of youth; in its
+chief motive, the fairy-bride, it is akin to the old Irish story of
+Connla. It is different from both in its definite historical manner of
+treating the subject. The story is allowed to count for the full value
+of all its incidents, with scarcely a touch to heighten the importance
+of any of them. It is the argument of a story, and little more. Even
+an argument, however, may present some of the vital qualities of a
+fairy story, as well as of a tragic plot, and the conclusion,
+especially, of _Guingamor_ is very fine in its own way, through its
+perfect clearness.
+
+There was a king in Britain, and Guingamor was his nephew. The queen
+fell in love with him, and was driven to take revenge for his
+rejection of her; but being less cruel than other queens of similar
+fortune, she planned nothing worse than to send him into the _lande
+aventureuse_, a mysterious forest on the other side of the river, to
+hunt the white boar. This white boar of the adventurous ground had
+already taken off ten knights, who had gone out to hunt it and had
+never returned. Guingamor followed the boar with the king's hound. In
+his wanderings he came on a great palace, with a wall of green marble
+and a silver shining tower, and open gates, and no one within, to
+which he was brought back later by a maiden whom he met in the forest.
+The story of their meeting was evidently, in the original, a story
+like that of Weland and the swan-maidens, and those of other swan or
+seal maidens, who are caught by their lovers as Weland caught his
+bride. But the simplicity of the French story here is in excess of
+what is required even by the illiterate popular versions of similar
+incidents.
+
+Guingamor, after two days in the rich palace (where he met the ten
+knights of the king's court, who had disappeared before), on the third
+day wished to go back to bring the head of the white boar to the king.
+His bride told him that he had been there for three hundred years, and
+that his uncle was dead, with all his retinue, and his cities fallen
+and destroyed.
+
+But she allowed him to go, and gave him the boar's head and the king's
+hound; and told him after he had crossed the river into his own
+country to eat and drink nothing.
+
+He was ferried across the river, and there he met a charcoal-burner
+and asked for news of the king. The king had been dead for three
+hundred years, he was told; and the king's nephew had gone hunting in
+the forest and had never been seen again. Guingamor told him his
+story, and showed him the boar's head, and turned to go back.
+
+Now it was after nones and turning late. He saw a wild apple-tree and
+took three apples from it; but as he tasted them he grew old and
+feeble and fell from his horse.
+
+The charcoal-burner had followed him and was going to help him, when
+he saw two damsels richly dressed, who came to Guingamor and
+reproached him for his forgetfulness. They put him gently on a horse
+and brought him to the river, and ferried him over, along with his
+hound. The charcoal-burner went back to his own house at nightfall.
+The boar's head he took to the king of Britain that then was, and told
+the story of Guingamor, and the king bade turn it into a lay.
+
+The simplicity of all this is no small excellence in a story. If
+there is anything in this story that can affect the imagination, it is
+there unimpaired by anything foreign or cumbrous. It is unsupported
+and undeveloped by any strong poetic art, but it is sound and clear.
+
+In the Dutch romance of _Walewein_, and doubtless in its French
+original (to show what is gained by the moderation and restriction of
+the earlier school), another story of fairy adventures has been
+dressed up to look like chivalry. The story of Walewein is one that
+appears in collections of popular tales; it is that of Mac Iain
+Direach in Campbell's _West Highland Tales_ (No. xlvi.), as well as of
+Grimm's _Golden Bird_. The romance observes the general plot of the
+popular story; indeed, it is singular among the romances in its close
+adherence to the order of events as given in the traditional oral
+forms. Though it contains 11,200 lines, it begins at the beginning and
+goes on to the end without losing what may be considered the original
+design. But while the general economy is thus retained, there are
+large digressions, and there is an enormous change in the character of
+the hero. While Guingamor in the French poem has little, if anything,
+to distinguish him from the adventurer of popular fairy stories, the
+hero in this Dutch romance is Gawain,--Gawain the Courteous, in
+splendid armour, playing the part of Mac Iain Direach. The discrepancy
+is very great, and there can be little doubt that the story as told in
+Gaelic fifty years ago by Angus Campbell, quarryman, is, in respect of
+the hero's condition and manners, more original than the medieval
+romance. Both versions are simple enough in their plot, and their plot
+is one and the same: the story of a quest for something wonderful,
+leading to another quest and then another, till the several problems
+are solved and the adventurer returns successful. In each story (as
+in Grimm's version also) the Fox appears as a helper.
+
+Mac Iain Direach is sent to look for the Blue Falcon; the giant who
+owns the Falcon sends him to the big Women of the Isle of Jura to ask
+for their white glaive of light. The Women of Jura ask for the bay
+filly of the king of Erin; the king of Erin sends him to woo for him
+the king's daughter of France. Mac Iain Direach wins all for himself,
+with the help of the Fox.
+
+Gawain has to carry out similar tasks: to find and bring back to King
+Arthur a magical flying Chessboard that appeared one day through the
+window and went out again; to bring to King Wonder, the owner of the
+Chessboard, "the sword of the strange rings"; to win for the owner of
+the sword the Princess of the Garden of India.
+
+Some things in the story, apart from the hero, are different from the
+popular versions. In _Walewein_ there appears quite plainly what is
+lost in the Gaelic and the German stories, the character of the
+strange land in which the quests are carried out. Gawain has to pass
+through or into a hill to reach the land of King Wonder; it does not
+belong to the common earth. The three castles to which he comes have
+all of them water about them; the second of them, Ravensten, is an
+island in the sea; the third is beyond the water of Purgatory, and is
+reached by two perilous bridges, the bridge of the sword and the
+bridge under water, like those in Chrestien's _Lancelot_. There is a
+distinction here, plain enough, between the human world, to which
+Arthur and his Court belong, and the other world within the hill, and
+the castles beyond the waters. But if this may be supposed to belong
+to an older form of the story not evident in the popular versions, a
+story of adventures in the land of the Dead, on the other hand the
+romance has no conception of the meaning of these passages, and gets
+no poetical result from the chances here offered to it. It has nothing
+like the vision of Thomas of Erceldoune; the waters about the magic
+island are tame and shallow; the castle beyond the Bridge of Dread is
+loaded with the common, cheap, pedantic "hyperboles," like those of
+the _Pčlerinage_ or of Benoit's _Troy_. Gawain is too heavily
+armoured, also, and even his horse Gringalet has a reputation of his
+own; all inconsistent with the lightness of the fairy tale. Gawain in
+the land of all these dreams is burdened still by the heavy chivalrous
+conventions. The world for him, even after he has gone through the
+mountain, is still very much the old world with the old stale business
+going on; especially tournaments and all their weariness. One natural
+result of all this is that the Fox's part is very much reduced. In the
+Gaelic story, Mac Iain Direach and his friend Gille Mairtean (the Lad
+of March, the Fox) are a pair of equals; they have no character, no
+position in the world, no station and its duties. They are quite
+careless, and they move freely. Gawain is slow, and he has to put in a
+certain amount of the common romantic business. The authors of that
+romantic school, if ever they talked shop, may have asked one another,
+"Where do you put your Felon Red Knight? Where do you put your doing
+away of the Ill Custom? or your tournaments?" and the author of
+_Walewein_ would have had an answer ready. Everything is there all
+right: that is to say, all the things that every one else has, all the
+mechanical business of romance. The Fox is postponed to the third
+adventure, and there, though he has not quite grown out of his
+original likeness to the Gille Mairtean, he is evidently constrained.
+Sir Gawain of the romance, this courteous but rather dull and
+middle-aged gentleman in armour, is not his old light-hearted
+companion.
+
+Still, though this story of _Gawain_ is weighed down by the
+commonplaces of the Romantic School, it shows through all its
+encumbrances what sort of story it was that impressed the French
+imagination at the beginning of the School. It may be permitted to
+believe that the story of _Walewein_ existed once in a simpler and
+clearer form, like that of _Guingamor_.
+
+The curious sophistication of _Guinglain_ by Renaud de Beaujeu has
+been fully described and criticised by M. Gaston Paris in one of his
+essays (_Hist. litt. de la France_, xxx. p. 171). His comparison with
+the English and Italian versions of the story brings out the
+indifference of the French poets to their plot, and their readiness to
+sacrifice the unities of action for the sake of irrelevant sentiment.
+The story is as simple as that of Walewein; an expedition, this time,
+to rescue a lady from enchantment. She is bewitched in the form of a
+serpent, and freed by a kiss (_le fier basier_). There are various
+adventures on the journey; it has some resemblance to that of Gareth
+in the _Morte d'Arthur_, and of the Red Cross Knight in Spenser, which
+is founded upon Malory's _Gareth_.[83] One of the adventures is in the
+house of a beautiful sorceress, who treats Guinglain with small
+consideration. Renaud de Beaujeu, in order to get literary credit from
+his handling of this romantic episode, brings Guinglain back to this
+enchantress after the real close of the story, in a kind of
+sentimental show-piece or appendix, by which the story is quite
+overweighted and thrown off its balance for the sake of a rhetorical
+demonstration. This of course belongs to the later period of romance,
+when the simpler methods had been discredited; but the simpler form,
+much nearer the fashion of popular stories, is still kept more or less
+by the English and the Italian rhymes of "Sir Lybeaux."
+
+[Footnote 83: Britomart in the House of Busirane has some resemblance
+to the conclusion of _Libius Disconius_.]
+
+The most remarkable examples of the earlier French romantic methods
+are presented by the fragments remaining of the old Anglo-Norman poems
+on Tristram and Yseult, by Béroul and Thomas, especially the
+latter;[84] most remarkable, because in this case there is the
+greatest contradiction between the tragic capabilities of the story
+and the very simple methods of the Norman poets. It is a story that
+might test the tragic strength and eloquence of any poet in any age of
+the world; the poetical genius of Thomas is shown in his abstinence
+from effort. Hardly anything could be simpler. He does very little to
+fill out or to elaborate the story; he does nothing to vitiate his
+style; there is little ornament or emphasis. The story itself is
+there, as if the poet thought it an impertinence to add any harmonies
+of his own. If it were only extant as a whole, it would be one of the
+most notable of poems. Where else is there anything like it, for
+sincerity and for thinness?
+
+[Footnote 84: Fr. Michel: _Tristan._ London, 1835. _Le Roman de
+Tristan_ (Thomas) ed. Bédier; (Béroul) ed. Muret, _Anc. Textes_,
+1902-1905. Cf. Gaston Paris, _Poëmes et Légendes_.]
+
+This poet of _Tristram_ does not represent the prevalent fashion of
+his time. The eloquence and the passion of the amorous romances are
+commonly more effusive, and seldom as true. The lost _Tristram_ of
+Chrestien would probably have made a contrast with the Anglo-Norman
+poem in this respect. Chrestien of Troyes is at the head of the French
+Romantic School, and his interest is in the science of love; not in
+ancient rude and passionate stories, such as the story of
+Tristram--for it is rude and ancient, even in the French of
+Thomas--not in the "Celtic magic," except for decorative and
+incidental purposes, but in psychology and analysis of the emotions,
+and in the appropriate forms of language for such things.
+
+It is impossible (as M. Gaston Paris has shown) to separate the spirit
+of French romance from the spirit of the Provençal lyric poetry. The
+romances represent in a narrative form the ideas and the spirit which
+took shape as lyric poetry in the South; the romances are directly
+dependent upon the poetry of the South for their principal motives.
+The courtesy of the Provençal poetry, with its idealism and its
+pedantry, its psychological formalism, its rhetoric of antithesis and
+conceits, is to be found again in the narrative poetry of France in
+the twelfth century, just as, in the thirteenth, all the floods of
+lyrical idealism are collected in the didactic reservoir of the
+_Romaunt of the Rose_. The dominant interest in the French romances is
+the same as in the Provençal lyric poetry and in the _Romaunt of the
+Rose_; namely, the idealist or courteous science of love. The origins
+of this mode of thought are difficult to trace fully. The inquiry
+belongs more immediately to the history of Provence than of France,
+for the romancers are the pupils of the Provençal school; not
+independent practitioners of the same craft, but directly indebted to
+Provence for some of their main ideas and a good deal of their
+rhetoric. In Provence itself the origins are partly to be found in the
+natural (_i.e._ inexplicable) development of popular love-poetry, and
+in the corresponding progress of society and its sentiments; while
+among the definite influences that can be proved and explained, one of
+the strongest is that of Latin poetry, particularly of the _Art of
+Love_. About this there can be no doubt, however great may seem to be
+the interval between the ideas of Ovid and those of the Provençal
+lyrists, not to speak of their greater scholars in Italy, Dante and
+Petrarch. The pedantry of Ovid was taken seriously, for one thing, in
+an age when everything systematic was valuable just because it was a
+system; when every doctrine was profitable. For another thing, they
+found in Ovid the form, at least, of devotion, and again the _Art of
+Love_ was not their only book. There were other writings of Ovid and
+works of other poets from whom the Middle Ages learned their lesson of
+chivalrous service; not for the most part, it must be confessed, from
+the example of "Paynim Knights," but far more from the classical
+"Legend of Good Women," from the passion of Dido and the other
+heroines. It is true that there were some names of ancient heroes that
+were held in honour; the name of Paris is almost inseparable from the
+name of Tristram, wherever a medieval poet has occasion to praise the
+true lovers of old time, and Dante followed the common form when he
+brought the names together in his fifth canto.
+
+But what made by far the strongest impression on the Middle Ages was
+not the example of Paris or of Leander, nor yet the passion of
+Catullus and Propertius, who were then unknown, but the poetry of the
+loyalty of the heroines, the fourth book of the _Aeneid_, the
+_Heroides_ of Ovid, and certain parts of the _Metamorphoses_. If
+anything literary can be said to have taken effect upon the temper of
+the Middle Ages, so as to produce the manners and sentiments of
+chivalry, this is the literature to which the largest share of
+influence must be ascribed. The ladies of Romance all owe allegiance,
+and some of them are ready to pay it, to the queens of the Latin
+poets.[85] Virgil's Dido and Ovid's Medea taught the eloquence of
+love to the French poets, and the first chivalrous lovers are those
+who have learned to think poorly of the recreant knights of antiquity.
+
+[Footnote 85: A fine passage is quoted from the romance of _Ider_ in
+the essay cited above, where Guenloďe the queen finds Ider near death
+and thinks of killing herself, like Phyllis and other ladies of the
+old time, who will welcome her. It is the "Saints' Legend of Cupid,"
+many generations before Chaucer, in the form of an invocation to Love,
+the tyrant:--
+
+ Bel semblant ço quit me feront
+ Les cheitives qui a toi sont
+ Qui s'ocistrent par druerie
+ D'amor; mout voil lor compainie:
+ D'amor me recomfortera
+ La lasse Deďanira,
+ Qui s'encroast, et Canacé,
+ Eco, Scilla, Fillis, Pronné,
+ Ero, Biblis, Dido, Mirra,
+ Tisbé, la bele Hypermnestra,
+ Et des autres mil et cinc cenz.
+ Amor! por quoi ne te repenz
+ De ces simples lasses destruire?
+ Trop cruelment te voi deduire:
+ Pechié feiz que n'en as pitié;
+ Nuls deus fors toi ne fait pechié!
+ De ço est Tisbé al dessus,
+ Que por lié s'ocist Piramus;
+ Amors, de ço te puet loer
+ Car a ta cort siet o son per;
+ Ero i est o Leander:
+ Si jo i fusse avec Ider,
+ Aise fusse, ço m'est avis,
+ Com alme qu'est en paraďs.]
+
+The French romantic authors were scholars in the poetry of the
+Provençal School, but they also knew a good deal independently of
+their Provençal masters, and did not need to be told everything. They
+read the ancient authors for themselves, and drew their own
+conclusions from them. They were influenced by the special Provençal
+rendering of the common ideas of chivalry and courtesy; they were also
+affected immediately by the authors who influenced the Provençal
+School.
+
+Few things are more instructive in this part of literature than the
+story of Medea in the _Roman de Troie_ of Benoit de Sainte More. It
+might even claim to be the representative French romance, for it
+contains in an admirable form the two chief elements common to all the
+dominant school--adventure (here reduced from Ovid to the scale of a
+common fairy story, as has been seen already) and sentimental
+eloquence, which in this particular story is very near its original
+fountain-head.
+
+It is to be noted that Benoit is not in the least troubled by the
+Latin rhetoric when he has to get at the story. Nothing Latin, except
+the names, and nothing rhetorical remains to show that the story came
+from Ovid, and not from Blethericus or some other of his
+fellow-romancers in Wales,[86] so long, that is, as the story is
+merely concerned with the Golden Fleece, the Dragon, the Bulls, and
+all the tasks imposed on Jason. But one essential thing is retained by
+Benoit out of the Latin which is his authority, and that is the way in
+which the love of Medea for Jason is dwelt upon and described.
+
+[Footnote 86: Blethericus, or Bréri, is the Welsh authority cited by
+Thomas in his _Tristan_. Cf. Gaston Paris, _Romania_, viii. p. 427.]
+
+This is for medieval poetry one of the chief sources of the psychology
+in which it took delight,--an original and authoritative
+representation of the beginning and growth of the passion of love, not
+yet spoilt by the pedantry which later displayed itself unrestrained
+in the following generations of amatory poets, and which took its
+finest form in the poem of Guillaume de Lorris; but yet at the same
+time giving a starting-point and some encouragement to the later
+pedants, by its study of the different degrees of the passion, and by
+the success with which they are explained and made interesting. This
+is one of the masterpieces and one of the standards of composition in
+early French romance; and it gives one of the most singular proofs of
+the dependence of modern on ancient literature, in certain respects.
+It would not be easy to prove any real connexion between Homer and the
+Sagas, in order to explain the resemblances of temper, and even of
+incident, between them; but in the case of the medieval romances there
+is this direct and real dependence. The Medea of Apollonius Rhodius is
+at the beginning of medieval poetry, in one line of descent (through
+Virgil's Dido as well as Ovid's Medea); and it would be hard to
+overestimate the accumulated debt of all the modern poets whose
+rhetoric of passion, whether they knew it or not, is derived somehow
+from the earlier medieval masters of Dante or Chaucer, Boccaccio or
+Spenser.
+
+The "medieval" character of the work of Chrestien and his
+contemporaries is plain enough. But "medieval" and other terms of the
+same sort are too apt to impose themselves on the mind as complete
+descriptive formulas, and in this case the term "medieval" ought not
+to obscure the fact that it is modern literature, in one of its chief
+branches, which has its beginning in the twelfth century. No later
+change in the forms of fiction is more important than the
+twelfth-century revolution, from which all the later forms and
+constitutions of romance and novel are in some degree or other
+derived. It was this revolution, of which Chrestien was one of the
+first to take full advantage, that finally put an end to the old local
+and provincial restrictions upon narrative. The older schools of epic
+are bound to their own nation or tribe, and to the family traditions.
+These restrictions are no hindrance to the poetry of Homer, nor to the
+plots and conversations of the Sagas. Within these local restrictions
+the highest form of narrative art is possible. Nevertheless the period
+of these restrictions must come to an end; the heroic age cannot last
+for ever. The merit of the twelfth-century authors, Benoit, Chrestien,
+and their followers, is that they faced the new problems and solved
+them. In their productions it may be seen how the Western world was
+moving away from the separate national traditions, and beginning the
+course of modern civilisation with a large stock of ideas, subjects,
+and forms of expression common to all the nations. The new forms of
+story might be defective in many ways, thin or formal or extravagant
+in comparison with some of the older modes; but there was no help for
+it, there was no progress to be made in any other way.
+
+The first condition of modern progress in novel-writing, as in other
+more serious branches of learning, was that the author should be free
+to look about him, to reflect and choose, to pick up his ideas and his
+matter anyhow. He was turned out of the old limited region of epic
+tradition. The nations had several centuries to themselves, in the
+Dark Ages, in which they were at liberty to compose Homeric poems ("if
+they had a mind"), but by the twelfth century that time was over. The
+romancers of the twelfth century were in the same position as modern
+authors in regard to their choice of subjects. Their subjects were not
+prescribed to them by epic tradition. They were more or less
+reflective and self-conscious literary men, citizens of the universal
+world, ready to make the most of their education. They are the
+sophists of medieval literature; emancipated, enlightened and
+intelligent persons, with an apparatus of rhetoric, a set of abstract
+ideas, a repertory of abstract sentiments, which they could apply to
+any available subject. In this sophistical period, when the serious
+interest of national epic was lost, and when stories, collected from
+all the ends of the earth, were made the receptacles of a common,
+abstract, sentimental pathos, it was of some importance that the
+rhetoric should be well managed, and that the sentiment should be
+refined. The great achievement of the French poets, on account of
+which they are to be remembered as founders and benefactors, is that
+they went to good masters for instruction. Solid dramatic
+interpretation of character was beyond them, and they were not able to
+make much of the openings for dramatic contrast in the stories on
+which they worked. But they were caught and held by the language of
+passion, the language of Dido and Medea; language not dramatic so much
+as lyrical or musical, the expression of universal passion, such as
+might be repeated without much change in a thousand stories. In this
+they were happily guided. The greater drama, the stronger characters,
+appeared in due time; but the dramas and the novels of Europe would
+not have been what they are, without the medieval elaboration of the
+simple motives, and the practice of the early romantic schools in
+executing variations on Love and Jealousy. It may be remarked that
+there were sources more remote and even more august, above and beyond
+the Latin poets from whom the medieval authors copied their phrasing;
+in so far as the Latin poets were affected by Athenian tragedy,
+directly or indirectly, in their great declamatory passages, which in
+turn affected the Middle Ages.
+
+The history of this school has no end, for it merges in the history of
+the romantic schools that are still flourishing, and will be continued
+by their successors. One of the principal lines of progress may be
+indicated, to conclude this discourse on Epic Poetry.
+
+The twelfth-century romances are in most things the antithesis to
+Homer, in narrative. They are fanciful, conceited, thin in their
+drama, affected in their sentiments. They are like the "heroic
+romances" of the seventeenth century, their descendants, as compared
+with the strong imagination of Cervantes or Shakespeare, who are the
+representatives, if not of the Homeric line, at any rate of the
+Homeric principles, in their intolerance of the formally pathetic or
+heroic, and who have all the great modern novelists on their side.
+
+But the early romantic schools, though they are generally formal and
+sentimental, and not dramatic, have here and there the possibilities
+of a stronger drama and a truer imagination, and seem at times almost
+to have worked themselves free from their pedantry.
+
+There is sentiment and sentiment: and while the pathos of medieval
+romance, like some of the effusion of medieval lyric, is often merely
+formal repetition of phrases, it is sometimes more natural, and
+sometimes the mechanical fancy seems to quicken into true poetical
+vision, or at least to make room for a sane appreciation of real life
+and its incidents. Chrestien of Troyes shows his genius most
+unmistakably in his occasional surprising intervals of true
+description and natural feeling, in the middle of his rhetoric; while
+even his sustained rhetorical dissertations, like those of the _Roman
+de la Rose_ in the next century, are not absolutely untrue, or
+uncontrolled by observation of actual manners. Often the rhetorical
+apparatus interferes in the most annoying way with the clear vision.
+In the _Chevalier au Lion_, for example, there is a pretty sketch of a
+family party--a girl reading a romance to her father in a garden, and
+her mother coming up and listening to the story--from which there is a
+sudden and annoying change to the common impertinences of the amatory
+professional novelist. This is the passage, with the two kinds of
+literature in abrupt opposition:--
+
+ Messire Yvain goes into the garden, and his people follow;
+ and he sees a goodly gentleman reclining on a cloth of silk
+ and leaning on his elbow; and a maiden was sitting before
+ him reading out of a romance, I know not whose the story.
+ And to listen to the romance a lady had drawn near; that was
+ her mother, and he was her father, and well might they be
+ glad to look on her and listen to her, for they had no other
+ child. She was not yet sixteen years old, and she was so
+ fair and gentle that the God of Love if he had seen her
+ would have given himself to be her slave, and never would
+ have bestowed the love of her on any other than himself. For
+ her sake, to serve her, he would have made himself man,
+ would have put off his deity, and would have stricken
+ himself with the dart whose wound is never healed, except a
+ disloyal physician tend it. It is not right that any should
+ recover from that wound, unless there be disloyalty in it;
+ and whoever is otherwise healed, he never loved with
+ loyalty. _Of this wound I could talk to you without end_, if
+ it pleased you to listen; but I know that some would say
+ that all my talk was idleness, for the world is fallen away
+ from true love, and men know not any more how to love as
+ they ought, for the very talk of love is a weariness to
+ them! (ll. 5360-5396).
+
+This short passage is representative of Chrestien's work, and indeed
+of the most successful and influential work of the twelfth-century
+schools. It is not, like some affected kinds of romance, entirely cut
+off from reality. But the glimpses of the real world are occasional
+and short; there is a flash of pure daylight, a breath of fresh air,
+and then the heavy-laden, enchanted mists of rhetoric and obligatory
+sentiment come rolling down and shut out the view.
+
+It is possible to trace out in some detail a line of progress in
+medieval romance, in which there is a victory in the end for the more
+ingenuous kind of sentiment; in which the rhetorical romantic forms
+are altered and strengthened to bear the weight of true imagination.
+
+This line of progress is nothing less than the earlier life of all the
+great modern forms of novel; a part of European history which deserves
+some study from those who have leisure for it.
+
+The case may be looked at in this way. The romantic schools, following
+on the earlier heroic literature, generally substituted a more
+shallow, formal, limited set of characters for the larger and freer
+portraits of the heroic age, making up for this defect in the
+personages by extravagance in other respects--in the incidents, the
+phrasing, the sentimental pathos, the rhetorical conceits. The great
+advantage of the new school over the old was that it was adapted to
+modern cosmopolitan civilisation; it left the artist free to choose
+his subject anywhere, and to deal with it according to the laws of
+good society, without local or national restrictions. But the earlier
+work of this modern enlightenment in the Middle Ages was generally
+very formal, very meagre in imagination. The progress of literature
+was to fill out the romantic forms, and to gain for the new
+cosmopolitan schemes of fiction the same sort of substantial contents,
+the same command of human nature and its variety, as belong (with
+local or national restrictions) to some at any rate of the earlier
+epic authors. This being so, one of the interests of the study of
+medieval romance must be the discovery of those places in which it
+departs from its own dominant conventions, and seems to aim at
+something different from its own nature: at the recovery of the fuller
+life of epic for the benefit of romance. Epic fulness of life within
+the limits of romantic form--that might be said to be the ideal which
+is _not_ attained in the Middle Ages, but towards which many medieval
+writers seem to be making their way.
+
+Chrestien's story of _Geraint and Enid_ (Geraint has to take the name
+of _Erec_ in the French) is one of his earlier works, but cannot be
+called immature in comparison with what he wrote afterwards. In
+Chrestien's _Enid_ there is not a little superfluity of the common
+sort of adventure. The story of Enid in the _Idylls of the King_
+(founded upon the Welsh _Geraint_, as given in Lady Charlotte Guest's
+_Mabinogion_) has been brought within compass, and a number of quite
+unnecessary adventures have been cut out. Yet the story here is the
+same as Chrestien's, and the drama of the story is not the pure
+invention of the English poet. Chrestien has all the principal
+motives, and the working out of the problem is the same. In one place,
+indeed, where the Welsh romance, the immediate source of Tennyson's
+_Enid_, has shortened the scene of reconciliation between the lovers,
+the Idyll has restored something like the proportions of the original
+French. Chrestien makes Erec speak to Enid and renounce all his
+ill-will, after the scene in which "the brute Earl" is killed; the
+Welsh story, with no less effect, allows the reconciliation to be
+taken for granted when Geraint, at this point in the history, with no
+speech of his reported, lifts Enid on his own horse. The Idyll goes
+back (apparently without any direct knowledge of Chrestien's version)
+to the method of Chrestien.
+
+The story of Enid in Chrestien is very unlike the other stories of
+distressed and submissive wives; it has none of the ineradicable
+falsity of the story of Griselda. How much is due to Chrestien for
+this can hardly be reckoned, in our ignorance of the materials he
+used. But taking into account the other passages, like that of the
+girl reading in the garden, where Chrestien shows a distinct original
+appreciation of certain aspects of life, it cannot be far wrong to
+consider Chrestien's picture of Enid as mainly his own; and, in any
+case, this picture is one of the finest in medieval romance. There is
+no comparison between Chrestien of Troyes and Homer, but it is not
+impious to speak of Enid along with Nausicaa, and there are few other
+ladies of romance who may claim as much as this. The adventure of the
+Sparrowhawk, one of the finest pieces of pure romance in the poetry of
+this century, is also one of the finest in the old French, and in many
+ways very unlike the commonplaces of chivalry, in the simplicity of
+the household where Enid waits on her father's guest and takes his
+horse to the stable, in the sincerity and clearness with which
+Chrestien indicates the gentle breeding and dignity of her father and
+mother, and the pervading spirit of grace and loyalty in the whole
+scene.[87]
+
+[Footnote 87: The Welsh version has the advantage here in noting more
+fully than Chrestien the beauty of age in Enid's mother: "And he
+thought that there could be no woman fairer than she must have been in
+the prime of her youth." Chrestien says merely (at the end of his
+story, l. 6621):--
+
+ Bele est Enide et bele doit
+ Estre par reison et par droit,
+ Que bele dame est mout sa mere
+ Bel chevalier a an son pere.]
+
+In the story of Enid, Chrestien has a subject which recommends itself
+to modern readers. The misunderstanding between Enid and her husband,
+and the reconciliation, are not peculiarly medieval, though the
+adventures through which their history is worked out are of the
+ordinary romantic commonplace.
+
+Indeed the relation of husband and wife in this story is rather
+exceptionally divergent from the current romantic mode, and from the
+conventional law that true love between husband and wife was
+impossible. Afterwards, in his poem of _Lancelot_ (_le Chevalier de la
+Charrette_), Chrestien took up and worked out this conventional and
+pedantic theory, and made the love of Lancelot and the Queen into the
+standard for all courtly lovers. In his _Enid_, however, there is
+nothing of this. At the same time, the courtly and chivalrous mode
+gets the better of the central drama in his _Enid_, in so far as he
+allows himself to be distracted unduly from the pair of lovers by
+various "hyperboles" of the Romantic School; there are a number of
+unnecessary jousts and encounters, and a mysterious exploit of Erec in
+a magic garden, which is quite out of connexion with the rest of the
+story. The final impression is that Chrestien wanted strength of mind
+or inclination to concentrate himself on the drama of the two lovers.
+The story is taken too lightly.
+
+In _Cliges_, his next work, the dramatic situation is much less
+valuable than in _Enid_, but the workmanship is far more careful and
+exact, and the result is a story which may claim to be among the
+earliest of modern novels, if the Greek romances, to which it has a
+close relation, are not taken into account. The story has very little
+"machinery"; there are none of the marvels of the Faerie in it. There
+is a Thessalian witch (the heroine's nurse), who keeps well within the
+limits of possible witchcraft, and there is the incident of the
+sleeping-draught (familiar in the ballad of the _Gay Goshawk_), and
+that is all. The rest is a simple love-story (or rather a double
+love-story, for there is the history of the hero's father and mother,
+before his own begins), and the personages are merely true lovers,
+undistinguished by any such qualities as the sulkiness of Erec or the
+discretion of Enid. It is all pure sensibility, and as it happens the
+sensibility is in good keeping--not overdriven into the pedantry of
+the more quixotic troubadours and minnesingers, and not warped by the
+conventions against marriage. It is explained at the end that, though
+Cliges and Fenice are married, they are lovers still:--
+
+ De s'amie a feite sa fame,
+ Mais il l'apele amie et dame,
+ Que por ce ne pert ele mie
+ Que il ne l'aint come s'amie,
+ Et ele lui autresi
+ Con l'an doit feire son ami:
+ Et chascun jor lor amors crut,
+ N'onques cil celi ne mescrut,
+ Ne querela de nule chose.
+
+ _Cliges_, l. 6753.
+
+This poem of Chrestien's is a collection of the finest specimens of
+medieval rhetoric on the eternal theme. There is little incident, and
+sensibility has it all its own way, in monologues by the actors and
+digressions by the author, on the nature of love. It is rather the
+sentiment than the passion that is here expressed in the "language of
+the heart"; but, however that may be, there are both delicacy and
+eloquence in the language. The pensive Fenice, who debates with
+herself for nearly two hundred lines in one place (4410-4574), is the
+ancestress of many later heroines.
+
+ Meis Fenice est sor toz pansive;
+ Ele ne trueve fonz ne rive
+ El panser dont ele est anplie,
+ Tant li abonde et mouteplie.
+
+ _Cliges_, l. 4339.
+
+In the later works of Chrestien, in _Yvain_, _Lancelot_, and
+_Perceval_, there are new developments of romance, more particularly
+in the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. But these three later stories,
+unlike _Cliges_, are full of the British marvels, which no one would
+wish away, and yet they are encumbrances to what we must regard as the
+principal virtue of the poet--his skill of analysis in cases of
+sentiment, and his interest in such cases. _Cliges_, at any rate,
+however far it may come short of the _Chevalier de la Charrette_ and
+the _Conte du Graal_ in variety, is that one of Chrestien's poems, it
+might be said that one of the twelfth-century French romances, which
+best corresponds to the later type of novel. It is the most modern of
+them; and at the same time it does not represent its own age any the
+worse, because it also to some extent anticipates the fashions of
+later literature.
+
+In this kind of romance, which reduces the cost of the "machinery,"
+and does without enchanters, dragons, magic mists, and deadly castles,
+there are many other examples besides _Cliges_.
+
+A hundred years after Chrestien, one of his cleverest pupils wrote the
+Provençal story of _Flamenca_,[88] a work in which the form of the
+novel is completely disengaged from the unnecessary accidents of
+romance, and reaches a kind of positive and modern clearness very much
+at variance in some respects with popular ideas of what is medieval.
+The Romance of the medieval Romantic School attains one of its highest
+and most distinctive points in _Flamenca_, and shows what it had been
+aiming at from the beginning--namely, the expression in an elegant
+manner of the ideas of the _Art of Love_, as understood in the polite
+society of those times. _Flamenca_ is nearly contemporary with the
+_Roman de la Rose_ of Guillaume de Lorris. Its inspiring ideas are the
+same, and though its influence on succeeding authors is
+indiscernible, where that of the _Roman de la Rose_ is widespread and
+enduring, _Flamenca_ would have as good a claim to be considered a
+representative masterpiece of medieval literature, if it were not that
+it appears to be breaking loose from medieval conventions where the
+_Roman de la Rose_ makes all it can out of them. _Flamenca_ is a
+simple narrative of society, with the indispensable three
+characters--the husband, the lady, and the lover. The scene of the
+story is principally at the baths of Bourbon, in the then present day;
+and of the miracles and adventures of the more marvellous and
+adventurous romances there is nothing left but the very pleasant
+enumeration of the names of favourite stories in the account of the
+minstrelsy at Flamenca's wedding. The author knew all that was to be
+known in romance, of Greek, Latin, or British invention--Thebes and
+Troy, Alexander and Julius Caesar, Samson and Judas Maccabeus, Ivain
+and Gawain and Perceval, Paris and Tristram, and all Ovid's _Legend of
+Good Women_--but out of all these studies he has retained only what
+suited his purpose. He does not compete with the Greek or the British
+champions in their adventures among the romantic forests. Chrestien of
+Troyes is his master, but he does not try to copy the magic of the
+Lady of the Fountain, or the Bridge of the Sword, or the Castle of the
+Grail. He follows the doctrine of love expounded in Chrestien's
+_Lancelot_, but his hero is not sent wandering at random, and is not
+made to display his courtly emotions among the ruins and shadows of
+the lost Celtic mythology, like Lancelot in Chrestien's poem. The life
+described in _Flamenca_ is the life of the days in which it was
+composed; and the hero's task is to disguise himself as a clerk, so as
+to get a word with the jealously-guarded lady in church on Sundays,
+while giving her the Psalter to kiss after the Mass. _Flamenca_, is
+really the triumph of Ovid, with the _Art of Love_, over all his
+Gothic competitors out of the fairy tales. The Provençal poet has
+discarded everything but the essential dominant interests, and in so
+doing has gone ahead of his master Chrestien, who (except in _Cliges_)
+allowed himself to be distracted between opposite kinds of story,
+between the school of Ovid and the school of Blethericus; and who,
+even in _Cliges_, was less consistently modern than his Provençal
+follower.
+
+[Footnote 88: Ed. Paul Meyer, 1865, and, again, 1901.]
+
+_Flamenca_ is the perfection and completion of medieval romance in one
+kind and in one direction. It is all sentiment; the ideal courtly
+sentiment of good society and its poets, made lively by the author's
+knowledge of his own time and its manners, and his decision not to
+talk about anything else. It is perhaps significant that he allows his
+heroine the romance of _Flores and Blanchefleur_ for her reading, an
+older story of true lovers, after the simpler pattern of Greek
+romance, which the author of _Flamenca_ apparently feels himself
+entitled to refer to with the condescension of a modern and critical
+author towards some old-fashioned prettiness. He is completely
+self-possessed and ironical with regard to his story. His theme is the
+idle love whose origin is explained by Ovid; his personages are
+nothing to him but the instruments of the symphony which he composes
+and directs: _sopra lor vanitŕ che par persona_, over and through
+their graceful inanity, passes the stream of sentiment, the shifting,
+flickering light which the Provençal author has borrowed from Ovid and
+transferred for his own purposes to his own time. It is perhaps the
+first complete modern appropriation of classical examples in literary
+art; for the poem of _Flamenca_ is classical in more than one sense of
+the term--classical, not only because of its comprehension of the
+spirit of the Latin poet and his code of manners and sentiment, but
+because of its clear proportions and its definite abstract lines of
+composition; because of the self-possession of the author and his
+subordination of details and rejection of irrelevances.
+
+Many things are wanting to _Flamenca_ which it did not suit the author
+to bring in. It was left to other greater writers to venture on other
+and larger schemes with room for more strength and individuality of
+character, and more stress of passion, still keeping the romantic
+framework which had been designed by the masters of the twelfth
+century, and also very much of the sentimental language which the same
+masters had invented and elaborated.
+
+The story of the _Chastelaine de Vergi_[89] (dated by its editor
+between 1282 and 1288) is an example of a different kind from
+_Flamenca_; still abstract in its personages, still sentimental, but
+wholly unlike _Flamenca_ in the tragic stress of its sentiment and in
+the pathos of its incidents. There is no plot in _Flamenca_, or only
+just enough to display the author's resources of eloquence; in the
+_Chastelaine de Vergi_ there is no rhetorical expansion or effusion,
+but instead of that the coherent closely-reasoned argument of a
+romantic tragedy, with nothing in it out of keeping with the
+conditions of "real life." It is a moral example to show the
+disastrous result of breaking the first law of chivalrous love, which
+enjoins loyal secrecy on the lover; the tragedy in this case arises
+from the strong compulsion of honour under which the commandment is
+transgressed.
+
+[Footnote 89: Ed. G. Raynaud, _Romania_, xxi. p. 145.]
+
+There was a knight who was the lover of the Chastelaine de Vergi,
+unknown to all the world. Their love was discovered by the jealous
+machinations of the Duchess of Burgundy, whom the knight had
+neglected. The Duchess made use of her knowledge to insult the
+Chastelaine; the Chastelaine died of a broken heart at the thought
+that her lover had betrayed her; the knight found her dead, and threw
+himself on his sword to make amends for his unwilling disloyalty. Even
+a summary like this may show that the plot has capabilities and
+opportunities in it; and though the scheme of the short story does not
+allow the author to make use of them in the full detailed manner of
+the great novelists, he understands what he is about, and his work is
+a very fine instance of sensitive and clearly-executed medieval
+narrative, which has nothing to learn (in its own kind, and granting
+the conditions assumed by the author) from any later fiction.
+
+The story of the _Lady of Vergi_ was known to Boccaccio, and was
+repeated both by Bandello and by Queen Margaret of Navarre.
+
+It is time to consider how the work of the medieval romantic schools
+was taken up and continued by many of the most notable writers of the
+period which no longer can be called medieval, in which modern
+literature makes a new and definite beginning; especially in the works
+of the two modern poets who have done most to save and adapt the
+inheritance of medieval romance for modern forms of literature--Boccaccio
+and Chaucer.
+
+The development of romance in these authors is not always and in all
+respects a gain. Even the pathetic stories of the _Decameron_ (such as
+the _Pot of Basil_, _Tancred and Gismunda_, _William of Cabestaing_)
+seem to have lost something by the adoption of a different kind of
+grammar, a more learned rhetoric, in comparison with the best of the
+simple French stories, like the _Chastelaine de Vergi_. This is the
+case in a still greater degree where Boccaccio has allowed himself a
+larger scale, as in his version of the old romance of _Flores and
+Blanchefleur_ (_Filocolo_), while his _Teseide_ might be taken as the
+first example in modern history of the pernicious effect of classical
+studies. The _Teseide_ is the story of Palamon and Arcita. The
+original is lost, but it evidently was a French romance, probably not
+a long one; one of the favourite well-defined cases or problems of
+love, easily understood as soon as stated, presenting the rivalry of
+the two noble kinsmen for the love of the lady Emily. It might have
+been made into one of the stories of the _Decameron_, but Boccaccio
+had other designs for it. He wished to write a classical epic in
+twelve books, and not very fortunately chose this simple theme as the
+groundwork of his operations. The _Teseide_ is the first of the solemn
+row of modern epics; "reverend and divine, abiding without motion,
+shall we say that they have being?" Everything is to be found in the
+_Teseide_ that the best classical traditions require in epic--Olympian
+machinery, catalogues of armies, descriptions of works of art to
+compete with the Homeric and Virgilian shields, elaborate battles, and
+epic similes, and funeral games. Chaucer may have been at one time
+tempted by all this magnificence; his final version of the story, in
+the _Knight's Tale_, is a proof among other things of his critical
+tact. He must have recognised that the _Teseide_, with all its
+ambition and its brilliancy of details, was a failure as a story; that
+this particular theme, at any rate, was not well fitted to carry the
+epic weight. These personages of romance were not in training for the
+heavy classical panoply. So he reduced the story of Palamon and Arcita
+to something not very different from what must have been its original
+scale as a romance. His modifications of Boccaccio here are a lesson
+in the art of narrative which can hardly be overvalued by students of
+that mystery.
+
+Chaucer's procedure in regard to his romantic subjects is often very
+difficult to understand. How firm and unwavering his critical
+meditations and calculations were may be seen by a comparison of the
+_Knight's Tale_ with its Italian source. At other times and in other
+stories he appears to have worked on different principles, or without
+much critical study at all. The _Knight's Tale_ is a complete and
+perfect version of a medieval romance, worked out with all the
+resources of Chaucer's literary study and reflexion; tested and
+considered and corrected in every possible way. The story of
+_Constance_ (the _Man of Law's Tale_) is an earlier work in which
+almost everything is lacking that is found in the mere workmanship of
+the _Knight's Tale_; though not, of course, the humanity, the pathos,
+of Chaucer. The story of _Constance_ appears to have been taken by
+Chaucer from one of the least artificial specimens of medieval
+romance, the kind of romance that worked up in a random sort of way
+the careless sequence of incidents in a popular traditional tale. Just
+as the tellers of the stories in Campbell's _Highland Tales_, and
+other authentic collections, make no scruple about proportion where
+their memory happens to fail them or their irrelevant fancy to
+distract them, but go on easily, dropping out a symmetrical adventure
+here and there, and repeating a favourite "machine" if necessary or
+unnecessary; so the story of _Constance_ forgets and repeats itself.
+The voice is the voice of Chaucer, and so are the thoughts, but the
+order or disorder of the story is that of the old wives' tales when
+the old wives are drowsy. All the principal situations occur twice
+over; twice the heroine is persecuted by a wicked mother-in-law, twice
+sent adrift in a rudderless boat, twice rescued from a churl, and so
+on. In this story the poetry of Chaucer appears as something almost
+independent of the structure of the plot; there has been no such
+process of design and reconstruction as in the _Knight's Tale_.
+
+It is almost as strange to find Chaucer in other stories, as in the
+_Franklin's Tale_ and the _Clerk's Tale_, putting up with the most
+abstract medieval conventions of morality; the Point of Honour in the
+_Franklin's Tale_, and the unmitigated virtue of Griselda, are
+hopelessly opposed to anything like dramatic truth, and very far
+inferior as motives to the ethical ideas of many stories of the
+twelfth century. The truth of _Enid_ would have given no opportunity
+for the ironical verses in which Chaucer takes his leave of the Clerk
+of Oxford and his heroine.
+
+In these romances Chaucer leaves some old medieval difficulties
+unresolved and unreconciled, without attempting to recast the
+situation as he found it in his authorities, or to clear away the
+element of unreason in it. He takes the framework as he finds it, and
+embroiders his poetry over it, leaving an obvious discrepancy between
+his poetry and its subject-matter.
+
+In some other stories, as in the _Legend of Good Women_, and the tale
+of Virginia, he is content with pathos, stopping short of vivid drama.
+In the _Knight's Tale_ he seems to have deliberately chosen a
+compromise between the pathetic mood of pure romance and a fuller
+dramatic method; he felt, apparently, that while the contrast between
+the two rivals admitted of drama, the position of the lady Emily in
+the story was such as to prevent a full dramatic rendering of all the
+characters. The plot required that the lady Emily should be left
+without much share of her own in the action.
+
+The short and uncompleted poem of _Anelida_ gains in significance and
+comes into its right place in Chaucer's works, when it is compared
+with such examples of the older school as the _Chastelaine de Vergi_.
+It is Chaucer's essay in that delicate abstract fashion of story which
+formed one of the chief accomplishments of the French Romantic School.
+It is his acknowledgment of his debt to the artists of sensibility,
+the older French authors, "that can make of sentiment," and it proves,
+like all his writings, how quick he was to save all he could from the
+teaching of his forerunners, for the profit of "that fair style that
+has brought him honour." To treat a simple problem, or "case," of
+right and wrong in love, was a favourite task of medieval courtly
+poetry, narrative and lyric. Chaucer in his _Anelida_ takes up this
+old theme again, treating it in a form between narrative and lyric,
+with the pure abstract melody that gives the mood of the actors apart
+from any dramatic individuality. He is one of the Extractors of
+Quintessence, and his _Anelida_ is the formal spirit, impalpable yet
+definite, of the medieval courtly romance.
+
+It is not here, but in a poem the opposite of this in fulness and
+richness of drama, that Chaucer attains a place for himself above all
+other authors as the poet who saw what was needed to transform
+medieval romance out of its limitations into a new kind of narrative.
+Chaucer's _Troilus and Criseyde_ is the poem in which medieval romance
+passes out of itself into the form of the modern novel. What Cervantes
+and what Fielding did was done first by Chaucer; and this was the
+invention of a kind of story in which life might be represented no
+longer in a conventional or abstract manner, or with sentiment and
+pathos instead of drama, but with characters adapting themselves to
+different circumstances, no longer obviously breathed upon by the
+master of the show to convey his own ideas, but moving freely and
+talking like men and women. The romance of the Middle Ages comes to an
+end, in one of the branches of the family tree, by the production of a
+romance that has all the freedom of epic, that comprehends all good
+and evil, and excludes nothing as common or unclean which can be made
+in any way to strengthen the impression of life and variety. Chaucer
+was not tempted by the phantasm of the Epic Poem like Boccaccio, and
+like so many of the great and wise in later generations. The substance
+of Epic, since his time, has been appropriated by certain writers of
+history, as Fielding has explained in his lectures on that science in
+_Tom Jones_. The first in the line of these modern historians is
+Chaucer with his _Troilus and Criseyde_, and the wonder still is as
+great as it was for Sir Philip Sidney:--
+
+ Chaucer undoubtedly did excellently in his _Troylus_ and
+ _Cresseid_; of whom, truly I know not whether to mervaile
+ more, either that he in that mistie time could see so
+ clearely, or that wee in this cleare age walke so
+ stumblingly after him.
+
+His great work grew out of the French Romantic School. The episode of
+Troilus and Briseide in Benoit's _Roman de Troie_ is one of the best
+passages in the earlier French romance; light and unsubstantial like
+all the work of that School, but graceful, and not untrue. It is all
+summed up in the monologue of Briseide at the end of her story (l.
+20,308):--
+
+ Dex donge bien a Troylus!
+ Quant nel puis amer ne il mei
+ A cestui[90] me done et otrei.
+ Molt voldreie aveir cel talent
+ Que n'eüsse remembrement
+ Des ovres faites d'en arriere:
+ Ço me fait mal ŕ grant maničre!
+
+[Footnote 90: _i.e._ Diomede.]
+
+Boccaccio took up this story, from the Latin version of the Tale of
+Troy, the _Historia Trojana_ of Guido. His _Filostrato_ is written on
+a different plan from the _Teseide_; it is one of his best works. He
+did not make it into an epic poem; the _Filostrato_, Boccaccio's
+_Troilus and Cressida_, is a romance, differing from the older French
+romantic form not in the design of the story, but in the new poetical
+diction in which it is composed, and its new poetical ideas. There is
+no false classicism in it, as there is in his _Palamon and Arcita_; it
+is a novel of his own time, a story of the _Decameron_, only written
+at greater length, and in verse. Chaucer, the "great translator," took
+Boccaccio's poem and treated it in his own way, not as he had dealt
+with the _Teseide_. The _Teseide_, because there was some romantic
+improbability in the story, he made into a romance. The story of
+Troilus he saw was strong enough to bear a stronger handling, and
+instead of leaving it a romance, graceful and superficial as it is in
+Boccaccio, he deepened it and filled it with such dramatic imagination
+and such variety of life as had never been attained before his time by
+any romancer; and the result is a piece of work that leaves all
+romantic convention behind. The _Filostrato_ of Boccaccio is a story
+of light love, not much more substantial, except in its new poetical
+language, than the story of _Flamenca_. In Chaucer the passion of
+Troilus is something different from the sentiment of romance; the
+changing mind of Cressida is represented with an understanding of the
+subtlety and the tragic meaning of that life which is "Time's fool."
+Pandarus is the other element. In Boccaccio he is a personage of the
+same order as Troilus and Cressida; they all might have come out of
+the Garden of the _Decameron_, and there is little to choose between
+them. Chaucer sets him up with a character and a philosophy of his
+own, to represent the world outside of romance. The Comic Genius
+claims a share in the tragedy, and the tragedy makes room for him,
+because the tragic personages, "Tragic Comedians" as they are, can
+bear the strain of the contrast. The selection of personages and
+motives is made in another way in the romantic schools, but this poem
+of Chaucer's is not romance. It is the fulfilment of the prophecy of
+Socrates, just before Aristophanes and the tragic poet had to be put
+to bed at the end of the _Symposium_, that the best author of tragedy
+is the best author of comedy also. It is the freedom of the
+imagination, beyond all the limits of partial and conventional forms.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+
+NOTE A (p. 133)
+
+_Rhetoric of the Western and Northern Alliterative Poems_
+
+Any page of the Anglo-Saxon poets, and of the "Elder Edda," will show
+the difference between the "continuous" and the "discrete"--the
+Western and the Northern--modes of the alliterative verse. It may be
+convenient to select some passages here for reference.
+
+(1) As an example of the Western style ("the sense variously drawn out
+from one verse to another"), the speech of the "old warrior" stirring
+up vengeance for King Froda (_Beowulf_, l. 2041 _sq._; see above, p.
+70):--
+
+ ţonne cwiđ ćt beore se đe beah gesyhđ,
+ eald ćscwiga, se đe eall geman
+ garcwealm gumena (him biđ grim sefa)
+ onginneđ geomormod geongum cempan
+ ţurh hređra gehygd higes cunnian,
+ wigbealu weccean, ond ţćt word acwyđ:
+ "Meaht đu, min wine, mece gecnawan,
+ ţone ţin fćder to gefeohte bćr
+ under heregriman, hindeman siđe,
+ dyre iren, ţćr hine Dene slogon,
+ weoldon wćlstowe, syđđan Wiđergyld lćg
+ ćfter hćleţa hryre, hwate Scyldingas?
+ Nu her ţara banena byre nathwylces,
+ frćtwum hremig, on flet gćđ,
+ mordres gylpeđ ond ţone mađţum byređ
+ ţone ţe ţu mid rihte rćdan sceoldest!"
+
+(The "old warrior"--no less a hero than Starkad himself, according to
+Saxo--bears a grudge on account of the slaying of Froda, and cannot
+endure the reconciliation that has been made. He sees the reconciled
+enemies still wearing the spoils of war, arm-rings, and even Froda's
+sword, and addresses Ingeld, Froda's son):--
+
+ Over the ale he speaks, seeing the ring,
+ the old warrior, that remembers all,
+ the spear-wrought slaying of men (his thought is grim),
+ with sorrow at heart begins with the young champion,
+ in study of mind to make trial of his valour,
+ to waken the havoc of war, and thus he speaks:
+ "Knowest thou, my lord? nay, well thou knowest the falchion
+ that thy father bore to the fray,
+ wearing his helmet of war, in that last hour,
+ the blade of price, where the Danes him slew,
+ and kept the field, when Withergyld was brought down
+ after the heroes' fall; yea, the Danish princes slew him!
+ See now, a son of one or other of the men of blood,
+ glorious in apparel, goes through the hall,
+ boasts of the stealthy slaying, and bears the goodly heirloom
+ that thou of right shouldst have and hold!"
+
+(2) The Northern arrangement, with "the sense concluded in the
+couplet," is quite different from the Western style. There is no need
+to quote more than a few lines. The following passage is from the last
+scene of _Helgi and Sigrun_ (_C.P.B._, i. p. 143; see p. 72
+above--"Yet precious are the draughts," etc.):--
+
+ Vel skolom drekka dýrar veigar
+ ţótt misst hafim munar ok landa:
+ skal engi mađr angr-lióđ kveđa,
+ ţótt mer á briósti benjar líti.
+ Nú ero brúđir byrgđar í haugi,
+ lofđa dísir, hjá oss liđnom.
+
+The figure of _Anadiplosis_ (or the "Redouble," as it is called in the
+_Arte of English Poesie_) is characteristic of a certain group of
+Northern poems. See the note on this, with references, in _C.P.B._,
+i. p. 557. The poems in which this device appears are the poems of the
+heroines (Brynhild, Gudrun, Oddrun), the heroic idylls of the North.
+In these poems the repetition of a phrase, as in the Greek pastoral
+poetry and its descendants, has the effect of giving solemnity to the
+speech, and slowness of movement to the line.
+
+So in the _Long Lay of Brynhild_ (_C.P.B._, i. p. 296):--
+
+ svárar sifjar, svarna eiđa,
+ eiđa svarna, unnar trygđir;
+
+and (_ibid._)--
+
+ hann vas fyr utan eiđa svarna,
+ eiđa svarna, unnar trygđir;
+
+and in the _Old Lay of Gudrun_ (_C.P.B._, i. p. 319)--
+
+ Hverr vildi mer hnossir velja
+ hnossir velja, ok hugat mćla.
+
+There are other figures which have the same effect:--
+
+ Gott es at ráđa Rínar malmi,
+ ok unandi auđi styra,
+ ok sitjandi sćlo nióta.
+
+ _C.P.B._, i. p. 296.
+
+But apart from these emphatic forms of phrasing, all the sentences are
+so constructed as to coincide with the divisions of the lines, whereas
+in the Western poetry, Saxon and Anglo-Saxon, the phrases are made to
+cut across the lines, the sentences having their own limits,
+independent of the beginnings and endings of the verses.
+
+
+NOTE B (p. 205)
+
+_The Meeting of Kjartan and King Olaf Tryggvason_ (_Laxdćla Saga_, c.
+40)
+
+Kjartan rode with his father east from Hjardarholt, and they parted in
+Northwaterdale; Kjartan rode on to the ship, and Bolli, his kinsman,
+went along with him. There were ten men of Iceland all together that
+followed Kjartan out of goodwill; and with this company he rides to
+the harbour. Kalf Asgeirsson welcomes them all. Kjartan and Bolli took
+a rich freight with them. So they made themselves ready to sail, and
+when the wind was fair they sailed out and down the Borg firth with a
+gentle breeze and good, and so out to sea. They had a fair voyage, and
+made the north of Norway, and so into Throndheim. There they asked for
+news, and it was told them that the land had changed its masters; Earl
+Hacon was gone, and King Olaf Tryggvason come, and the whole of Norway
+had fallen under his sway. King Olaf was proclaiming a change of law;
+men did not take it all in the same way. Kjartan and his fellows
+brought their ship into Nidaros.
+
+At that time there were in Norway many Icelanders who were men of
+reputation. There at the wharves were lying three ships all belonging
+to men of Iceland: one to Brand the Generous, son of Vermund
+Thorgrimsson; another to Hallfred the Troublesome Poet; the third ship
+was owned by two brothers, Bjarni and Thorhall, sons of Skeggi, east
+in Fleetlithe,--all these men had been bound for Iceland in the
+summer, but the king had arrested the ships because these men would
+not accept the faith that he was proclaiming. Kjartan was welcomed by
+them all, and most of all by Brand, because they had been well
+acquainted earlier. The Icelanders all took counsel together, and this
+was the upshot, that they bound themselves to refuse the king's new
+law. Kjartan and his mates brought in their ship to the quay, and fell
+to work to land their freight.
+
+King Olaf was in the town; he hears of the ship's coming, and that
+there were men in it of no small account. It fell out on a bright day
+in harvest-time that Kjartan's company saw a number of men going to
+swim in the river Nith. Kjartan said they ought to go too, for the
+sport; and so they did. There was one man of the place who was far
+the best swimmer. Kjartan says to Bolli:
+
+"Will you try your swimming against this townsman?"
+
+Bolli answers: "I reckon that is more than my strength."
+
+"I know not what is become of your hardihood," says Kjartan; "but I
+will venture it myself."
+
+"That you may, if you please," says Bolli.
+
+Kjartan dives into the river, and so out to the man that swam better
+than all the rest; him he takes hold of and dives under with him, and
+holds him under for a time, and then lets him go. After that they swam
+for a little, and then the stranger takes Kjartan and goes under with
+him, and holds him under, none too short a time, as it seemed to
+Kjartan. Then they came to the top, but there were no words between
+them. They dived together a third time, and were down longer than
+before. Kjartan thought it hard to tell how the play would end; it
+seemed to him that he had never been in so tight a place in his life.
+However, they come up at last, and strike out for the land.
+
+Then says the stranger: "Who may this man be?"
+
+Kjartan told his name.
+
+The townsman said: "You are a good swimmer; are you as good at other
+sports as at this?"
+
+Kjartan answers, but not very readily: "When I was in Iceland it was
+thought that my skill in other things was much of a piece; but now
+there is not much to be said about it."
+
+The townsman said: "It may make some difference to know with whom you
+have been matched; why do you not ask?"
+
+Kjartan said: "I care nothing for your name."
+
+The townsman says: "For one thing you are a good man of your hands,
+and for another you bear yourself otherwise than humbly; none the less
+shall you know my name and with whom you have been swimming; I am
+Olaf Tryggvason, the king."
+
+Kjartan makes no answer, and turns to go away. He had no cloak, but a
+coat of scarlet cloth. The king was then nearly dressed. He called to
+Kjartan to wait a little; Kjartan turned and came back, rather slowly.
+Then the king took from his shoulders a rich cloak and gave it to
+Kjartan, saying he should not go cloakless back to his men. Kjartan
+thanks the king for his gift, and goes to his men and shows them the
+cloak. They did not take it very well, but thought he had allowed the
+king too much of a hold on him.
+
+Things were quiet for a space; the weather began to harden with frost
+and cold. The heathen men said it was no wonder they had ill weather
+that autumn; it was all the king's newfangledness and the new law that
+had made the gods angry.
+
+The Icelanders were all together that winter in the town; and Kjartan
+took the lead among them. In time the weather softened, and men came
+in numbers to the town at the summons of King Olaf. Many men had taken
+the Christian faith in Throndheim, but those were more in number who
+were against it. One day the king held an assembly in the town, out on
+the point of Eyre, and declared the Faith with many eloquent words.
+The Thronds had a great multitude there, and offered battle to the
+king on the spot. The king said they should know that he had fought
+against greater powers than to think of scuffling with clowns in
+Throndheim. Then the yeomen were cowed, and gave in wholly to the
+king, and many men were christened; then the assembly broke up.
+
+That same evening the king sends men to the Icelanders' inn to observe
+and find out how they talked. When the messengers came there, there
+was a loud sound of voices within.
+
+Kjartan spoke, and said to Bolli: "Kinsman, are you willing to take
+this faith of the king's?"
+
+"I am not," says Bolli, "for it seems to me a feeble, pithless thing."
+
+Says Kjartan: "Seemed the king to you to have no threats for those
+that refused to accept his will?"
+
+Says Bolli: "Truly the king seemed to us to come out clearly and leave
+no shadow on that head, that they should have hard measure dealt
+them."
+
+"No man's underling will I be," says Kjartan, "while I can keep my
+feet and handle a sword; it seems to me a pitiful thing to be taken
+thus like a lamb out of the pen, or a fox out of the trap. I hold it a
+far better choice, if one must die, to do something first that shall
+be long talked of after."
+
+"What will you do?" says Bolli.
+
+"I will not make a secret of it," says Kjartan; "burn the king's
+house, and the king in it."
+
+"I call that no mean thing to do," says Bolli; "but yet it will not
+be, for I reckon that the king has no small grace and good luck along
+with him; and he keeps a strong watch day and night."
+
+Kjartan said that courage might fail the stoutest man; Bolli answered
+that it was still to be tried whose courage would hold out longest.
+Then many broke in and said that this talk was foolishness; and when
+the king's spies had heard so much, they went back to the king and
+told him how the talk had gone.
+
+On the morrow the king summons an assembly; and all the Icelanders
+were bidden to come. When all were met, the king stood up and thanked
+all men for their presence, those who were willing to be his friends
+and had taken the Faith. Then he fell to speech with the Icelanders.
+The king asks if they will be christened. They make little sound of
+agreement to that. The king said that they might make a choice that
+would profit them less.
+
+"Which of you was it that thought it convenient to burn me in my
+house?"
+
+Then says Kjartan: "You think that he will not have the honesty to
+confess it, he that said this. But here you may see him."
+
+"See thee I may," says the king, "and a man of no mean imagination;
+yet it is not in thy destiny to see my head at thy feet. And good
+enough cause might I have to stay thee from offering to burn kings in
+their houses in return for their good advice; but because I know not
+how far thy thought went along with thy words, and because of thy
+manly declaration, thou shalt not lose thy life for this; it may be
+that thou wilt hold the Faith better, as thou speakest against it more
+than others. I can see, too, that it will bring the men of all the
+Iceland ships to accept the Faith the same day that thou art
+christened of thine own free will. It seems to me also like enough
+that thy kinsmen and friends in Iceland will listen to what thou
+sayest when thou art come out thither again. It is not far from my
+thought that thou, Kjartan, mayst have a better Faith when thou
+sailest from Norway than when thou camest hither. Go now all in peace
+and liberty whither you will from this meeting; you shall not be
+penned into Christendom; for it is the word of God that He will not
+have any come to Him save in free will."
+
+There was much approval of this speech of the king's, yet chiefly from
+the Christians; the heathen men left it to Kjartan to answer as he
+would. Then said Kjartan: "We will thank you, Sir, for giving us your
+peace; this more than anything would draw us to accept your Faith,
+that you renounce all grounds of enmity and speak gently altogether,
+though you have our whole fortunes in your hand to-day. And this is in
+my mind, only to accept the Faith in Norway if I may pay some small
+respect to Thor next winter when I come to Iceland."
+
+Then answered the king, smiling: "It is well seen from the bearing of
+Kjartan that he thinks he has better surety in his strength and his
+weapons than there where Thor and Odin are."
+
+After that the assembly broke up.
+
+
+NOTE C (p. 257)
+
+ _Eyjolf Karsson_: an Episode in the History of Bishop
+ Gudmund Arason, A.D. 1222 (from _Arons Saga Hjörleifssonar_,
+ c. 8, printed in _Biskupa Sögur_, i., and in _Sturlunga_,
+ ii. pp. 312-347).
+
+ [Eyjolf Karsson and Aron stood by Bishop Gudmund in his
+ troubles, and followed him out to his refuge in the island
+ of Grimsey, lying off the north coast of Iceland, about 30
+ miles from the mouth of Eyjafirth. There the Bishop was
+ attacked by the Sturlungs, Sighvat (brother of Snorri
+ Sturluson) and his son Sturla. His men were out-numbered;
+ Aron was severely wounded. This chapter describes how Eyjolf
+ managed to get his friend out of danger and how he went back
+ himself and was killed.]
+
+Now the story turns to Eyjolf and Aron. When many of Eyjolf's men were
+down, and some had run to the church, he took his way to the place
+where Aron and Sturla had met, and there he found Aron sitting with
+his weapons, and all about were lying dead men and wounded. It is
+reckoned that nine men must have lost their lives there. Eyjolf asks
+his cousin whether he can move at all. Aron says that he can, and
+stands on his feet; and now they go both together for a while by the
+shore, till they come to a hidden bay; there they saw a boat ready
+floating, with five or six men at the oars, and the bow to sea. This
+was Eyjolf's arrangement, in case of sudden need. Now Eyjolf tells
+Aron that he means the boat for both of them; giving out that he sees
+no hope of doing more for the Bishop at that time.
+
+"But I look for better days to come," says Eyjolf.
+
+"It seems a strange plan to me," says Aron; "for I thought that we
+should never part from Bishop Gudmund in this distress; there is
+something behind this, and I vow that I will not go unless you go
+first on board."
+
+"That I will not, cousin," says Eyjolf; "for it is shoal water here,
+and I will not have any of the oarsmen leave his oar to shove her off;
+and it is far too much for you to go afoot with wounds like yours. You
+will have to go on board."
+
+"Well, put your weapons in the boat," says Aron, "and I will believe
+you."
+
+Aron now goes on board; and Eyjolf did as Aron asked him. Eyjolf waded
+after, pushing the boat, for the shallows went far out. And when he
+saw the right time come, Eyjolf caught up a battle-axe out of the
+stern of the boat, and gave a shove to the boat with all his might.
+
+"Good-bye, Aron," says Eyjolf; "we shall meet again when God pleases."
+
+And since Aron was disabled with wounds, and weary with loss of blood,
+it had to be even so; and this parting was a grief to Aron, for they
+saw each other no more.
+
+Now Eyjolf spoke to the oarsmen and told them to row hard, and not to
+let Aron come back to Grimsey that day, and not for many a day if they
+could help it.
+
+They row away with Aron in their boat; but Eyjolf turns to the shore
+again and to a boat-house with a large ferry-boat in it, that belonged
+to the goodman Gnup. And at the same nick of time he sees the Sturlung
+company come tearing down from the garth, having finished their
+mischief there. Eyjolf takes to the boat-house, with his mind made up
+to defend it as long as his doom would let him. There were double
+doors to the boat-house, and he puts heavy stones against them.
+
+Brand, one of Sighvat's followers, a man of good condition, caught a
+glimpse of a man moving, and said to his companions that he thought he
+had made out Eyjolf Karsson there, and they ought to go after him.
+Sturla was not on the spot; there were nine or ten together. So they
+come to the boat-house. Brand asks who is there, and Eyjolf says it is
+he.
+
+"Then you will please to come out and come before Sturla," says Brand.
+
+"Will you promise me quarter?" says Eyjolf.
+
+"There will be little of that," says Brand.
+
+"Then it is for you to come on," says Eyjolf, "and for me to guard; and
+it seems to me the shares are ill divided."
+
+Eyjolf had a coat of mail, and a great axe, and that was all.
+
+Now they came at him, and he made a good and brave defence; he cut
+their pike-shafts through; there were stout strokes on both sides. And
+in that bout Eyjolf breaks his axe-heft, and catches up an oar, and
+then another, and both break with his blows. And in this bout Eyjolf
+gets a thrust under his arm, and it came home. Some say that he broke
+the shaft from the spear-head, and let it stay in the wound. He sees
+now that his defence is ended. Then he made a dash out, and got
+through them, before they knew. They were not expecting this; still
+they kept their heads, and a man named Mar cut at him and caught his
+ankle, so that his foot hung crippled. With that he rolls down the
+beach, and the sea was at the flood. In such plight as he was in,
+Eyjolf set to and swam; and swimming he came twelve fathoms from shore
+to a shelf of rock, and knelt there; and then he fell full length upon
+the earth, and spread his hands from him, turning to the East as if to
+pray.
+
+Now they launch the boat, and go after him. And when they came to the
+rock, a man drove a spear into him, and then another, but no blood
+flowed from either wound. So they turn to go ashore, and find Sturla
+and tell him the story plainly how it had all fallen out. Sturla held,
+and other men too, that this had been a glorious defence. He showed
+that he was pleased at the news.
+
+
+NOTE D (p. 360)
+
+_Two Catalogues of Romances_
+
+There are many references to books and cycles of romance in medieval
+literature--minstrels' enumerations of their stock-in-trade, and
+humorous allusions like those of Sir Thopas, and otherwise. There are
+two passages, among others, which seem to do their best to cover the
+whole ground, or at least to exemplify all the chief groups. One of
+these is that referred to in the text, from _Flamenca_; the other is
+to be found, much later, in the _Complaint of Scotland_ (1549).
+
+I. FLAMENCA (ll. 609-701)
+
+ Qui volc ausir diverses comtes
+ De reis, de marques e de comtes,
+ Auzir ne poc tan can si volc;
+ Anc null' aurella non lai colc,
+ Quar l'us comtet de Priamus,
+ E l'autre diz de Piramus;
+ L'us contet de la bell'Elena
+ Com Paris l'enquer, pois l'anmena;
+ L'autres comtava d'Ulixes,
+ L'autre d'Ector et d'Achilles;
+ L'autre comtava d'Eneas,
+ E de Dido consi remas
+ Per lui dolenta e mesquina;
+ L'autre comtava de Lavina
+ Con fes lo breu el cairel traire
+ A la gaita de l'auzor caire;
+ L'us contet d'Apollonices
+ De Tideu e d'Etidiocles;
+ L'autre comtava d'Apolloine
+ Comsi retenc Tyr de Sidoine;
+ L'us comtet del rei Alexandri
+ L'autre d'Ero et de Leandri;
+ L'us dis de Catmus quan fugi
+ Et de Tebas con las basti,
+ L'autre contava de Jason
+ E del dragon que non hac son;
+ L'us comte d'Alcide sa forsa,
+ L'autre con tornet en sa forsa
+ Phillis per amor Demophon;
+ L'us dis com neguet en la fon
+ Lo bels Narcis quan s'i miret;
+ L'us dis de Pluto con emblet
+ Sa bella moillier ad Orpheu;
+ L'autre comtet del Philisteu
+ Golias, consi fon aucis
+ Ab treis peiras quel trais David;
+ L'us diz de Samson con dormi,
+ Quan Dalidan liet la cri;
+ L'autre comtet de Machabeu
+ Comen si combatet per Dieu;
+ L'us comtet de Juli Cesar
+ Com passet tot solet la mar,
+ E no i preguet Nostre Senor
+ Que nous cujes agues paor;
+ L'us diz de la Taula Redonda
+ Que no i venc homs que noil responda
+ Le reis segon sa conoissensa,
+ Anc nuil jorn ne i failli valensa;
+ L'autre comtava de Galvain,
+ E del leo que fon compain
+ Del cavallier qu'estors Luneta;
+ L'us diz de la piucella breta
+ Con tenc Lancelot en preiso
+ Cant de s'amor li dis de no;
+ L'autre comtet de Persaval
+ Co venc a la cort a caval;
+ L'us comtet d'Erec e d'Enida,
+ L'autre d'Ugonet de Perida;
+ L'us comtava de Governail
+ Com per Tristan ac grieu trebail,
+ L'autre comtava de Feniza
+ Con transir la fes sa noirissa
+ L'us dis del Bel Desconogut
+ E l'autre del vermeil escut
+ Que l'yras trobet a l'uisset;
+ L'autre comtava de Guiflet;
+ L'us comtet de Calobrenan,
+ L'autre dis con retenc un an
+ Dins sa preison Quec senescal
+ Lo deliez car li dis mal;
+ L'autre comtava de Mordret;
+ L'us retrais lo comte Duret
+ Com fo per los Ventres faiditz
+ E per Rei Pescador grazits;
+ L'us comtet l'astre d'Ermeli,
+ L'autre dis com fan l'Ancessi
+ Per gein lo Veil de la Montaina;
+ L'us retrais con tenc Alamaina
+ Karlesmaines tro la parti,
+ De Clodoveu e de Pipi
+ Comtava l'us tota l'istoria;
+ L'autre dis con cazec de gloria
+ Donz Lucifers per son ergoil;
+ L'us diz del vallet de Nantoil,
+ L'autre d'Oliveir de Verdu.
+ L'us dis lo vers de Marcabru,
+ L'autre comtet con Dedalus
+ Saup ben volar, et d'Icarus
+ Co neguet per sa leujaria.
+ Cascus dis lo mieil que sabia.
+ Per la rumor dels viuladors
+ E per brug d'aitans comtadors
+ Hac gran murmuri per la sala.
+
+The allusions are explained by the editor, M. Paul Meyer. The stories
+are as follows: Priam, Pyramus, Helen, Ulysses, Hector, Achilles,
+Dido, Lavinia (how she sent her letter with an arrow over the
+sentinel's head, _Roman d'Eneas_, l. 8807, _sq._), Polynices, Tydeus,
+and Eteocles; Apollonius of Tyre; Alexander; Hero and Leander; Cadmus
+of Thebes; Jason and the sleepless Dragon; Hercules; Demophoon and
+Phyllis (a hard passage); Narcissus; Pluto and the wife of Orpheus
+("Sir Orfeo"); David and Goliath; Samson and Dalila; Judas Maccabeus;
+Julius Caesar; the Round Table, and how the king had an answer for all
+who sought him; Gawain and Yvain ("of the lion that was companion of
+the knight whom Lunete rescued"[91]); of the British maiden who kept
+Lancelot imprisoned when he refused her love; of Perceval, how he rode
+into hall; Ugonet de Perida (?); Governail, the loyal comrade of
+Tristram; Fenice and the sleeping-draught (Chrestien's _Cliges_, see
+p. 357, above); Guinglain ("Sir Libeaus)"; Chrestien's _Chevalier de
+la Charrette_ ("how the herald found the red shield at the entry," an
+allusion explained by M. Gaston Paris, in _Romania_, xvi. p. 101),
+Guiflet, Calobrenan, Kay punished for his railing accusations;
+Mordred; how the Count Duret was dispossessed by the Vandals and
+welcomed by the Fisher King (?); the luck of Hermelin (?); the Old Man
+of the Mountain and his Assassins; the Wars of Charlemagne; Clovis and
+Pepin of France; the Fall of Lucifer; Gui de Nanteuil; Oliver of
+Verdun; the Flight of Daedalus, and how Icarus was drowned through his
+vanity. The songs of Marcabrun, the troubadour, find a place in the
+list among the stories.
+
+[Footnote 91: In a somewhat similar list of romances, in the Italian
+poem of _L'Intelligenza_, ascribed to Dino Compagni (st. 75), Luneta
+is named Analida; possibly the origin of Chaucer's Anelida, a name
+which has not been clearly traced.]
+
+The author of _Flamenca_ has arranged his library, though there are
+some incongruities; Daedalus belongs properly to the "matter of Rome"
+with which the catalogue begins, and Lucifer interrupts the series of
+_Chansons de geste_. The "matter of Britain," however, is all by
+itself, and is well represented.
+
+II. THE COMPLAYNT OF SCOTLAND, c. vi.
+
+(Ed. J.A.H. Murray, _E.E.T.S._, pp. 62-64)
+
+[This passage belongs to the close of the Middle Ages, when the old
+epic and romantic books were falling into neglect. There is no
+distinction here between literary romance and popular tales; the
+once-fashionable poetical works are reduced to their original
+elements. Arthur and Gawain are no more respected than the Red Etin,
+or the tale of the _Well at the World's End_ (the reading _volfe_ in
+the text has no defender); the Four Sons of Aymon have become what
+they were afterwards for Boileau (_Ep._ xi. 20), or rather for
+Boileau's gardener. But, on the whole, the list represents the common
+medieval taste in fiction. The _Chansons de geste_ have provided the
+_Bridge of the Mantrible_ (from _Oliver and Fierabras_, which may be
+intended in the _Flamenca_ reference to Oliver), and the _Siege of
+Milan_ (see _English Charlemagne Romances_, _E.E.T.S._, part ii.), as
+well as the _Four Sons of Aymon_ and _Sir Bevis_. The Arthurian cycle
+is popular; the romance of _Sir Ywain_ (the Knight of the Lion) is
+here, however, the only one that can be definitely traced in the
+_Flamenca_ list also, though of course there is a general
+correspondence in subject-matter. The classical fables from Ovid are
+still among the favourites, and many of them are common to both lists.
+See Dr. Furnivall's note, in the edition cited, pp. lxxiii.-lxxxii.]
+
+Quhen the scheiphird hed endit his prolixt orison to the laif of the
+scheiphirdis, i meruellit nocht litil quhen i herd ane rustic pastour
+of bestialite, distitut of vrbanite, and of speculatioune of natural
+philosophe, indoctryne his nychtbours as he hed studeit ptholome,
+auerois, aristotel, galien, ypocrites, or Cicero, quhilk var expert
+practicians in methamatic art. Than the scheiphirdis vyf said: my veil
+belouit hisband, i pray the to desist fra that tideus melancolic
+orison, quhilk surpassis thy ingyne, be rason that it is nocht thy
+facultee to disput in ane profund mater, the quhilk thy capacite can
+nocht comprehend. ther for, i thynk it best that ve recreat our selfis
+vytht ioyus comonyng quhil on to the tyme that ve return to the scheip
+fald vytht our flokkis. And to begin sic recreatione i thynk it best
+that everie ane of vs tel ane gude tayl or fable, to pas the tyme
+quhil euyn. Al the scheiphirdis, ther vyuis and saruandis, var glaid
+of this propositione. than the eldest scheiphird began, and al the
+laif follouit, ane be ane in their auen place. it vil be ouer prolixt,
+and no les tideus to reherse them agane vord be vord. bot i sal
+reherse sum of ther namys that i herd. Sum vas in prose and sum vas
+in verse: sum vas stories and sum var flet taylis. Thir var the namis
+of them as eftir follouis: the taylis of cantirberrye, Robert le
+dyabil duc of Normandie, the tayl of the volfe of the varldis end,
+Ferrand erl of Flandris that mareit the deuyl, the taiyl of the reyde
+eyttyn vitht the thre heydis, the tail quhou perseus sauit andromada
+fra the cruel monstir, the prophysie of merlyne, the tayl of the
+giantis that eit quyk men, on fut by fortht as i culd found, vallace,
+the bruce, ypomedon, the tail of the three futtit dug of norrouay, the
+tayl quhou Hercules sleu the serpent hidra that hed vij heydis, the
+tail quhou the king of est mure land mareit the kyngis dochtir of vest
+mure land, Skail gillenderson the kyngis sone of skellye, the tail of
+the four sonnis of aymon, the tail of the brig of the mantribil, the
+tail of syr euan, arthour's knycht, rauf col3ear, the seige of
+millan, gauen and gollogras, lancelot du lac, Arthour knycht he raid
+on nycht vitht gyltin spur and candil lycht, the tail of floremond of
+albanye that sleu the dragon be the see, the tail of syr valtir the
+bald leslye, the tail of the pure tynt, claryades and maliades,
+Arthour of litil bertang3e, robene hude and litil ihone, the
+meruellis of mandiueil, the tayl of the 3ong tamlene and of the
+bald braband, the ryng of the roy Robert, syr egeir and syr gryme,
+beuis of southamtoun, the goldin targe, the paleis of honour, the tayl
+quhou acteon vas transformit in ane hart and syne slane be his auen
+doggis, the tayl of Pirramus and tesbe, the tail of the amours of
+leander and hero, the tail how Iupiter transformit his deir love yo in
+ane cou, the tail quhou that iason van the goldin fleice, Opheus kyng
+of portingal, the tail of the goldin appil, the tail of the thre veird
+systirs, the tail quhou that dedalus maid the laborynth to keip the
+monstir minotaurus, the tail quhou kyng midas gat tua asse luggis on
+his hede because of his auereis.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+_Aage_, Danish ballad, related to Helgi and Sigrun, 144;
+ cf. York Powell, _C.P.B._ i. 502, and _Grimm Centenary Papers_ (1886), p. 47
+
+Achilles, 12, 13, 19, 35, 39, 67
+
+_Aeneid_, 18, 22, 334, 349
+
+Alboin the Lombard (O.E. Ćlfwine, see _Davenant_), 23, 66, 69, 82 n, 189
+
+Alexander the Great, in old French poetry, 27;
+ his _Epistle_; (Anglo-Saxon version), 329
+
+_Aliscans, chanson de geste_ of the cycle of William of Orange, 296
+
+_Alvíssmál_, in 'Elder Edda,' 112
+
+Amadis of Gaul, a formal hero, 175, 203, 222
+
+Ammius (O.N. Hamđer): see _Hamđismál_
+
+_Andreas_, old English poem on the legend of St. Andrew, 28, 50, 90, 329
+
+Andvari, 115
+
+_Angantyr_, the _Waking of_, poem in _Hervarar Saga_, 48, 70, 73, 78,
+112, 129 n
+
+_Apollonius of Tyre_, in Anglo-Saxon, 329
+
+Ari Thorgilsson, called the Wise (Ari Fróđi, A.D. 1067-1148),
+ his _Landnámabók_ and _Konunga Ćfi_, 248;
+ _Ynglinga Saga_, 279
+
+Ariosto, 30, 31, 40, 323
+
+Aristotle on the dramatic element in epic, 17 _sq._;
+ his summary of the _Odyssey_, 36, 74, 120, 139, 159 _sq._
+
+_Arnaldos, romance del Conde_, Spanish ballad, 327
+
+Arni, Bishop of Skalholt (_ob._ 1298), his _Life_ (_Arna Saga_), 268
+
+Arni Beiskr (the Bitter), murderer of Snorri Sturluson, his death at
+Flugumyri, 263
+
+Aron Hjörleifsson (_Arons Saga_), a friend of Bishop Gudmund, 225, 257,
+381 _sq._
+
+Asbjörnsen, P. Chr., 170 n
+
+Asdis, Grettir's mother, 216 n
+
+Askel: see _Reykdćla Saga_
+
+_Atlakviđa_, the _Lay of Attila_, 146 _sq._: see _Attila_
+
+_Atlamál_, the _Greenland Poem of Attila_, 92, 137, 146-156: see _Attila_
+
+_Atli and Rimgerd, Contention of_, in 'Elder Edda,' 113 _sq._
+
+Atli in _Grettis Saga_, his dying speech, 218
+ in _Hávarđar Saga_, 227
+
+Attila (O.E. Ćtla, O.N. Atli), the Hun, adopted as a German hero in
+epic tradition, 22;
+ different views of him in epic, 24;
+ in _Waltharius_, 84;
+ in _Waldere_, 86;
+ in the 'Elder Edda,' 80, 83, 105 _sq._, 110, 137, 149 _sq._
+
+_Aucassin et Nicolette_, 312, 327
+
+Audoin the Lombard (O.E. Eadwine), father of Alboin, 67
+
+_Aymon, Four Sons of_, i.e. _Renaus de Montauban_ (_chanson de geste_),
+313, 387
+
+
+Balder, death of, 43, 78, 112
+
+_Bandamanna Saga_, 'The Confederates,' 187, 226, 229-234
+
+Beatrice the Duchess, wife of Begon de Belin, mother of Gerin and
+Hernaudin, 307 _sq._
+
+Begon de Belin, brother of Garin le Loherain, _q.v._
+
+Benoit de Sainte More, his _Roman de Troie_, 330 _sq._, 334
+
+_Beowulf_, 69, 88 _sq._, 110, 136, 145, 158-175, 290
+ and the _Odyssey_, 10
+
+_Beowulf_ and the _Hęliand_, 28
+
+Bergthora, Njal's wife, 190, 220 _sq._
+
+Bernier: see _Raoul de Cambrai_
+
+Béroul: see _Tristram_
+
+_Bevis, Sir_, 388
+
+_Biarkamál_, 78
+
+Bjargey: see _Hávarđar Saga_
+
+Bjorn, in _Njála_, and his wife, 228-229
+
+Blethericus, a Welsh author, 348
+
+Boccaccio, his relation to the French Romantic School, and to Chaucer,
+363-370
+
+Bodvild, 95
+
+Boethius _On the Consolation of Philosophy_, a favourite book, 46
+
+Bolli, Gudrun's husband (_Laxdćla Saga_), 191, 207, 223, 376 _sq._;
+ kills Kjartan, 242
+
+Bolli the younger, son of Bolli and Gudrun, 223-224
+
+Bossu, on the Epic Poem, his opinion of Phaeacia, 32, 40 n
+
+Bradley, Mr. Henry, on the first Riddle in the _Exeter Book_, 135
+(_Academy_, March 24, 1888, p. 198)
+
+Bréri, cited by Thomas as his authority for the story of Tristram:
+see _Blethericus_
+
+Brink, Dr. Bernhard Ten, some time Professor at Strassburg, 145, 290
+
+Broceliande visited by Wace, 26, 171
+
+_Brunanburh_, poem of the battle of, 76
+
+Brynhild, sister of Attila, wife of Gunnar the Niblung, _passim_
+ long _Lay of_, in the 'Elder Edda' (_al. Sigurđarkviđa in Skamma_),
+ 83, 100 _sq._
+ _Hell-ride of_, 102
+ short _Lay of_ (fragment), 103, 256
+ lost poem concerning, paraphrased in _Volsunga Saga_, 71
+ Danish ballad of: see _Sivard_
+
+Bugge, Dr. Sophus, sometime Professor in Christiania, 77 n, 87 n, 137 n
+
+_Byrhtnoth_: see _Maldon_
+
+
+_C.P.B._, i.e. _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_, q.v.
+
+Campbell, J.F., of Islay, 170 n, 340
+
+Casket of whalebone (the Franks casket), in the British Museum, subjects
+represented on it, 48;
+ runic inscriptions, 49 (cf. Napier, in _An English Miscellany_,
+ Oxford 1901)
+
+Charles the Great, Roman Emperor (Charlemagne), different views of him
+in French Epic, 24;
+ in _Huon de Bordeaux_ 314 _sq._;
+ history of, in Norwegian (_Karlamagnus Saga_), 278;
+ in Spanish (chap-book), 297 n: see _Pčlerinage de Charlemagne_
+
+Charlot: see _Huon de Bordeaux_
+
+_Charroi de Nismes_, _chanson de geste_ of the cycle of William of
+Orange, quoted, 312
+
+Chaucer, 328, 332 n;
+ his relation to the French Romantic School, and to Boccaccio, 363-370
+
+Chrestien de Troyes, 323, 344
+ his works,
+ _Tristan_ (lost), 344;
+ _Erec_ (_Geraint and Enid_), 6, 332, 355 _sq._;
+ _Conte du Graal_ (_Perceval_), 327;
+ _Cliges_, 333, 357 _sq._, 387;
+ _Chevalier de la Charrette_ (_Lancelot_), 341, 357, 387;
+ _Yvain_ (_Chevalier au Lion_), 352 _sq._, 386 _sq._
+ his influence on the author of _Flamenca_, 359 _sq._
+
+_Codex Regius_ (2365, 4to), in the King's Library, Copenhagen: see
+_Edda, 'the Elder_'
+
+_Comédie Humaine, la_, 188
+
+Connla (the story of the fairy-bride): see _Guingamor_
+
+Contract, Social, in Iceland, 59
+
+_Coronemenz Looďs_, _chanson de geste_ of the cycle of William of
+Orange, quoted, 311
+
+_Corpus Poeticum Boreale_, ed. G. Vigfusson and F. York Powell, Oxford,
+1883, _passim_
+
+Corsolt, a pagan, 311
+
+Cressida, in _Roman de Troie_, 330;
+ the story treated in different ways by Boccaccio and Chaucer, _q.v._
+
+Cynewulf, the poet, 51
+
+_Cynewulf and Cyneheard_ (English Chronicle, A.D. 755), 5, 82 n
+
+
+Dag, brother of Sigrun, 72
+
+Dandie Dinmont, 201
+
+Dante, 31;
+ his reference to William of Orange, 296
+
+_Dart, Song of the_ (_Darrađarlióđ_, Gray's 'Fatal Sisters'), 78
+
+Davenant, Sir William, on the heroic poem (Preface to _Gondibert_),
+quoted, 30;
+ author of a tragedy, 'Albovine King of the Lombards,' 67
+
+_Deor's Lament_, old English poem, 76, 115, 134
+
+Drangey, island in Eyjafirth, north of Iceland, Grettir's refuge, 196
+
+Dryden and the heroic ideal, 30
+
+Du Bartas, 31
+
+
+_Edda_, a handbook of the Art of Poetry, by Snorri Sturluson, 42, 138, 181
+
+'Edda,' 'the Elder,' 'the Poetic,' 'of Sćmund the Wise' (_Codex
+Regius_), 77, 93, 156 _passim_
+
+Egil the Bowman, Weland's brother, represented on the Franks casket
+(Ćgili), 48
+
+Egil Skallagrimsson, 192, 215, 220
+
+Einar Thorgilsson: see _Sturla of Hvamm_
+
+Ekkehard, Dean of St. Gall, author of _Waltharius_, 84
+
+_Elene_, by Cynewulf, an old English poem on the legend of St. Helen
+(the Invention of the Cross), 50, 90, 329
+
+_Eneas, Roman d'_, 386
+
+_Enid_: see _Chrestien de Troyes_
+
+_Erec_: see _Chrestien de Troyes_
+
+Eric the Red, his Saga in Hauk's book, 47
+
+Ermanaric (O.E. Eormenríc, O.N. Jörmunrekr), 22;
+ killed by the brothers of Suanihilda, 66: see _Hamđismál_
+
+Erp: see _Hamđismál_
+
+_Exodus_, old English poem of, 28, 90
+
+Eyjolf Karsson, a friend of Bishop Gudmund, 257, 381, _sq._
+
+Eyjolf Thorsteinsson: see _Gizur_
+
+_Eyrbyggja Saga_, the story of the men of Eyre, 187 _sq._, 201, 227, 253
+
+
+_Fćreyinga Saga_, the story of the men of the Faroes (Thrond of Gata
+and Sigmund Brestisson), 206, 245
+
+Faroese ballads, 181, 283
+
+Fielding, Henry, 266
+
+_Fierabras_, 388
+
+Finn: see _Finnesburh_
+
+_Finnesburh_, old English poem (fragment), published by Hickes from a
+Lambeth MS., now mislaid, 81 _sq._, 265
+ episode in _Beowulf_, giving more of the story, 81 _sq._
+
+_Fiölsvinnsmál_ see _Svipdag_
+
+_Flamenca_, a Provençal romance, by a follower of Chrestien de Troyes,
+in the spirit of Ovid, 359-362;
+ romances named in, 360, 384-387
+
+_Flóamanna Saga_, the story of the people of Floi, 259
+
+_Flores et Blanchefleur_, romance, referred to in _Flamenca_, 361;
+ translated by Boccaccio (_Filocolo_), 364
+
+Flosi the Burner, in _Njála_, 218, 219, 190, 191, 219 _sq._
+
+Flugumyri, a homestead in Northern Iceland (Skagafjord), Earl Gizur's
+house, burned October 1253, the story as given by Sturla, 259-264
+
+_Fóstbrćđra Saga_ (the story of the two sworn brethren, Thorgeir and
+Thormod) 38 n, 47;
+ in Hauk's book, 187, 194, 196;
+ euphuistic interpolations in, 275 _sq._
+
+Frey, poem of his wooing of Gerd (_Skirnismál_), in the 'Poetic Edda,'
+77, 94, 114
+
+_Frithiof the Bold_, a romantic Saga, 247, 277, 280 _sq._
+
+Froda (Fróđá), homestead in Olafsvík, near the end of Snćfellsnes,
+Western Iceland, a haunted house, _Eyrbyggja Saga_, 208
+
+Froda (Frotho in Saxo Grammaticus), his story alluded to in _Beowulf_,
+69, 72, 82 n, 163, 373 _sq._
+
+Froissart and the courteous ideal, 328
+
+Fromont, the adversary in the story of _Garin le Loherain_, _q.v._
+
+
+Galopin the Prodigal, in the story of _Garin le Loherain_, 310
+
+_Gareth_, in Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, original of the Red Cross
+Knight in the _Faery Queene_, 343
+
+_Garin le Loherain_ (_chanson de geste_), 53 n, 300-309
+
+Gawain killed dragons, 168: see _Walewein_
+
+_Gawain and the Green Knight_, alliterative poem, 180
+
+_Gay Goshawk_, ballad of the, 357
+
+_Genesis_, old English poem of, 90, 136
+
+_Geraint_, Welsh story, 355
+
+Gerd: see _Frey_
+
+_Germania_ of Tacitus, 46
+
+_Gísla Saga_, the story of Gisli the Outlaw, 187, 196 _sq._, 207, 225;
+ its relations to the heroic poetry, 210
+
+Giuki (Lat. Gibicho, O.E. Gifica), father of Gunnar, Hogni, Gothorm,
+and Gudrun, _q.v._
+
+Gizur Thorvaldsson, the earl, at Flugumyri, 258, 259-264
+
+Glam (_Grettis Saga_), 172, 196
+
+Glum (_Víga-Glúms Saga_), 193 _sq._, 225
+ and _Raoul de Cambrai_, 299
+
+Gollancz, Mr., 135 (see _Academy_, Dec. 23, 1893, p. 572)
+
+Gothorm, 101
+
+Gray, his translations from the Icelandic, 78, 157 n
+
+Gregory (St.) the Great, _de Cura Pastorali_, studied in Iceland, 59
+
+Grendel, 165: see _Beowulf_
+
+_Grettis Saga_, the story of Grettir the Strong, 172, 187, 195 _sq._,
+216 n, 218, 226
+
+Grimhild, mother of Gudrun, 110
+
+_Grimild's Revenge_, Danish ballad (_Grimilds Hćvn_), 105, 149
+
+Grimm, 136 n;
+ story of the _Golden Bird_, 340
+ Wilhelm, _Deutsche Heldensage_, 79
+
+_Grímnismál_, in 'Elder Edda,' 112
+
+Gripir, Prophecy of (_Grípisspá_) in the 'Elder Edda,' a summary of
+the Volsung story, 94
+
+Groa, wife of Earl Gizur, _q.v._
+
+_Grógaldr_: see _Svipdag_
+
+_Grottasöngr_ (Song of the Magic Mill), 90
+
+Gudmund Arason, Bishop of Hólar, 170, 256, 381
+
+Gudmund, son of Granmar: see _Sinfiotli_
+
+Gudmund the Mighty (Guđmundr inn Riki), in _Ljósvetninga_ and other
+Sagas, 188, 225
+
+Gudny, wife of Sturla of Hvamm, _q.v._
+
+Gudrun (O.N. Guđrún), daughter of Giuki, sister of Gunnar and Hogni,
+wife of Sigurd, 23, 71, 101, 149 _sq._
+ and Theodoric, the _Old Lay of Gudrun_ (_Guđrúnarkviđa in forna_),
+ 103, 109
+ _Lay of_ (_Guđrúnarkviđa_), 111
+ _Lament of_, or _Chain of Woe_ (_Tregrof Guđrúnar_), 111, 215
+ _Ordeal of_, 111
+ daughter of Osvifr (_Laxdćla Saga_), 191, 209, 222-224
+
+_Guingamor, Lay of_, by Marie de France, 337-340
+
+_Guinglain_, romance, by Renaud de Beaujeu: see _Libeaux Desconus_
+
+Gundaharius (Gundicarius), the Burgundian (O.E. Gúđhere, O.N. Gunnarr;
+Gunther in the _Nibelungenlied_, etc.), 22: see _Gunnar_, _Gunther_
+
+Gunnar of Lithend (Hlíđarendi), in _Njáls Saga_, 190;
+ his death, 214
+
+Gunnar, son of Giuki, brother of Gudrun, 101 _sq._, 168 _sq._: see
+_Gundaharius_, _Gunther_
+
+Gunnlaug the Poet, called Wormtongue, his story (_Gunnlaugs Saga
+Ormstungu_), 207, 281
+
+Gunther (Guntharius, son of Gibicho) in _Waltharius_, 84 _sq._;
+ in _Waldere_, 100: see _Gundaharius_, _Gunnar_
+
+
+Hacon, King of Norway (A.D. 1217-1263): see _Hákonar Saga_;
+ his taste for French romances, 278
+
+Hadubrand, son of Hildebrand, 81
+
+Hagen (Hagano), in _Waltharius_, 84 _sq._
+
+Hagen, in _Waldere_ (Hagena), 86, 239
+ in _Sivard_, _q.v._: see _Hogni_
+
+_Hákonar Saga_, the _Life_ of Hacon, Hacon's son, King of Norway (_ob._
+1263), written by Sturla, contrasted with his history of Iceland, 267
+_sq._
+
+_Halfs Saga_, 280
+
+Hall, son of Earl Gizur, 259
+
+Hama, 163
+
+_Hamlet_ in Saxo, 70
+
+_Hamđismál_ ('Poetic Edda'), Lay of the death of Ermanaric, 66, 70-71,
+109, 140
+
+Harald, king of Norway (Fairhair), 58;
+ in _Egils Saga_, 192
+ king of Norway (Hardrada), killed dragons, 168;
+ his Saga referred to (story of Hreidar the Simple), 310;
+ (Varangian custom), 329 n
+
+_Harbarzlióđ_: see _Thor_
+
+_Harđar Saga ok Holmverja_, the story of Hord and the men of the
+island, 212 n
+
+Hauk's Book, an Icelandic gentleman's select library in the fourteenth
+century, 47 _sq._ (_Hauksbók_, ed. Finnur Jónsson, 1892-1896)
+
+_Hávamál_ in 'Poetic Edda,' a gnomic miscellany, 77
+
+_Hávarđar Saga Isfirđings_, the story of Howard of Icefirth, 199, 216
+_sq._, 227
+
+Hearne, Thomas, 78
+
+Hedin, brother of Helgi, Hiorvard's son, 99
+
+_Heiđarvíga Saga_, the story of the battle on the Heath (connected with
+_Eyrbyggja Saga_), 209: see _Víga-Styrr_
+
+_Heiđreks Saga_: see _Hervarar Saga_
+
+_Heimskringla_, Snorri's _Lives of the Kings of Norway_, abridged, 248
+
+Helgi and Kara, 98
+
+Helgi, Hiorvard's son, and Swava, 97 _sq._, 113
+
+Helgi Hundingsbane and Sigrun, 72, 93 n, 95 _sq._, 239
+
+_Hęliand_, old Saxon poem on the Gospel history, using the forms of
+German heroic poetry, 27, 90, 204
+
+Hengest: see _Finnesburh_
+
+Heremod, 162
+
+Herkja, 111
+
+Hermes, in the Homeric hymn, 43
+
+_Hervarar Saga ok Heiđreks Konungs_ (_Heiđreks Saga_), one of the
+romantic mythical Sagas in Hauk's book, 48;
+ contains the poems of the cycle of Angantyr, 78, 280
+
+Hervor, daughter of Angantyr, 70, 73, 112, 208
+
+Heusler, Dr. Andreas, Professor in Berlin, 100 n
+
+Hialli, 151
+
+Hickes, George, D.D., 73 n, 78
+
+_Hildebrand, Lay of_, 76, 79, 81, 87 n, 91
+
+Hildeburg: see _Finnesburh_
+
+Hildegund (Hildegyth), 84 _sq._: see _Walter_
+
+Hnćf: see _Finnesburh_
+
+Hobs, Mr. (_i.e._ Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury), 31
+
+Hodbrodd, in story of Helgi and Sigrun, 72, 96
+
+Hogni, father of Sigrun, 72, 96
+
+Hogni, son of Giuki, brother of Gunnar, Gothorm, and Gudrun, 101, 151
+_sq._: see _Hagen_
+
+Homeric analogies in medieval literature, 9 _sq._
+
+Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson, a friend of Bishop Gudmund, 257;
+ _Hrafns Saga_ quoted, 38 n
+
+Hrafn: see _Gunnlaug_
+
+_Hrafnkels Saga Freysgođa_, the story of Hrafnkel, Frey's Priest, 187, 198
+
+Hrefna, Kjartan's wife, 223
+
+Hreidar the Simple, an unpromising hero, in _Haralds Saga Harđráđa_, 310
+
+Hrolf Kraki (Hrođulf in _Beowulf_), 166, 280
+
+_Hromund Greipsson_, Saga of, 99
+
+Hrothgar, 10, 166.
+
+Hunding, 95
+
+Hunferth, 10, 166
+
+_Huon de Bordeaux_ (_chanson de geste_), epic and romance combined
+inartistically in, 37, 53, 314-317
+
+Hurd's _Letters on Chivalry and Romance_, 30
+
+Hygelac, 161 _sq._: see _Beowulf_
+
+_Hymiskviđa_: see _Thor_
+
+
+Ibsen, Henrik, his _Hćrmćndene paa Helgeland_ (_Warriors in Helgeland_),
+a drama founded on the Volsung story, its relation to _Laxdćla Saga_, 209
+ his _Kongsemnerne_ (_Rival Kings_, Hacon and Skule), 268
+
+_Ider_, romance, 331 _sq._, 347 n
+
+_Iliad_, 11 _sq._, 18, 38 _sq._, 52, 162 _sq._, 348, 352 n
+
+Ingeld: see _Froda_
+
+Ingibjorg, daughter of Sturla, her wedding at Flugumyri, 259 _sq._
+
+_Intelligenza, L'_, 386 n
+
+
+Jehoram, son of Ahab, in the famine of Samaria, 239
+
+Johnson, Dr., 9, 244
+
+Joinville, Jean de, Seneschal of Champagne, his _Life of St. Louis_
+compared with Icelandic prose history, 269 _sq._
+
+Jón Arason the poet, Bishop of Hólar, the last Catholic Bishop in
+Iceland, beheaded by Reformers, 7th November 1550, a notable character,
+268
+
+Jordanes, historian of the Goths, his version of the story of
+_Ermanaric_, its relation to _Hamđismál_, 65
+
+_Judith_, old English poem of, 28, 29, 90
+
+Julian, the Emperor, his opinion of German songs, 65
+
+
+Kara, 98 _sq._
+
+Kari, in _Njála_, 206
+ and Bjorn, 228-229
+
+Karl Jónsson, Abbot of Thingeyri in Iceland, author of _Sverris Saga_, 249
+
+Kjartan, son of Olaf the Peacock (_Laxdćla Saga_), 13, 191, 204, 207, 375
+ his death, 240 _sq._
+
+_Königskinder, die_, German ballad, 327
+
+_Kormaks Saga_, 129 n, 281
+
+
+_Lancelot_, the French prose romance, 335
+
+_Landnámabók_, in Hauk's book, 47
+
+Laurence, Bishop of Hólar (_ob._ 1331), his _Life_ (_Laurentius Saga_), 268
+
+_Laxdćla Saga_, the story of Laxdale (_the Lovers of the Gudrun_), 185,
+190, 240 _sq._, 375;
+ a new version of the Niblung story, 209 _sq._, 222 _sq._, 281
+
+Leconte de Lisle, _L'Epée d'Angantyr_, 73 n
+
+Lessing's _Laocoon_, 237
+
+_Libeaux Desconus_, romance in different versions--French, by Renaud
+de Beaujeu (_Guinglain_), 337, 343 _sq._, 387;
+ English, 337, 343;
+ Italian (_Carduino_), 337, 343
+
+_Ljósvetninga Saga_, story of the House of Ljósavatn, 188 _sq._
+
+_Lokasenna_ (the Railing of Loki), 41, 77, 113
+
+Longnon, Auguste, 314 n
+
+Louis IX., king of France (St. Louis): see _Joinville_
+
+_Lusiad_, the, a patriotic epic, unlike the poetry of the 'heroic age,' 22
+
+
+Macrobius, 47, 333
+
+_Maldon_, poem of the battle of (A.D. 991), 69, 88, 95 n, 134, 205, 244;
+ compared with the _Iliad_, 11;
+ compared with _Roland_, 51, 54 _sq._, 294
+
+Malory, Sir Thomas, his _Morte d'Arthur_, 215, 307
+
+_Mantrible, Bridge of the_, 388
+
+Marie de France, her _Lays_ translated into Norwegian (_Strengleikar_),
+278;
+ _Guingamor_ criticised, 337-340
+
+Marino, 31
+
+Martianus Capella, _de Nuptiis Philologiae_, studied in the Middle Ages, 47
+
+Medea, 334, 347 _sq._
+
+_Menglad, Rescue of_, 78, 114: see _Svipdag_
+
+Mephistopheles in Thessaly, 10
+
+Meyer, Paul, 290 n, 359 n, 386
+
+_Milan, Siege of_, 388
+
+Mimming, the sword of Weland, 86
+
+Morris, William, 205, 282, 334
+
+_Mort Arthure_, alliterative poem, 180
+
+_Mort Artus_, French prose romance, 335
+
+_Morte d'Arthur_: see _Malory_
+
+
+_Nibelungenlied_, 105, 120, 149, 179
+
+Niblung story, its relation to historical fact, 22 _sq._: see _Gunnar_,
+_Hogni_, _Gudrun_, _Laxdćla Saga_
+
+Nidad, 95
+
+Njal, story of (_Njála_), 8, 13, 60, 185, 207, 219-221
+
+
+Oberon; see _Huon de Bordeaux_
+
+Odd, Arrow (Örvar-Oddr), 73
+
+Oddrun, sister of Brynhild and Attila, 102
+ _Lament of_ (_Oddrúnargrátr_), in the 'Elder Edda,' 103, 107 _sq._,
+ 151 _sq._
+
+Odd Ufeigsson: see _Bandamanna Saga_
+
+Odoacer, referred to in _Lay of Hildebrand_, 81
+
+Odysseus, 7, 9, 32 _sq._, 35, 71
+
+_Odyssey_, the, 10, 163, 171;
+ Aristotle's summary of, 18;
+ romance in, 32 _sq._
+
+Olaf Tryggvason, king of Norway, 205, 375 _sq._
+
+_Olkofra Ţáttr_, the story of Alecap, related to _Bandamanna Saga_, 226
+
+Ossian, in the land of youth: see _Guingamor_
+
+Ovid in the Middle Ages, 47, 346, 412;
+[Transcriber's Note: No page 412 in original.]
+ _Ovidius Epistolarum_ studied in Iceland, 59
+
+Ovid's story of Medea, translated in the _Roman de Troie_, 334 _sq._,
+348 _sq._;
+ _Heroides_ became the 'Saints' Legend of Cupid,' 347
+
+
+Paris, Gaston, 290, 291, 331, 337, 343, 345, 348 n, 387
+
+Paulus Diaconus, heroic stories in the Lombard history, 66 _sq._
+
+Peer Gynt, 170
+
+_Pčlerinage de Charlemagne_ (_chanson de geste_), 24, 53, 329
+
+Percy, Thomas, D.D., _Five Pieces of Runic Poetry_, 73 n, 141 n
+
+Phaeacia, Odysseus in, Bossu's criticism, 31
+
+Pindar, his treatment of myths, 43
+
+Poitiers, William IX., Count of, his poem on setting out for the
+Crusade, 317
+
+Powell, F. York, 66: see _Aage_
+
+_Prise d'Orange_, _chanson de geste_ of the cycle of William of Orange,
+in substance a romance of adventure, 313
+
+
+_Queste del St. Graal_, French prose romance, a contrast to the style
+of Chrestien de Troyes, 327, 335
+
+
+Ragnar Lodbrok, his Death-Song (_Krákumál_), 140, 217, 295
+
+Rainouart, the gigantic ally of William of Orange, 296, 311;
+ their names associated by Dante (_Par._ xviii. 46), _ibid._
+
+_Raoul de Cambrai_ (_chanson de geste_), 291 n, 298-300, 309
+
+Rastignac, Eugčne de, 188
+
+_Reykdćla Saga_, the story of Vemund, Askel, and Skuta son of Askel,
+connected with the story of Glum, 194, 201
+
+Rigaut, son of Hervi the Villain, in the story of _Garin le Loherain_, 310
+
+Rimgerd the Giantess: see _Atli_
+
+_Rímur_, Icelandic rhyming romances, 181, 283
+
+_Roland, Chanson de_, 9, 24, 83, 287, 293-295, 308;
+ compared with _Byrhtnoth_ (_Maldon_), 54 _sq._;
+ with an incident in _Njála_, 265
+
+_Roman de la Rose_, of Guillaume de Lorris, 345, 348, 352, 359
+
+_Rood, Dream of the_, old English poem, 134
+
+Rosamund and Alboin in the Lombard history, 23, 67
+
+_Rosmunda_, a tragedy, by Rucellai, 67
+
+_Rou, Roman de_, the author's visit to Broceliande, 26
+
+
+Sam (Sámr), Gunnar's dog, 214
+
+Sarpedon's address to Glaucus, 9, 11
+
+Sarus and Ammius (Sorli and Hamther), brothers of Suanihilda (Jordanes),
+66: see _Hamđismál_
+
+Saxo Grammaticus, 69, 79, 105, 149, 181, 374
+
+_Scotland, Complaynt of_, romances named in, 387-389
+
+_Scottish Field_, alliterative poem on Flodden, 179 _sq._
+
+Shakespeare, his treatment of popular tales, 36 _sq._
+
+_Sibyl's Prophecy_: see _Volospá_
+
+Sidney, Sir Philip, 99, 368
+
+Sievers, Dr. Eduard, Professor in Leipzig, 136 n, 169 n
+
+Sigmund Brestisson, in _Fćreyinga Saga_, 206, 245, 283
+
+Sigmund, father of Sinfiotli, Helgi, and Sigurd, 95, 110
+
+Signild: see _Sivard_
+
+Sigrdrifa, 115
+
+Sigrun: see _Helgi_
+
+Sigurd, the Volsung (O.N. Sigurđr), 22, 71, 100 _sq._, 129, 133
+ fragmentary _Lay of_ (_Brot af Sigurđarkviđu_), 103
+ _Lay of_: see _Brynhild_
+
+Sinfiotli, debate of, and Gudmund, 96
+
+_Sivard og Brynild_, Danish ballad, translated, 127-129
+
+Skallagrim, how he told the truth to King Harald, 192
+
+Skarphedinn, son of Njal, 190, 220 _sq._, 244, 265
+
+Skirnir: see _Frey_
+
+Skule, Duke, the rival of Hacon, 267
+
+Skuta: see _Reykdćla Saga_
+
+Snorri Sturluson (A.D. 1178-1241), author of the _Edda_, 42;
+ and of the _Lives of the Kings of Norway_, 248;
+ his murder avenged at Flugumyri, 263
+
+Snorri the Priest (Snorri Gođi), in _Eyrbyggja_ and other Sagas, 188,
+213, 253
+
+_Sonatorrek_ (the Sons' Loss), poem by Egil Skallagrimsson, 215
+
+Sorli: see _Hamđismál_
+
+Spenser, 343
+
+Starkad, 166, 374
+
+Stephens, George, sometime Professor in Copenhagen, 78
+
+Stevenson, R.L., _Catriona_, 170 n
+
+Sturla of Hvamm (Hvamm-Sturla), founder of the house of the Sturlungs,
+his life (_Sturlu Saga_) 253-256
+
+Sturla (_c._ A.D. 1214-1284), son of Thord, and grandson of Hvamm-Sturla,
+nephew of Snorri, author of _Sturlunga Saga_ (_q.v._) and of _Hákonar
+Saga_ (_q.v._) 61, 251, 259
+
+_Sturlunga Saga_ (more accurately _Islendinga Saga_), of Sturla, Thord's
+son, a history of the author's own times, using the forms of the heroic
+Sagas, 61, 246 _sq._, 249 _sq._
+
+Suanihilda: see _Swanhild_
+
+_Svarfdćla Saga_, the story of the men of Swarfdale (_Svarfađardalr_), 219
+
+_Sveidal, Ungen_, Danish ballad, on the story of Svipdag and Menglad,
+114, 126
+
+Sverre, king of Norway (_ob._ 1202), his _Life_ (_Sverris Saga_) written
+by Abbot Karl Jónsson at the king's dictation, 249;
+ quotes a Volsung poem, 278
+
+_Svipdag and Menglad_, old Northern poems of, 78, 114 _sq._: see _Sveidal_
+
+Swanhild (O.N. Svanhildr), daughter of Sigurd and Gudrun, her cruel
+death; the vengeance on Ermanaric known to Jordanes in the sixth
+century, 65: see _Hamđismál_
+
+
+Tasso, 18, 21;
+ his critical essays on heroic poetry, 30
+
+Tegnér, Esaias, 141;
+ his _Frithiofs Saga_, 277
+
+Tennyson, _Enid_, 355
+
+Theodoric (O.N. Ţióđrekr), a hero of Teutonic epic in different
+dialects, 22, 81, 87;
+ fragment of Swedish poem on, inscription on stone at Rök, 78: see
+ _Gudrun_
+
+Thersites, 243
+
+Thidrandi, whom the goddesses slew, 208
+
+_Ţidreks Saga_ (thirteenth century), a Norwegian compilation from North
+German ballads on heroic subjects, 79, 121
+
+Thomas: see _Tristram_
+
+Thor, in old Northern literature, his Fishing for the World Serpent
+(_Hymiskviđa_), 43, 77, 95;
+ the Winning of the Hammer (_Ţrymskviđa_), 43, 77, 81, 95
+ Danish ballad of, 125
+ the contention of, and Odin (_Harbarzlióđ_), 77, 113
+
+Thorarin, in _Eyrbyggja_, the quiet man, 227
+
+Thorgils and Haflidi (_Ţorgils Saga ok Hafliđa_), 226, 238, 252 _sq._
+
+Thorkell Hake, in _Ljósvetinga Saga_, 225
+
+Thorolf Bćgifot: see _Eyrbyggja_
+
+Thorolf, Kveldulf's son: see _Skallagrim_
+
+_Ţorsteins Saga Hvíta_, the story of Thorstein the White, points of
+resemblance to _Laxdćla_ and _Gunnlaugs Saga_, 281
+
+_Ţorsteins Saga Stangarhöggs_ (Thorstein Staffsmitten), a short story, 282
+
+Thrond of Gata (_Fćreyinga Saga_), 245
+
+_Ţrymskviđa_: see _Thor_
+
+Thrytho, 162
+
+Thurismund, son of Thurisvend, king of the Gepidae, killed by Alboin, 67
+
+_Tirant lo Blanch_ (Tirant the White, Romance of), 38 n;
+ a moral work, 222
+
+Trissino, author of _Italia liberata dai Goti_, a correct epic poem, 30
+
+_Tristram and Iseult_, 336, Anglo-Norman poems, by Béroul and Thomas, 344;
+ of Chrestien (lost), _ibid._
+
+Troilus, 368 _sq._
+
+_Troy, Destruction of_, alliterative poem, 180
+
+
+Ufeig: see _Bandamanna Saga_
+
+Uistean Mor mac Ghille Phadrig, 170
+
+Uspak: see _Bandamanna Saga_
+
+
+_Vafţrúđnismál_, mythological poem in 'Elder Edda,' 77, 112, 115
+
+Vali: see _Bandamanna Saga_
+
+_Vápnfirđinga Saga_, the story of Vopnafjord, 193, 226
+
+_Vatnsdćla Saga_, story of the House of Vatnsdal, 189
+
+Vemund: see _Reykdćla Saga_
+
+_Vergi, la Chastelaine de_, a short tragic story, 362 _sq._
+
+_Víga-Glúms Saga_, 193: see _Glum_
+
+Víga-Styrr: see _Heiđarvíga Saga_
+
+ _N.B._--The story referred to in the text is preserved in
+ Jón Olafsson's recollection of the leaves of the MS. which
+ were lost in the fire of 1728 (_Islendinga Sögur_, 1847, ii.
+ p. 296). It is not given in Mr. William Morris's translation
+ of the extant portion of the Saga, appended to his
+ _Eyrbyggja_.
+
+Vigfusson, Gudbrand, 77, 280 n, 283 n
+
+_Viglund, Story of_, a romantic Saga, 278 _sq._
+
+Villehardouin, a contemporary of Snorri, 269
+
+_Volospá_ (the Sibyl's Song of the Doom of the Gods), in the 'Poetic
+Edda,' 43, 77, 139;
+ another copy in Hauk's book, 47, 93
+
+_Volsunga Saga_, a prose paraphrase of old Northern poems, 71, 77, 79, 280
+
+_Volsungs, Old Lay of the_, 96
+
+
+_Wade, Song of_, fragment recently discovered, 180 (see _Academy_, Feb.
+15, 1896)
+
+_Waldere_, old English poem (fragment), 78, 86 _sq._, 116, 163: see
+_Walter of Aquitaine_
+
+_Walewein, Roman van_, Dutch romance of Sir Gawain; the plot compared
+with the Gaelic story of Mac Iain Direach, 337, 340-343
+
+Walter of Aquitaine, 5, 78, 84 _sq._, 206
+
+_Waltharius_, Latin poem by Ekkehard, on the story of Walter of
+Aquitaine, _q.v._
+
+_Wanderer, the_, old English poem, 134
+
+Ward, H.L.D., his Catalogue of MS. Romances in the British Museum, 282
+
+Wealhtheo, 166
+
+_Weland_, 338
+ represented on the Franks casket in the British Museum, 48
+ mentioned in _Waldere_, 87, 163
+ _Lay of_, in 'Poetic Edda,' 77, 94
+
+_Well at the World's End_, 387
+
+Widia, Weland's son, 87, 163
+
+_Widsith_ (the Traveller's Song), old English poem, 76, 115, 134
+
+Wiglaf, the 'loyal servitor' in _Beowulf_, 166
+
+William of Orange, old French epic hero, 296: see _Coronemenz Looďs_,
+_Charroi de Nismes_, _Prise d'Orange_, _Aliscans_, _Rainouart_; cf. J.
+Bédier, _Les Légendes épiques_ (1908)
+
+
+
+
+Printed in Great Britain by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh.
+
+
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+<body>
+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, Epic and Romance, by W. P. Ker</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: Epic and Romance</p>
+<p> Essays on Medieval Literature</p>
+<p>Author: W. P. Ker</p>
+<p>Release Date: January 20, 2007 [eBook #20406]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EPIC AND ROMANCE***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Ted Garvin, Linda Cantoni,<br />
+ and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+ (http://www.pgdp.net/c/)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="notes">
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><b>Transcriber's Notes:</b></p>
+
+<p>This e-text employs some Anglo-Saxon characters, such as the eth (Đ or đ,
+equivalent of &quot;th&quot;) and the thorn (Ţ or ţ, also equivalent of &quot;th&quot;). These
+characters should display properly in most browsers. The Anglo-Saxon yogh
+(equivalent of &quot;y,&quot; &quot;g,&quot; or &quot;gh&quot;) will display properly only if the user has the
+proper font. A mouse-over pop-up transliteration has been provided for words
+containing a yogh, e.g., <span title="yong">&#540;ong</span>.</p>
+
+<p>This e-text also contains passages in ancient Greek. In the original text, some of the Greek
+characters have diacritical marks that may not display properly in some browsers,
+depending on the available fonts. In order to make this e-text as
+accessible as possible, the diacritical marks have been omitted. Short phrases in Greek have a mouse-hover transliteration,
+e.g., <span title="Greek: kalos">&#954;&#945;&#955;&#959;&#962;</span>. Longer
+passages have the transliteration immediately following.</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1>EPIC AND ROMANCE</h1>
+
+<h2>ESSAYS ON MEDIEVAL LITERATURE</h2>
+
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>W. P. KER</h2>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE, OXFORD<br />
+PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE<br />
+LONDON</p>
+
+<p>&#160;</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<b><a href="#CONTENTS">Contents</a></b></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 35%;" />
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED<br />
+ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON<br />
+1931<br />
+<br />
+<span class="small">COPYRIGHT</span><br />
+<span class="small"><i>First Edition (8vo)</i> 1896</span><br />
+<span class="small"><i>Second Edition (Eversley Series)</i> 1908</span><br />
+<span class="small"><i>Reprinted (Crown 8vo)</i> 1922, 1926, 1931</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="small">PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN</span><br />
+<span class="small">BY R. &amp; R. CLARK, LIMITED, EDINBURGH</span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">These</span> essays are intended as a general description of some of the
+principal forms of narrative literature in the Middle Ages, and as a
+review of some of the more interesting works in each period. It is
+hardly necessary to say that the conclusion is one &quot;in which nothing
+is concluded,&quot; and that whole tracts of literature have been barely
+touched on&#8212;the English metrical romances, the Middle High German
+poems, the ballads, Northern and Southern&#8212;which would require to be
+considered in any systematic treatment of this part of history.</p>
+
+<p>Many serious difficulties have been evaded (in <i>Finnesburh</i>, more
+particularly), and many things have been taken for granted, too
+easily. My apology must be that there seemed to be certain results
+available for criticism, apart from the more strict and scientific
+procedure which is required to solve the more difficult problems of
+<i>Beowulf</i>, or of the old Northern or the old French poetry. It is
+hoped that something may be gained by a less minute and exacting
+consideration of the whole field, and by an attempt to bring the more
+distant and dissociated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span> parts of the subject into relation with one
+another, in one view.</p>
+
+<p>Some of these notes have been already used, in a course of three
+lectures at the Royal Institution, in March 1892, on &quot;the Progress of
+Romance in the Middle Ages,&quot; and in lectures given at University
+College and elsewhere. The plot of the Dutch romance of <i>Walewein</i> was
+discussed in a paper submitted to the Folk-Lore Society two years ago,
+and published in the journal of the Society (<i>Folk-Lore</i>, vol. v. p.
+121).</p>
+
+<p>I am greatly indebted to my friend Mr. Paget Toynbee for his help in
+reading the proofs.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot put out on this venture without acknowledgment of my
+obligation to two scholars, who have had nothing to do with my
+employment of all that I have borrowed from them, the Oxford editors
+of the Old Northern Poetry, Dr. Gudbrand Vigfusson and Mr. York
+Powell. I have still to learn what Mr. York Powell thinks of these
+discourses. What Gudbrand Vigfusson would have thought I cannot guess,
+but I am glad to remember the wise goodwill which he was always ready
+to give, with so much else from the resources of his learning and his
+judgment, to those who applied to him for advice.</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: right">W. P. KER.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">London</span>, <i>4th November 1896</i>.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>
+<h2>POSTSCRIPT</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">This</span> book is now reprinted without addition or change, except in a few
+small details. If it had to be written over again, many things, no
+doubt, would be expressed in a different way. For example, after some
+time happily spent in reading the Danish and other ballads, I am
+inclined to make rather less of the interval between the ballads and
+the earlier heroic poems, and I have learned (especially from Dr. Axel
+Olrik) that the Danish ballads do not belong originally to simple
+rustic people, but to the Danish gentry in the Middle Ages. Also the
+comparison of Sturla's Icelandic and Norwegian histories, though it
+still seems to me right in the main, is driven a little too far; it
+hardly does enough justice to the beauty of the <i>Life of Hacon</i>
+(<i>H&#225;konar Saga</i>), especially in the part dealing with the rivalry of
+the King and his father-in-law Duke Skule. The critical problems with
+regard to the writings of Sturla are more difficult than I imagined,
+and I am glad to have this opportunity of referring, with admiration,
+to the work of my friend Dr. Bj&#246;rn Magn&#250;sson Olsen on the <i>Sturlunga
+Saga</i> (in <i>Safn til S&#246;gu Islands</i>, iii. pp. 193-510, Copen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span>hagen,
+1897). Though I am unable to go further into that debatable ground, I
+must not pass over Dr. Olsen's argument showing that the life of the
+original Sturla of Hvamm (<i>v. inf.</i> pp. <a href="#Page_253">253</a>-256) was written by Snorri
+himself; the story of the alarm and pursuit (<a href="#Page_255">p. 255</a>) came from the
+recollections of Gudny, Snorri's mother.</p>
+
+<p>In the <i>Chansons de Geste</i> a great discovery has been made since my
+essay was written; the <i>Chan&#231;un de Willame</i>, an earlier and ruder
+version of the epic of <i>Aliscans</i>, has been printed by the unknown
+possessor of the manuscript, and generously given to a number of
+students who have good reason to be grateful to him for his
+liberality. There are some notes on the poem in <i>Romania</i> (vols.
+xxxii. and xxxiv.) by M. Paul Meyer and Mr. Raymond Weeks, and it has
+been used by Mr. Andrew Lang in illustration of Homer and his age. It
+is the sort of thing that the Greeks willingly let die; a rough
+draught of an epic poem, in many ways more barbarous than the other
+extant <i>chansons de geste</i>, but full of vigour, and notable (like <i>le
+Roi Gormond</i>, another of the older epics) for its refrain and other
+lyrical passages, very like the manner of the ballads. The <i>Chan&#231;un de
+Willame</i>, it may be observed, is not very different from <i>Aliscans</i>
+with regard to Rainouart, the humorous gigantic helper of William of
+Orange. One would not have been surprised if it had been otherwise, if
+Rainouart had been first introduced by the later composer, with a view
+to &quot;comic relief&quot; or some such additional variety for his tale. But it
+is not so; Rainouart, it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span> appears, has a good right to his place by
+the side of William. The grotesque element in French epic is found
+very early, <i>e.g.</i> in the <i>Pilgrimage of Charlemagne</i>, and is not to
+be reckoned among the signs of decadence.</p>
+
+<p>There ought to be a reference, on <a href="#Page_298">p. 298</a> below, to M. Joseph B&#233;dier's
+papers in the <i>Revue Historique</i> (xcv. and xcvii.) on <i>Raoul de
+Cambrai</i>. M. B&#233;dier's <i>L&#233;gendes &#233;piques</i>, not yet published at this
+time of writing, will soon be in the hands of his expectant readers.</p>
+
+<p>I am deeply indebted to many friends&#8212;first of all to York Powell&#8212;for
+innumerable good things spoken and written about these studies. My
+reviewers, in spite of all differences of opinion, have put me under
+strong obligations to them for their fairness and consideration.
+Particularly, I have to offer my most sincere acknowledgments to Dr.
+Andreas Heusler of Berlin for the honour he has done my book in his
+<i>Lied und Epos</i> (1905), and not less for the help that he has given,
+in this and other of his writings, towards the better understanding of
+the old poems and their history.</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: right">W. P. K.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Oxford</span>, <i>25th Jan. 1908</i>.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<p>&#160;</p>
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a></h3>
+
+<h3>INTRODUCTION</h3>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a href="#I.I">The Heroic Age</a></span></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>&#160;</td><td style="text-align: right">PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Epic and Romance: the two great orders of medieval narrative</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Epic</i>, of the &quot;heroic age,&quot; preceding <i>Romance</i> of the &quot;age of chivalry&quot;</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_4">4</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The heroic age represented in three kinds of literature&#8212;Teutonic Epic, French Epic, and the Icelandic Sagas</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_6">6</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Conditions of Life in an &quot;heroic age&quot;</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_7">7</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Homer and the Northern poets</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_9">9</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Homeric passages in <i>Beowulf</i><br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">and in the <i>Song of Maldon</i></span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_10">10</a><br /><a href="#Page_11">11</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Progress of poetry in the heroic age</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_13">13</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Growth of Epic, distinct in character, but generally incomplete, among the Teutonic nations</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_14">14</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a href="#I.II">Epic and Romance</a></span></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>The complex nature of Epic</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>No kind or aspect of life that may not be included</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>This freedom due to the dramatic quality of true (<i>e.g.</i> Homeric) Epic <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span><br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">as explained by Aristotle</span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_17">17</a><br /><a href="#Page_17">17</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Epic does not require a magnificent ideal subject<br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">such as those of the artificial epic (<i>Aeneid</i>, <i>Gerusalemme Liberata</i>, <i>Paradise Lost</i>)</span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_18">18</a><br /><a href="#Page_18">18</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The <i>Iliad</i> unlike these poems in its treatment of &quot;ideal&quot; motives (patriotism, etc.)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_19">19</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>True Epic begins with a dramatic plot and characters</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_20">20</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Epic of the Northern heroic age is sound in its dramatic conception<br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">and does not depend on impersonal ideals (with exceptions, in the <i>Chansons de geste</i>)</span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_20">20</a><br /><a href="#Page_21">21</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The German heroes in history and epic (Ermanaric, Attila, Theodoric)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_21">21</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Relations of Epic to historical fact</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_22">22</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The epic poet is free in the conduct of his story<br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">but his story and personages must belong to his own people</span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_23">23</a><br /><a href="#Page_26">26</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Nature of Epic brought out by contrast with secondary narrative poems, where the subject is not national</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_27">27</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>This secondary kind of poem may be excellent, but is always different in character from native Epic</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_28">28</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Disputes of academic critics about the &quot;Epic Poem&quot;</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_30">30</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tasso's defence of Romance. Pedantic attempts to restrict the compass of Epic</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_30">30</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Bossu on Phaeacia</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_31">31</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Epic, as the most comprehensive kind of poetry, includes Romance as one of its elements<br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">but needs a strong dramatic imagination to keep Romance under control</span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_32">32</a><br /><a href="#Page_33">33</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a href="#I.III">Romantic Mythology</a></span></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>Mythology not required in the greatest scenes in Homer</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_35">35</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Myths and popular fancies may be a hindrance to the epic poet, but he is compelled to make some use of them</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_36">36</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>He criticises and selects, and allows the characters of the gods <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">[Pg xiii]</a></span>to be modified in relation to the human characters</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_37">37</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Early humanism and reflexion on myth&#8212;two processes: (1) rejection of the grosser myths; (2) refinement of myth<br />through poetry</td><td style="text-align: right">&#160;<br /><a href="#Page_40">40</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Two ways of refining myth in poetry&#8212;(1) by turning it into mere fancy, and the more ludicrous things into comedy;<br />(2) by finding an imaginative or an ethical meaning in it</td><td style="text-align: right">&#160;<br /><a href="#Page_40">40</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Instances in Icelandic literature&#8212;<i>Lokasenna</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_41">41</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Snorri Sturluson, his ironical method in the <i>Edda</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_42">42</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The old gods rescued from clerical persecution</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_43">43</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Imaginative treatment of the graver myths&#8212;the death of Balder; the Doom of the Gods</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_43">43</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Difficulties in the attainment of poetical self-command</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_44">44</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Medieval confusion and distraction</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_45">45</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Premature &quot;culture&quot;</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_46">46</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Depreciation of native work in comparison with ancient literature and with theology</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_47">47</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>An Icelandic gentleman's library</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_47">47</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The whalebone casket</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_48">48</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Epic not wholly stifled by &quot;useful knowledge&quot;</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_49">49</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a href="#I.IV">The Three Schools&#8212;Teutonic Epic&#8212;French Epic&#8212;The
+Icelandic Histories</a></span></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>Early failure of Epic among the Continental Germans</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_50">50</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Old English Epic invaded by Romance (Lives of Saints, etc.)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_50">50</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Old Northern (Icelandic) poetry full of romantic mythology</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_51">51</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>French Epic and Romance contrasted</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_51">51</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Feudalism in the old French Epic (<i>Chansons de Geste</i>) not unlike the prefeudal &quot;heroic age&quot;</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_52">52</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>But the <i>Chansons de Geste</i> are in many ways &quot;romantic&quot;</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_53">53</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Comparison of the English <i>Song of Byrhtnoth</i> (<i>Maldon</i>, <span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 991) with the <i>Chanson de Roland</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_54">54</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Severity and restraint of <i>Byrhtnoth</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_55">55</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Mystery and pathos of <i>Roland</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_56">56</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Iceland and the German heroic age</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_57">57</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Icelandic paradox&#8212;old-fashioned politics together with <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">[Pg xiv]</a></span>clear understanding</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_58">58</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Icelandic prose literature&#8212;its subject, the anarchy of the heroic age; its methods, clear and positive</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_59">59</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Icelandic histories, in prose, complete the development of the early Teutonic Epic poetry</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_60">60</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>&#160;</p>
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a></h3>
+
+<h3>THE TEUTONIC EPIC</h3>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a href="#II.I">The Tragic Conception</a></span></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>Early German poetry</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_65">65</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>One of the first things certain about it is that it knew the meaning of tragic situations</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_66">66</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The <i>Death of Ermanaric</i> in Jordanes</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_66">66</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The story of <i>Alboin</i> in Paulus Diaconus</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_66">66</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tragic plots in the extant poems</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_69">69</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The <i>Death of Ermanaric</i> in the &quot;Poetic Edda&quot; (<i>Ham&#240;ism&#225;l</i>)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_70">70</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Some of the Northern poems show the tragic conception modified by romantic motives, yet without loss of the tragic<br />purport&#8212;<i>Helgi and Sigrun</i></td><td style="text-align: right">&#160;<br /><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Similar harmony of motives in the <i>Waking of Angantyr</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_73">73</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Whatever may be wanting, the heroic poetry had no want of tragic plots&#8212;the &quot;fables&quot; are sound</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_74">74</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Value of the abstract plot (Aristotle)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_74">74</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a href="#II.II">Scale of the Poems</a></span></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>List of extant poems and fragments in one or other of the older Teutonic languages (German, English, and Northern) in<br />unrhymed alliterative verse</td><td style="text-align: right">&#160;<br /><a href="#Page_76">76</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Small amount of the extant poetry</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_78">78</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Supplemented in various ways</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_79">79</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xv" id="Page_xv">[Pg xv]</a></span>1. <span class="smcap">The Western Group</span> (German and English)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_79">79</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Amount of story contained in the several poems, and scale of treatment</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_79">79</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Hildebrand</i>, a short story</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_80">80</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Finnesburh</i>, (1) the Lambeth fragment (Hickes); and (2) the abstract of the story in <i>Beowulf</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_81">81</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Finnesburh</i>, a story of (1) wrong and (2) vengeance, like the story of the death of Attila, or of the betrayal of Roland</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_82">82</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Uncertainty as to the compass of the <i>Finnesburh</i> poem (Lambeth) in its original complete form</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_84">84</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Waldere</i>, two fragments: the story of Walter of Aquitaine preserved in the Latin <i>Waltharius</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_84">84</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Plot of <i>Waltharius</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_84">84</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Place of the <i>Waldere</i> fragments in the story, and probable compass of the whole poem</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Scale of <i>Maldon</i><br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">and of <i>Beowulf</i></span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_88">88</a><br /><a href="#Page_89">89</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>General resemblance in the themes of these poems&#8212;unity of action</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_89">89</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Development of style, and not neglect of unity nor multiplication of contents, accounts for the difference of length between<br />earlier and later poems</td><td style="text-align: right">&#160;<br /><a href="#Page_91">91</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Progress of Epic in England&#8212;unlike the history of Icelandic poetry</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_92">92</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>2. <span class="smcap">The Northern Group</span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_93">93</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The contents of the so-called &quot;Elder Edda&quot; (<i>i.e.</i> <i>Codex Regius</i> 2365, 4to <i>Havn</i>.)<br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">to what extent <i>Epic</i></span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_93">93</a><br /><a href="#Page_93">93</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Notes on the contents of the poems, to show their scale; the <i>Lay of Weland</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_94">94</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Different plan in the <i>Lays of Thor</i>, <i>&#222;rymskvi&#240;a</i> and <i>Hymiskvi&#240;a</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_95">95</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The <i>Helgi</i> Poems&#8212;complications of the text</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_95">95</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Three separate stories&#8212;<i>Helgi Hundingsbane and Sigrun</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_95">95</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Helgi Hiorvardsson and Swava</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_98">98</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Helgi and Kara</i> (lost)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_99">99</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The story of the Volsungs&#8212;the long <i>Lay of Brynhild</i><br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">contains the whole story in abstract</span><br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">giving the chief place to the character of <i>Brynhild</i></span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_100">100</a><br /><a href="#Page_100">100</a><br /><a href="#Page_101">101</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The <i>Hell-ride of Brynhild</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_102">102</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xvi" id="Page_xvi">[Pg xvi]</a></span>The fragmentary <i>Lay of Brynhild</i> (<i>Brot af Sigur&#240;arkvi&#240;u</i>)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_103">103</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Poems on the death of Attila&#8212;the <i>Lay of Attila</i> (<i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i>), and the Greenland <i>Poem of Attila</i> (<i>Atlam&#225;l</i>)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_105">105</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Proportions of the story</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_105">105</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A third version of the story in the <i>Lament of Oddrun</i> (<i>Oddr&#250;nargr&#225;tr</i>)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_107">107</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The <i>Death of Ermanaric</i> (<i>Ham&#240;ism&#225;l</i>)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_109">109</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Northern idylls of the heroines (Oddrun, Gudrun)&#8212;the <i>Old Lay of Gudrun</i>, or Gudrun's story to Theodoric</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_109">109</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The <i>Lay of Gudrun</i> (<i>Gu&#240;r&#250;narkvi&#240;a</i>)&#8212;Gudrun's sorrow for Sigurd</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_111">111</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The refrain</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_111">111</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Gudrun's <i>Chain of Woe</i> (<i>Tregrof Gu&#240;r&#250;nar</i>)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_111">111</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The <i>Ordeal of Gudrun</i>, an episodic lay</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_111">111</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Poems in dialogue, without narrative&#8212;<br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">(1) Dialogues in the common epic measure&#8212;<i>Balder's Doom</i>, Dialogues of <i>Sigurd</i>, <i>Angantyr</i>&#8212;explanations</span><br /><span style="margin-left: 2em">in prose, between the dialogues</span><br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">(2) Dialogues in the gnomic or elegiac measure:</span><br /><span style="margin-left: 2em">(<i>a</i>) vituperative debates&#8212;<i>Lokasenna</i>, <i>Harbarzli&#243;&#240;</i> (in irregular verse), <i>Atli and Rimgerd</i></span><br /><span style="margin-left: 2em;">(<i>b</i>) Dialogues implying action&#8212;<i>The Wooing of Frey</i> (<i>Sk&#237;rnism&#225;l</i>)</span></td><td style="text-align: right">&#160;<br />&#160;<br /><a href="#Page_112">112</a><br />&#160;<br /><a href="#Page_112">112</a><br /><a href="#Page_114">114</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Svipdag and Menglad</i> (<i>Gr&#243;galdr</i>, <i>Fi&#246;lsvinnsm&#225;l</i>)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_114">114</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The <i>Volsung</i> dialogues</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_115">115</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Western and Northern poems compared, with respect to their scale</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_116">116</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The old English poems (<i>Beowulf</i>, <i>Waldere</i>), in scale, midway between the Northern poems and Homer</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_117">117</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Many of the Teutonic epic remains may look like the &quot;short lays&quot; of the agglutinative epic theory; but this is illusion</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_117">117</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Two kinds of story in Teutonic Epic&#8212;(1) episodic, <i>i.e.</i> representing a single action (<i>Hildebrand</i>, etc.);<br />(2) summary, <i>i.e.</i> giving the whole of a long story in abstract, with details of one part of it (<i>Weland</i>, etc.)</td><td style="text-align: right">&#160;<br /><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The second class is unfit for agglutination</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_119">119</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Also the first, when it is looked into</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_121">121</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Teutonic Lays are too individual to be conveniently <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xvii" id="Page_xvii">[Pg xvii]</a></span>fused into larger masses of narrative</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_122">122</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a href="#II.III">Epic and Ballad Poetry</a></span></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>Many of the old epic lays are on the scale of popular ballads</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_123">123</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Their style is different</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_124">124</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>As may be proved where later ballads have taken up the epic subjects</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_125">125</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Danish ballads of <i>Ungen Sveidal</i> (<i>Svipdag and Menglad</i>)<br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">and of <i>Sivard</i> (<i>Sigurd and Brynhild</i>)</span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_126">126</a><br /><a href="#Page_127">127</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The early epic poetry, unlike the ballads, was ambitious and capable of progress</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_129">129</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a href="#II.IV">The Style of the Poems</a></span></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>Rhetorical art of the alliterative verse</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_133">133</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>English and Norse</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_134">134</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Different besetting temptations in England and the North</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_136">136</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>English tameness; Norse emphasis and false wit (the Scaldic poetry)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_137">137</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Narrative poetry undeveloped in the North; unable to compete with the lyrical forms</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_137">137</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Lyrical element in Norse narrative</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_138">138</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Volosp&#225;</i>, the greatest of all the Northern poems</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_139">139</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>False heroics; <i>Kr&#225;kum&#225;l</i> (<i>Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrok</i>)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_140">140</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A fresh start, in prose, with no rhetorical encumbrances</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_141">141</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a href="#II.V">The Progress of Epic</a></span></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>Various renderings of the same story due (1) to accidents of tradition and impersonal causes; (2) to calculation and<br />selection of motives by poets, and intentional modification of traditional matter</td><td style="text-align: right">&#160;<br /><a href="#Page_144">144</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The three versions of the death of Gunnar and Hogni compared&#8212;<i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i>, <i>Atlam&#225;l</i>, <i>Oddr&#250;nargr&#225;tr</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_147">147</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Agreement of the three poems in ignoring the German theory <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xviii" id="Page_xviii">[Pg xviii]</a></span>of Kriemhild's revenge</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_149">149</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The incidents of the death of Hogni clear in <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i>, apparently confused and ill recollected in the other two poems</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_150">150</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>But it turns out that these two poems had each a view of its own which made it impossible to use the original story</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_152">152</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Atlam&#225;l</i>, the work of a critical author, making his selection of incidents from heroic tradition<br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">the largest epic work in Northern poetry, and the last of its school</span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_153">153</a><br /><a href="#Page_155">155</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The &quot;Poetic Edda,&quot; a collection of deliberate experiments in poetry and not of casual popular variants</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_156">156</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<h3><i><span class="smcap"><a href="#II.VI">Beowulf</a></span></i></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td><i>Beowulf</i> claims to be a single complete work</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_158">158</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Want of unity: a story and a sequel</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_159">159</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>More unity in <i>Beowulf</i> than in some Greek epics. The first 2200 lines form a complete story, not ill composed</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_160">160</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Homeric method of episodes and allusions in <i>Beowulf</i><br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">and <i>Waldere</i></span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_162">162</a><br /><a href="#Page_163">163</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Triviality of the main plot in both parts of <i>Beowulf</i>&#8212;tragic significance in some of the allusions</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_165">165</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The characters in <i>Beowulf</i> abstract types</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_165">165</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The adventures and sentiments commonplace, especially in the fight with the dragon</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_168">168</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Adventure of Grendel not pure fantasy</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_169">169</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Grendel's mother more romantic</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_172">172</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Beowulf</i> is able to give epic dignity to a commonplace set of romantic adventures</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_173">173</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>&#160;</p>
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</a></h3>
+
+<h3>THE ICELANDIC SAGAS</h3>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a href="#III.I">Iceland and the Heroic Age</a></span></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>The close of Teutonic Epic&#8212;in Germany the old forms were <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xix" id="Page_xix">[Pg xix]</a></span>lost, but not the old stories, in the later Middle Ages</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_179">179</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>England kept the alliterative verse through the Middle Ages</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_180">180</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heroic themes in Danish ballads, and elsewhere</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_181">181</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Place of Iceland in the heroic tradition&#8212;a new heroic literature in prose</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_182">182</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a href="#III.II">Matter and Form</a></span></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>The Sagas are not pure fiction</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_184">184</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Difficulty of giving form to genealogical details</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_185">185</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Miscellaneous incidents</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_186">186</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Literary value of the historical basis&#8212;the characters well known and recognisable</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_187">187</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The coherent Sagas&#8212;the tragic motive</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_189">189</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Plan of <i>Nj&#225;la</i><br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">of <i>Laxd&#230;la</i></span><br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">of <i>Egils Saga</i></span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_190">190</a><br /><a href="#Page_191">191</a><br /><a href="#Page_192">192</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>V&#225;pnfir&#240;inga Saga</i>, a story of two generations</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_193">193</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>V&#237;ga-Gl&#250;ms Saga</i>, a biography without tragedy</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_193">193</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Reykd&#230;la Saga</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_194">194</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Grettis Saga</i> and <i>G&#237;sla Saga</i> clearly worked out</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_195">195</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Passages of romance in these histories</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_196">196</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Hrafnkels Saga Freysgo&#240;a</i>, a tragic idyll, well proportioned</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_198">198</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Great differences of scale among the Sagas&#8212;analogies with the heroic poems</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_198">198</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a href="#III.III">The Heroic Ideal</a></span></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>Unheroic matters of fact in the Sagas</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_200">200</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heroic characters</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_201">201</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Heroic rhetoric</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_203">203</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Danger of exaggeration&#8212;Kjartan in <i>Laxd&#230;la</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_204">204</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xx" id="Page_xx">[Pg xx]</a></span>The heroic ideal not made too explicit or formal</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_206">206</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a href="#III.IV">Tragic Imagination</a></span></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>Tragic contradictions in the Sagas&#8212;<i>Gisli</i>, <i>Njal</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_207">207</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Fantasy</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_208">208</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Laxd&#230;la</i>, a reduction of the story of Sigurd and Brynhild to the terms of common life</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_209">209</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Compare Ibsen's <i>Warriors in Helgeland</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_209">209</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Sagas are a late stage in the progress of heroic literature</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_210">210</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Northern rationalism</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_212">212</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Self-restraint and irony</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_213">213</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The elegiac mood infrequent</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_215">215</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The story of Howard of Icefirth&#8212;ironical pathos</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_216">216</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The conventional Viking</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_218">218</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The harmonies of <i>Nj&#225;la</i><br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">and of <i>Laxd&#230;la</i></span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_219">219</a><br /><a href="#Page_222">222</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The two speeches of Gudrun</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_223">223</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a href="#III.V">Comedy</a></span></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>The Sagas not bound by solemn conventions</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_225">225</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Comic humours</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_226">226</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Bjorn and his wife in <i>Nj&#225;la</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_228">228</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Bandamanna Saga</i>: &quot;The Confederates,&quot; a comedy</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_229">229</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Satirical criticism of the &quot;heroic age&quot;</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_231">231</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tragic incidents in <i>Bandamanna Saga</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_233">233</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Neither the comedy nor tragedy of the Sagas is monotonous or abstract</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_234">234</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a href="#III.VI">The Art of Narrative</a></span></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>Organic unity of the best Sagas</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_235">235</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Method of representing occurrences as they appear at the time</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_236">236</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxi" id="Page_xxi">[Pg xxi]</a></span>Instance from <i>&#222;orgils Saga</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_238">238</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Another method&#8212;the death of Kjartan as it appeared to a churl</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_240">240</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Psychology (not analytical)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_244">244</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Impartiality&#8212;justice to the hero's adversaries (<i>F&#230;reyinga Saga</i>)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_245">245</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<h3>VII</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a href="#III.VII">Epic and History</a></span></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>Form of Saga used for contemporary history in the thirteenth century</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_246">246</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The historians, Ari (1067-1148) and Snorri (1178-1241)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_248">248</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The <i>Life of King Sverre</i>, by Abbot Karl J&#243;nsson</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_249">249</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sturla (<i>c.</i> 1214-1284), his history of Iceland in his own time (<i>Islendinga</i> or <i>Sturlunga Saga</i>)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_249">249</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The matter ready to his hand</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_250">250</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Biographies incorporated in <i>Sturlunga</i>: Thorgils and Haflidi</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_252">252</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Sturlu Saga</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_253">253</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The midnight raid (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1171)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_254">254</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Lives of Bishop Gudmund, Hrafn, and Aron</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_256">256</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sturla's own work (<i>Islendinga Saga</i>)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_257">257</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The burning of Flugumyri</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_259">259</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Traces of the heroic manner</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_264">264</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The character of this history brought out by contrast with Sturla's other work, the <i>Life of King Hacon of Norway</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_267">267</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Norwegian and Icelandic politics in the thirteenth century</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_267">267</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Norway more fortunate than Iceland&#8212;the history less interesting</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_267">267</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sturla and Joinville contemporaries</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_269">269</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Their methods of narrative compared</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_270">270</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<h3>VIII</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a href="#III.VIII">The Northern Prose Romances</a></span></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>Romantic interpolations in the Sagas&#8212;the ornamental version of <i>F&#243;stbr&#230;&#240;ra Saga</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_275">275</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The secondary romantic Sagas&#8212;<i>Frithiof</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_277">277</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>French romance imported (<i>Strengleikar</i>, <i>Tristram's Saga</i>, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxii" id="Page_xxii">[Pg xxii]</a></span>etc.)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_278">278</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Romantic Sagas made out of heroic poems (<i>Volsunga Saga</i>, etc.)<br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">and out of authentic Sagas by repetition of common forms and motives</span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_279">279</a><br /><a href="#Page_280">280</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Romantic conventions in the original Sagas</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_280">280</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Laxd&#230;la</i> and <i>Gunnlaug's Saga</i>&#8212;<i>Thorstein the White</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_281">281</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Thorstein Staffsmitten</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_282">282</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sagas turned into rhyming romances (<i>R&#237;mur</i>)<br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">and into ballads in the Faroes</span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_283">283</a><br /><a href="#Page_284">284</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>&#160;</p>
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a></h3>
+
+<h3>THE OLD FRENCH EPIC</h3>
+
+<h3>(<span class="smcap"><i>Chansons de Geste</i></span>)</h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>Lateness of the extant versions</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_287">287</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Competition of Epic and Romance in the twelfth century</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_288">288</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Widespread influence of the <i>Chansons de geste</i>&#8212;a contrast to the Sagas</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_289">289</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Narrative style</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_290">290</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>No obscurities of diction</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_291">291</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The &quot;heroic age&quot; imperfectly represented<br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">but not ignored</span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_292">292</a><br /><a href="#Page_293">293</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Roland</i>&#8212;heroic idealism&#8212;France and Christendom</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_293">293</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>William of Orange&#8212;<i>Aliscans</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_296">296</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Rainouart&#8212;exaggeration of heroism</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_296">296</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Another class of stories in the <i>Chansons de geste</i>, more like the Sagas</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_297">297</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Raoul de Cambrai</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_298">298</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Barbarism of style</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_299">299</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Garin le Loherain</i>&#8212;style clarified</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_300">300</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Problems of character&#8212;Fromont</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_301">301</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The story of the death of Begon<br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">unlike contemporary work of the Romantic School</span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_302">302</a><br /><a href="#Page_304">304</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The lament for Begon</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_307">307</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Raoul</i> and <i>Garin</i> contrasted with <i>Roland</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_308">308</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Comedy in French Epic&#8212;&quot;humours&quot; in <i>Garin</i> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxiii" id="Page_xxiii">[Pg xxiii]</a></span><br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">in the <i>Coronemenz Loo&#239;s</i>, etc.</span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_310">310</a><br /><a href="#Page_311">311</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Romantic additions to heroic cycles&#8212;<i>la Prise d'Orange</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_313">313</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Huon de Bordeaux</i>&#8212;the original story grave and tragic<br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">converted to Romance</span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_314">314</a><br /><a href="#Page_314">314</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>&#160;</p>
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</a></h3>
+
+<h3>ROMANCE AND THE OLD FRENCH ROMANTIC SCHOOLS</h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>Romance an element in Epic and Tragedy apart from all &quot;romantic schools&quot;</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_321">321</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The literary movements of the twelfth century</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_322">322</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A new beginning</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_323">323</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Romantic School unromantic in its methods</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_324">324</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Professional Romance</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_325">325</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Characteristics of the school&#8212;courteous sentiment</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_328">328</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Decorative passages&#8212;descriptions&#8212;pedantry</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_329">329</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Instances from <i>Roman de Troie</i><br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">and from <i>Ider</i>, etc.</span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_330">330</a><br /><a href="#Page_331">331</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Romantic adventures&#8212;the &quot;matter of Rome&quot; and the &quot;matter of Britain&quot;</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_334">334</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Blending of classical and Celtic influences&#8212;<i>e.g.</i> in Benoit's <i>Medea</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_334">334</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Methods of narrative&#8212;simple, as in the <i>Lay of Guingamor</i>; overloaded, as in <i>Walewein</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_337">337</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Guingamor</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_338">338</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Walewein</i>, a popular tale disguised as a chivalrous romance</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_340">340</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The different versions of <i>Libeaux Desconus</i>&#8212;one of them is sophisticated</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_343">343</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Tristram</i>&#8212;the Anglo-Norman poems comparatively simple and ingenuous</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_344">344</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>French Romance and Proven&#231;al Lyric</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_345">345</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Ovid in the Middle Ages&#8212;the <i>Art of Love</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_346">346</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Heroines</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_347">347</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Benoit's <i>Medea</i> again</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_348">348</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Chrestien of Troyes, his place at the beginning of modern literature</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_349">349</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxiv" id="Page_xxiv">[Pg xxiv]</a></span>'Enlightenment' in the Romantic School</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_350">350</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The sophists of Romance&#8212;the rhetoric of sentiment and passion</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_351">351</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The progress of Romance from medieval to modern literature</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_352">352</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Chrestien of Troyes, his inconsistencies&#8212;nature and convention</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_352">352</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Departure from conventional romance; Chrestien's <i>Enid</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_355">355</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Chrestien's <i>Cliges</i>&#8212;&quot;sensibility&quot;</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_357">357</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Flamenca</i>, a Proven&#231;al story of the thirteenth century&#8212;the author a follower of Chrestien</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_359">359</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>His acquaintance with romantic literature<br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">and rejection of the &quot;machinery&quot; of adventures</span></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_360">360</a><br /><a href="#Page_360">360</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Flamenca</i>, an appropriation of Ovid&#8212;disappearance of romantic mythology</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_361">361</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The <i>Lady of Vergi</i>, a short tragic story without false rhetoric</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_362">362</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Use of medieval themes by the great poets of the fourteenth century</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_363">363</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Boccaccio and Chaucer&#8212;the <i>Teseide</i> and the <i>Knight's Tale</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_364">364</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Variety of Chaucer's methods</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_364">364</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Want of art in the <i>Man of Law's Tale</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_365">365</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The abstract point of honour (<i>Clerk's Tale</i>, <i>Franklin's Tale</i>)</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_366">366</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Pathos in the <i>Legend of Good Women</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_366">366</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Romantic method perfect in the <i>Knight's Tale</i></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_366">366</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>Anelida</i>, the abstract form of romance</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_367">367</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>In <i>Troilus and Criseyde</i> the form of medieval romance is filled out with strong dramatic imagination</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_367">367</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Romance obtains the freedom of Epic, without the old local and national limitations of Epic</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_368">368</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Conclusion</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_370">370</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>&#160;</p>
+
+<h3><a href="#APPENDIX">APPENDIX</a></h3>
+
+<table style="width: 100%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td><a href="#NOTE_A">Note A</a>&#8212;Rhetoric of the Alliterative Poetry</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_373">373</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#NOTE_B">Note B</a>&#8212;Kjartan and Olaf Tryggvason</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_375">375</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#NOTE_C">Note C</a>&#8212;Eyjolf Karsson</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_381">381</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#NOTE_D">Note D</a>&#8212;Two Catalogues of Romances</td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_384">384</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&#160;</td><td style="text-align: right">&#160;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><b><a href="#INDEX">INDEX</a></b></td><td style="text-align: right"><a href="#Page_391">391</a></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h1>INTRODUCTION</h1>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="I.I"></a>I</h3>
+
+<h3>THE HEROIC AGE</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> title of Epic, or of &quot;heroic poem,&quot; is claimed by historians for a
+number of works belonging to the earlier Middle Ages, and to the
+medieval origins of modern literature. &quot;Epic&quot; is a term freely applied
+to the old school of Germanic narrative poetry, which in different
+dialects is represented by the poems of Hildebrand, of Beowulf, of
+Sigurd and Brynhild. &quot;Epic&quot; is the name for the body of old French
+poems which is headed by the <i>Chanson de Roland</i>. The rank of Epic is
+assigned by many to the <i>Nibelungenlied</i>, not to speak of other Middle
+High German poems on themes of German tradition. The title of prose
+Epic has been claimed for the Sagas of Iceland.</p>
+
+<p>By an equally common consent the name Romance is given to a number of
+kinds of medieval narrative by which the Epic is succeeded and
+displaced; most notably in France, but also in other countries which
+were led, mainly by the example and influence of France, to give up
+their own &quot;epic&quot; forms and subjects in favour of new manners.</p>
+
+<p>This literary classification corresponds in general history to the
+difference between the earlier &quot;heroic&quot;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> age and the age of chivalry.
+The &quot;epics&quot; of Hildebrand and Beowulf belong, if not wholly to German
+heathendom, at any rate to the earlier and prefeudal stage of German
+civilisation. The French epics, in their extant form, belong for the
+most part in spirit, if not always in date, to an order of things
+unmodified by the great changes of the twelfth century. While among
+the products of the twelfth century one of the most remarkable is the
+new school of French romance, the brilliant and frequently
+vainglorious exponent of the modern ideas of that age, and of all its
+chivalrous and courtly fashions of thought and sentiment. The
+difference of the two orders of literature is as plain as the
+difference in the art of war between the two sides of the battle of
+Hastings, which indeed is another form of the same thing; for the
+victory of the Norman knights over the English axemen has more than a
+fanciful or superficial analogy to the victory of the new literature
+of chivalry over the older forms of heroic narrative. The history of
+those two orders of literature, of the earlier Epic kinds, followed by
+the various types of medieval Romance, is parallel to the general
+political history of the earlier and the later Middle Ages, and may do
+something to illustrate the general progress of the nations. The
+passage from the earlier &quot;heroic&quot; civilisation to the age of chivalry
+was not made without some contemporary record of the &quot;form and
+pressure&quot; of the times in the changing fashions of literature, and in
+successive experiments of the imagination.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever Epic may mean, it implies some weight and solidity; Romance
+means nothing, if it does not convey some notion of mystery and
+fantasy. A general distinction of this kind, whatever names may be
+used to render it, can be shown, in medieval<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> literature, to hold good
+of the two large groups of narrative belonging to the earlier and the
+later Middle Ages respectively. Beowulf might stand for the one side,
+Lancelot or Gawain for the other. It is a difference not confined to
+literature. The two groups are distinguished from one another, as the
+respectable piratical gentleman of the North Sea coast in the ninth or
+tenth century differs from one of the companions of St. Louis. The
+latter has something fantastic in his ideas which the other has not.
+The Crusader may indeed be natural and brutal enough in most of his
+ways, but he has lost the sobriety and simplicity of the earlier type
+of rover. If nothing else, his way of fighting&#8212;the undisciplined
+cavalry charge&#8212;would convict him of extravagance as compared with men
+of business, like the settlers of Iceland for example.</p>
+
+<p>The two great kinds of narrative literature in the Middle Ages might
+be distinguished by their favourite incidents and commonplaces of
+adventure. No kind of adventure is so common or better told in the
+earlier heroic manner than the defence of a narrow place against odds.
+Such are the stories of Hamther and Sorli in the hall of Ermanaric, of
+the Niblung kings in the hall of Attila, of the Fight of Finnesburh,
+of Walter at the Wasgenstein, of Byrhtnoth at Maldon, of Roland in the
+Pyrenees. Such are some of the finest passages in the Icelandic Sagas:
+the death of Gunnar, the burning of Njal's house, the burning of
+Flugumyri (an authentic record), the last fight of Kjartan in
+Svinadal, and of Grettir at Drangey. The story of Cynewulf and
+Cyneheard in the English Chronicle may well have come from a poem in
+which an attack and defence of this sort were narrated.</p>
+
+<p>The favourite adventure of medieval romance is something different,&#8212;a
+knight riding alone through a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> forest; another knight; a shock of
+lances; a fight on foot with swords, &quot;racing, tracing, and foining
+like two wild boars&quot;; then, perhaps, recognition&#8212;the two knights
+belong to the same household and are engaged in the same quest.</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Et Guivrez vers lui esperone,<br />
+De rien nule ne l'areisone,<br />
+Ne Erec ne li sona mot.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em"><i>Erec</i>, l. 5007.</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>This collision of blind forces, this tournament at random, takes the
+place, in the French romances, of the older kind of combat. In the
+older kind the parties have always good reasons of their own for
+fighting; they do not go into it with the same sort of readiness as
+the wandering champions of romance.</p>
+
+<p>The change of temper and fashion represented by the appearance and the
+vogue of the medieval French romances is a change involving the whole
+world, and going far beyond the compass of literature and literary
+history. It meant the final surrender of the old ideas, independent of
+Christendom, which had been enough for the Germanic nations in their
+earlier days; it was the close of their heroic age. What the &quot;heroic
+age&quot; of the modern nations really was, may be learned from what is
+left of their heroic literature, especially from three groups or
+classes,&#8212;the old Teutonic alliterative poems on native subjects; the
+French <i>Chansons de Geste</i>; and the Icelandic Sagas.</p>
+
+<p>All these three orders, whatever their faults may be, do something to
+represent a society which is &quot;heroic&quot; as the Greeks in Homer are
+heroic. There can be no mistake about the likeness. To compare the
+imaginations and the phrases of any of these barbarous works with the
+poetry of Homer may be futile, but their contents may be compared
+without<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> reference to their poetical qualities; and there is no
+question that the life depicted has many things in common with Homeric
+life, and agrees with Homer in ignorance of the peculiar ideas of
+medieval chivalry.</p>
+
+<p>The form of society in an heroic age is aristocratic and magnificent.
+At the same time, this aristocracy differs from that of later and more
+specialised forms of civilisation. It does not make an insuperable
+difference between gentle and simple. There is not the extreme
+division of labour that produces the contempt of the lord for the
+villain. The nobles have not yet discovered for themselves any form of
+occupation or mode of thought in virtue of which they are widely
+severed from the commons, nor have they invented any such ideal of
+life or conventional system of conduct as involves an ignorance or
+depreciation of the common pursuits of those below them. They have no
+such elaborate theory of conduct as is found in the chivalrous society
+of the Middle Ages. The great man is the man who is best at the things
+with which every one is familiar. The epic hero may despise the
+churlish man, may, like Odysseus in the <i>Iliad</i> (ii. 198), show little
+sympathy or patience with the bellowings of the multitude, but he may
+not ostentatiously refuse all community of ideas with simple people.
+His magnificence is not defended by scruples about everything low. It
+would not have mattered to Odysseus if he had been seen travelling in
+a cart, like Lancelot; though for Lancelot it was a great misfortune
+and anxiety. The art and pursuits of a gentleman in the heroic age are
+different from those of the churl, but not so far different as to keep
+them in different spheres. There is a community of prosaic interests.
+The great man is a good judge of cattle; he sails his own ship.</p>
+
+<p>A gentleman adventurer on board his own ship,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> following out his own
+ideas, carrying his men with him by his own power of mind and temper,
+and not by means of any system of naval discipline to which he as well
+as they must be subordinate; surpassing his men in skill, knowledge,
+and ambition, but taking part with them and allowing them to take part
+in the enterprise, is a good representative of the heroic age. This
+relation between captain and men may be found, accidentally and
+exceptionally, in later and more sophisticated forms of society. In
+the heroic age a relation between a great man and his followers
+similar to that between an Elizabethan captain and his crew is found
+to be the most important and fundamental relation in society. In later
+times it is only by a special favour of circumstances, as for example
+by the isolation of shipboard from all larger monarchies, that the
+heroic relation between the leader and the followers can be repeated.
+As society becomes more complex and conventional, this relation
+ceases. The homeliness of conversation between Odysseus and his
+vassals, or between Njal and Thord Freedman's son, is discouraged by
+the rules of courtly behaviour as gentlefolk become more idle and
+ostentatious, and their vassals more sordid and dependent. The secrets
+also of political intrigue and dexterity made a difference between
+noble and villain, in later and more complex medieval politics, such
+as is unknown in the earlier days and the more homely forms of
+Society. An heroic age may be full of all kinds of nonsense and
+superstition, but its motives of action are mainly positive and
+sensible,&#8212;cattle, sheep, piracy, abduction, merchandise, recovery of
+stolen goods, revenge. The narrative poetry of an heroic age, whatever
+dignity it may obtain either by its dramatic force of imagination, or
+by the aid of its mythology, will keep its hold upon such common
+matters, simply because it cannot<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> do without the essential practical
+interests, and has nothing to put in their place, if kings and chiefs
+are to be represented at all. The heroic age cannot dress up ideas or
+sentiments to play the part of characters. If its characters are not
+men they are nothing, not even thoughts or allegories; they cannot go
+on talking unless they have something to do; and so the whole business
+of life comes bodily into the epic poem.</p>
+
+<p>How much the matter of the Northern heroic literature resembles the
+Homeric, may be felt and recognised at every turn in a survey of the
+ground. In both there are the <i>ashen spears</i>; there are the <i>shepherds
+of the people</i>; the retainers bound by loyalty to the prince who gives
+them meat and drink; the great hall with its minstrelsy, its boasting
+and bickering; the battles which are a number of single combats, while
+&quot;physiology supplies the author with images&quot;<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> for the same; the
+heroic rule of conduct (<span title="Greek: iomen">&#953;&#959;&#956;&#949;&#957;</span>)<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>; the eminence of the hero,
+and at the same time his community of occupation and interest with
+those who are less distinguished.</p>
+
+<p>There are other resemblances also, but some of these are miraculous,
+and perhaps irrelevant. By what magic is it that the cry of Odysseus,
+wounded and hard bestead in his retreat before the Trojans, comes over
+us like the three blasts of the horn of Roland?</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Thrice he shouted, as loud as the head of a man will bear;
+and three times Menelaus heard the sound thereof, and
+quickly he turned and spake to Ajax: &quot;Ajax, there is come
+about me the cry of Odysseus slow to yield; and it is like
+as though the Trojans had come hard upon him by himself
+alone, closing him round in the battle.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></p></div>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span></p>
+<p>It is reported as a discovery made by Mephistopheles in Thessaly, in
+the classical <i>Walpurgisnacht</i>, that the company there was very much
+like his old acquaintances on the Brocken. A similar discovery, in
+regard to more honourable personages and other scenes, may be made by
+other Gothic travellers in a &quot;south-eastward&quot; journey to heroic
+Greece. The classical reader of the Northern heroics may be frequently
+disgusted by their failures; he may also be bribed, if not to applaud,
+at least to continue his study, by the glimmerings and &quot;shadowy
+recollections,&quot; the affinities and correspondences between the Homeric
+and the Northern heroic world.</p>
+
+<p>Beowulf and his companions sail across the sea to Denmark on an errand
+of deliverance,&#8212;to cleanse the land of monsters. They are welcomed by
+Hrothgar, king of the Danes, and by his gentle queen, in a house less
+fortunate than the house of Alcinous, for it is exposed to the attacks
+of the lumpish ogre that Beowulf has to kill, but recalling in its
+splendour, in the manner of its entertainment, and the bearing of its
+gracious lord and lady, the house where Odysseus told his story.
+Beowulf, like Odysseus, is assailed by an envious person with
+discourteous words. Hunferth, the Danish courtier, is irritated by
+Beowulf's presence; &quot;he could not endure that any one should be
+counted worthier than himself&quot;; he speaks enviously, a biting
+speech&#8212;<span title="Greek: thymodak&#234;s gar mythos">&#952;&#965;&#956;&#959;&#948;&#945;&#954;&#951;&#962; &#947;&#945;&#961; &#956;&#965;&#952;&#959;&#962;</span>&#8212;and is answered in the tone of
+Odysseus to Euryalus.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> Beowulf has a story to tell of his former
+perils among the creatures of the sea. It is differently introduced
+from that of Odysseus, and has not the same importance, but it
+increases the likeness between the two adventurers.</p>
+
+<p>In the shadowy halls of the Danish king a minstrel<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> sings of the
+famous deeds of men, and his song is given as an interlude in the main
+action. It is a poem on that same tragedy of Finnesburh, which is the
+theme of a separate poem in the Old English heroic cycle; so Demodocus
+took his subjects from the heroic cycle of Achaea. The leisure of the
+Danish king's house is filled in the same manner as the leisure of
+Phaeacia. In spite of the difference of the climate, it is impossible
+to mistake the likeness between the Greek and the Northern conceptions
+of a dignified and reasonable way of life. The magnificence of the
+Homeric great man is like the magnificence of the Northern lord, in so
+far as both are equally marked off from the pusillanimity and
+cheapness of popular morality on the one hand, and from the
+ostentation of Oriental or chivalrous society on the other. The
+likeness here is not purely in the historical details, but much more
+in the spirit that informs the poetry.</p>
+
+<p>If this part of <i>Beowulf</i> is a Northern <i>Odyssey</i>, there is nothing in
+the whole range of English literature so like a scene from the <i>Iliad</i>
+as the narrative of Maldon. It is a battle in which the separate deeds
+of the fighters are described, with not quite so much anatomy as in
+Homer. The fighting about the body of Byrhtnoth is described as
+strongly, as &quot;the Fighting at the Wall&quot; in the twelfth book of the
+<i>Iliad</i>, and essentially in the same way, with the interchange of
+blows clearly noted, together with the speeches and thoughts of the
+combatants. Even the most heroic speech in Homer, even the power of
+Sarpedon's address to Glaucus in the twelfth book of the <i>Iliad</i>,
+cannot discredit, by comparison, the heroism and the sublimity of the
+speech of the &quot;old companion&quot; at the end of <i>Maldon</i>. The language is
+simple, but it is not less adequate in its own way<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> than the
+simplicity of Sarpedon's argument. It states, perhaps more clearly and
+absolutely than anything in Greek, the Northern principle of
+resistance to all odds, and defiance of ruin. In the North the
+individual spirit asserts itself more absolutely against the bodily
+enemies than in Greece; the defiance is made wholly independent of any
+vestige of prudent consideration; the contradiction, &quot;Thought the
+harder, Heart the keener, Mood the more, as our Might lessens,&quot; is
+stated in the most extreme terms. This does not destroy the
+resemblance between the Greek and the Northern ideal, or between the
+respective forms of representation.</p>
+
+<p>The creed of Maldon is that of Achilles:<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> &quot;Xanthus, what need is
+there to prophesy of death? Well do I know that it is my doom to
+perish here, far from my father and mother; but for all that I will
+not turn back, until I give the Trojans their fill of war.&quot; The
+difference is that in the English case the strain is greater, the
+irony deeper, the antithesis between the spirit and the body more
+paradoxical.</p>
+
+<p>Where the centre of life is a great man's house, and where the most
+brilliant society is that which is gathered at his feast, where
+competitive boasting, story-telling, and minstrelsy are the principal
+intellectual amusements, it is inevitable that these should find their
+way into a kind of literature which has no foundation except
+experience and tradition. Where fighting is more important than
+anything else in active life, and at the same time is carried on
+without organisation or skilled combinations, it is inevitable that it
+should be described as it is in the <i>Iliad</i>, the <i>Song of Maldon</i> and
+<i>Song of Roland</i>, and the Icelandic Sagas, as a series of personal
+encounters, in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> which every stroke is remembered. From this early
+aristocratic form of society, there is derived in one age the
+narrative of life at Ithaca or of the navigation of Odysseus, in
+another the representation of the household of Njal or of Olaf the
+Peacock, and of the rovings of Olaf Tryggvason and other captains.
+There is an affinity between these histories in virtue of something
+over and above the likeness in the conditions of things they describe.
+There is a community of literary sense as well as of historical
+conditions, in the record of Achilles and Kjartan Olafsson, of
+Odysseus and Njal.</p>
+
+<p>The circumstances of an heroic age may be found in numberless times
+and places, in the history of the world. Among its accompaniments will
+be generally found some sort of literary record of sentiments and
+imaginations; but to find an heroic literature of the highest order is
+not so easy. Many nations instead of an <i>Iliad</i> or an <i>Odyssey</i> have
+had to make shift with conventional repetitions of the praise of
+chieftains, without any story; many have had to accept from their
+story-tellers all sorts of monstrous adventures in place of the
+humanities of debate and argument. Epic literature is not common; it
+is brought to perfection by a slow process through many generations.
+The growth of Epic out of the older and commoner forms of poetry,
+hymns, dirges, or panegyrics, is a progress towards intellectual and
+imaginative freedom. Few nations have attained, at the close of their
+heroic age, to a form of poetical art in which men are represented
+freely in action and conversation. The labour and meditation of all
+the world has not discovered, for the purposes of narrative, any
+essential modification of the procedure of Homer. Those who are
+considered reformers and discoverers in later times&#8212;Chaucer,
+Cervantes, Fielding&#8212;are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> discoverers merely of the old devices of
+dramatic narration which were understood by Homer and described after
+him by Aristotle.</p>
+
+<p>The growth of Epic, in the beginning of the history of the modern
+nations, has been generally thwarted and stunted. It cannot be said of
+many of the languages of the North and West of Europe that in them the
+epic form has come fully to its own, or has realised its proper
+nature. Many of them, however, have at least made a beginning. The
+history of the older German literature, and of old French, is the
+history of a great number of experiments in Epic; of attempts, that
+is, to represent great actions in narrative, with the personages well
+defined. These experiments are begun in the right way. They are not
+merely barbarous nor fantastic. They are different also from such
+traditional legends and romances as may survive among simple people
+long after the day of their old glories and their old kings. The poems
+of <i>Beowulf</i> and <i>Waldere</i>, of <i>Roland</i> and <i>William of Orange</i>, are
+intelligible and reasonable works, determined in the main by the same
+essential principles of narrative art, and of dramatic conversation
+within the narrative, as are observed in the practice of Homer.
+Further, these are poems in which, as in the Homeric poems, the ideas
+of their time are conveyed and expressed in a noble manner: they are
+high-spirited poems. They have got themselves clear of the confusion
+and extravagance of early civilisation, and have hit upon a way of
+telling a story clearly and in proportion, and with dignity. They are
+epic in virtue of their superiority to the more fantastic motives of
+interest, and in virtue of their study of human character. They are
+heroic in the nobility of their temper and their style. If at any time
+they indulge in heroic commonplaces of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> sentiment, they do so without
+insincerity or affectation, as the expression of the general temper or
+opinion of their own time. They are not separated widely from the
+matters of which they treat; they are not antiquarian revivals of past
+forms, nor traditional vestiges of things utterly remote and separate
+from the actual world. What art they may possess is different from the
+&quot;rude sweetness&quot; of popular ballads, and from the unconscious grace of
+popular tales. They have in different degrees and manners the form of
+epic poetry, in their own right. There are recognisable qualities that
+serve to distinguish even a fragment of heroic poetry from the ballads
+and romances of a lower order, however near these latter forms may
+approach at times to the epic dignity.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="I.II"></a>II</h3>
+
+<h3>EPIC AND ROMANCE</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is the nature of epic poetry to be at ease in regard to its subject
+matter, to be free from the strain and excitement of weaker and more
+abstract forms of poetry in dealing with heroic subjects. The heroic
+ideal of epic is not attained by a process of abstraction and
+separation from the meannesses of familiar things. The magnificence
+and aristocratic dignity of epic is conformable to the practical and
+ethical standards of the heroic age; that is to say, it tolerates a
+number of things that may be found mean and trivial by academicians.
+Epic poetry is one of the complex and comprehensive kinds of
+literature, in which most of the other kinds may be included&#8212;romance,
+history, comedy; <i>tragical</i>, <i>comical</i>, <i>historical</i>, <i>pastoral</i> are
+terms not sufficiently various to denote the variety of the <i>Iliad</i>
+and the <i>Odyssey</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The &quot;common life&quot; of the Homeric poems may appeal to modern pedantic
+theorists, and be used by them in support of Euripidean or
+Wordsworthian receipts for literature. But the comprehensiveness of
+the greater kinds of poetry, of Homer and Shakespeare, is a different
+thing from the premeditated and self-assertive realism of the authors
+who take viciously to common life by way of protest against the
+romantic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> extreme. It has its origin, not in a critical theory about
+the proper matter of literature, but in dramatic imagination. In an
+epic poem where the characters are vividly imagined, it follows
+naturally that their various moods and problems involve a variety of
+scenery and properties, and so the whole business of life comes into
+the story.</p>
+
+<p>The success of epic poetry depends on the author's power of imagining
+and representing characters. A kind of success and a kind of
+magnificence may be attained in stories, professing to be epic, in
+which there is no dramatic virtue, in which every new scene and new
+adventure merely goes to accumulate, in immortal verse, the proofs of
+the hero's nullity and insignificance. This is not the epic poetry of
+the heroic ages.</p>
+
+<p>Aristotle, in his discussion of tragedy, chose to lay stress upon the
+plot, the story. On the other hand, to complete the paradox, in the
+epic he makes the characters all-important, not the story. Without the
+tragic plot or fable, the tragedy becomes a series of moral essays or
+monologues; the life of the drama is derived from the original idea of
+the fable which is its subject. Without dramatic representation of the
+characters, epic is mere history or romance; the variety and life of
+epic are to be found in the drama that springs up at every encounter
+of the personages.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Homer is the only poet who knows the right proportions of epic
+narrative; when to narrate, and when to let the characters speak for
+themselves. Other poets for the most part tell their story straight
+on, with scanty passages of drama and far between. Homer, with little
+prelude, leaves the stage to his personages, men and women, all with
+characters of their own.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span></p>
+<p>Aristotle wrote with very little consideration for the people who were
+to come after him, and gives little countenance to such theories of
+epic as have at various times been prevalent among the critics, in
+which the dignity of the subject is insisted on. He does not imagine
+it the chief duty of an epic poet to choose a lofty argument for
+historical rhetoric. He does not say a word about the national or the
+ecumenical importance of the themes of the epic poet. His analysis of
+the plot of the <i>Odyssey</i>, but for the reference to Poseidon, might
+have been the description of a modern realistic story.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A man is abroad for many years, persecuted by Poseidon and alone;
+meantime the suitors of his wife are wasting his estate and plotting
+against his son; after many perils by sea he returns to his own
+country and discovers himself to his friends. He falls on his enemies
+and destroys them, and so comes to his own again.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Iliad</i> has more likeness than the <i>Odyssey</i> to the common pattern
+of later sophisticated epics. But the war of Troy is not the subject
+of the <i>Iliad</i> in the same way as the siege of Jerusalem is the
+subject of Tasso's poem. The story of the <i>Aeneid</i> can hardly be told
+in the simplest form without some reference to the destiny of Rome, or
+the story of <i>Paradise Lost</i> without the feud of heaven and hell. But
+in the <i>Iliad</i>, the assistance of the Olympians, or even the presence
+of the whole of Greece, is not in the same degree essential to the
+plot of the story of Achilles. In the form of Aristotle's summary of
+the <i>Odyssey</i>,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> reduced to &quot;the cool element of prose,&quot; the <i>Iliad</i>
+may be proved to be something quite different from the common fashion
+of literary epics. It might go in something like this way:&#8212;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A certain man taking part in a siege is slighted by the general, and
+in his resentment withdraws from the war, though his own side is in
+great need of his help. His dearest friend having been killed by the
+enemy, he comes back into the action and takes vengeance for his
+friend, and allows himself to be reconciled.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It is the debate among the characters, and not the onset of Hera and
+Athena in the chariot of Heaven, that gives its greatest power to the
+<i>Iliad</i>. The <i>Iliad</i>, with its &quot;machines,&quot; its catalogue of the
+forces, its funeral games, has contributed more than the <i>Odyssey</i> to
+the common pattern of manufactured epics. But the essence of the poem
+is not to be found among the Olympians. Achilles refusing the embassy
+or yielding to Priam has no need of the Olympian background. The poem
+is in a great degree independent of &quot;machines&quot;; its life is in the
+drama of the characters. The source of all its variety is the
+imagination by which the characters are distinguished; the liveliness
+and variety of the characters bring with them all the other kinds of
+variety.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible for the author who knows his personages intimately to
+keep to any one exclusive mode of sentiment or one kind of scene. He
+cannot be merely tragical and heroic, or merely comical and pastoral;
+these are points of view to which those authors are confined who are
+possessed by one kind of sentiment or sensibility, and who wish to
+find expression for their own prevailing mood. The author who is
+interested primarily in his characters will not allow them to be
+obliterated by the story or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> by its diffused impersonal sentiment. The
+action of an heroic poem must be &quot;of a certain magnitude,&quot; but the
+accessories need not be all heroic and magnificent; the heroes do not
+derive their magnificence from the scenery, the properties, and the
+author's rhetoric, but contrariwise: the dramatic force and
+self-consistency of the <i>dramatis personae</i> give poetic value to any
+accessories of scenery or sentiment which may be required by the
+action. They are not figures &quot;animating&quot; a landscape; what the
+landscape means for the poet's audience is determined by the character
+of his personages.</p>
+
+<p>All the variety of epic is explained by Aristotle's remark on Homer.
+Where the characters are true, and dramatically represented, there can
+be no monotony.</p>
+
+<p>In the different kinds of Northern epic literature&#8212;German, English,
+French, and Norse&#8212;belonging to the Northern heroic ages, there will
+be found in different degrees this epic quality of drama. Whatever
+magnificence they may possess comes mainly from the dramatic strength
+of the heroes, and in a much less degree from the historic dignity or
+importance of the issues of the story, or from its mythological
+decorations.</p>
+
+<p>The place of history in the heroic poems belonging to an heroic age is
+sometimes misconceived. Early epic poetry may be concerned with great
+historic events. It does not necessarily emphasise&#8212;by preference it
+does not emphasise&#8212;the historic importance or the historic results of
+the events with which it deals. Heroic poetry implies an heroic age,
+an age of pride and courage, in which there is not any extreme
+organisation of politics to hinder the individual talent and its
+achievements, nor on the other hand too much isolation of the hero
+through<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> the absence of any national or popular consciousness. There
+must be some unity of sentiment, some common standard of appreciation,
+among the people to whom the heroes belong, if they are to escape
+oblivion. But this common sentiment must not be such as to make the
+idea of the community and its life predominant over the individual
+genius of its members. In such a case there may be a Roman history,
+but not anything approaching the nature of the Homeric poems.</p>
+
+<p>In some epic poems belonging to an heroic age, and not to a time of
+self-conscious and reflective literature, there may be found general
+conceptions that seem to resemble those of the <i>Aeneid</i> rather than
+those of the <i>Iliad</i>. In many of the old French <i>Chansons de Geste</i>,
+the war against the infidels is made the general subject of the story,
+and the general idea of the Holy War is expressed as fully as by
+Tasso. Here, however, the circumstances are exceptional. The French
+epic with all its Homeric analogies is not as sincere as Homer. It is
+exposed to the touch of influences from another world, and though many
+of the French poems, or great part of many of them, may tell of heroes
+who would be content with the simple and positive rules of the heroic
+life, this is not allowed them. They are brought within the sphere of
+other ideas, of another civilisation, and lose their independence.</p>
+
+<p>Most of the old German heroic poetry is clearly to be traced, as far
+as its subjects are concerned, to the most exciting periods in early
+German history, between the fourth and the sixth centuries. The names
+that seem to have been most commonly known to the poets are the names
+that are most important to the historian&#8212;Ermanaric, Attila,
+Theodoric. In the wars of the great migration the spirit of each of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>
+the German families was quickened, and at the same time the spirit of
+the whole of Germany, so that each part sympathised with all the rest,
+and the fame of the heroes went abroad beyond the limits of their own
+kindred. Ermanaric, Attila, and Theodoric, Sigfred the Frank, and
+Gundahari the Burgundian, are heroes over all the region occupied by
+all forms of Teutonic language. But although the most important period
+of early German history may be said to have produced the old German
+heroic poetry, by giving a number of heroes to the poets, at the same
+time that the imagination was stirred to appreciate great things and
+make the most of them, still the result is nothing like the patriotic
+epic in twelve books, the <i>Aeneid</i> or the <i>Lusiad</i>, which chooses, of
+set purpose, the theme of the national glory. Nor is it like those old
+French epics in which there often appears a contradiction between the
+story of individual heroes, pursuing their own fortunes, and the idea
+of a common cause to which their own fortunes ought to be, but are not
+always, subordinate. The great historical names which appear in the
+old German heroic poetry are seldom found there in anything like their
+historical character, and not once in their chief historical aspect as
+adversaries of the Roman Empire. Ermanaric, Attila, and Theodoric are
+all brought into the same Niblung story, a story widely known in
+different forms, though it was never adequately written out. The true
+history of the war between the Burgundians and the Huns in the fifth
+century is forgotten. In place of it, there is associated with the
+life and death of Gundahari the Burgundian king a story which may have
+been vastly older, and may have passed through many different forms
+before it became the story of the Niblung treasure, of Sigfred and
+Brynhild. This,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> which has made free with so many great historical
+names, the name of Attila, the name of Theodoric, has little to do
+with history. In this heroic story coming out of the heroic age, there
+is not much that can be traced to historical as distinct from mythical
+tradition. The tragedy of the death of Attila, as told in the
+<i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i> and the <i>Atlam&#225;l</i>, may indeed owe something to the facts
+recorded by historians, and something more to vaguer historical
+tradition of the vengeance of Rosamund on Alboin the Lombard. But, in
+the main, the story of the Niblungs is independent of history, in
+respect of its matter; in its meaning and effect as a poetical story
+it is absolutely free from history. It is a drama of personal
+encounters and rivalries. This also, like the story of Achilles, is
+fit for a stage in which the characters are left free to declare
+themselves in their own way, unhampered by any burden of history, any
+purpose or moral apart from the events that are played out in the
+dramatic clashing of one will against another.</p>
+
+<p>It is not vanity in an historian to look for the historical origin of
+the tale of Troy or of the vengeance of Gudrun; but no result in
+either case can greatly affect the intrinsic relations of the various
+elements within the poems. The relations of Achilles to his
+surroundings in the <i>Iliad</i>, of Attila and Ermanaric to theirs, are
+freely conceived by the several poets, and are intelligible at once,
+without reference to anything outside the poems. To require of the
+poetry of an heroic age that it shall recognise the historical meaning
+and importance of the events in which it originates, and the persons
+whose names it uses, is entirely to mistake the nature of it. Its
+nature is to find or make some drama played by kings and heroes, and
+to let the historical framework take care of itself. The connexion of
+epic poetry with history is real,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> and it is a fitting subject for
+historical inquiry, but it lies behind the scene. The epic poem is cut
+loose and set free from history, and goes on a way of its own.</p>
+
+<p>Epic magnificence and the dignity of heroic poetry may thus be only
+indirectly derived from such greatness or magnificence as is known to
+true prosaic history. The heroes, even if they can be identified as
+historical, may retain in epic nothing of their historical character,
+except such qualities as fit them for great actions. Their conduct in
+epic poetry may be very far unlike their actual demeanour in true
+history; their greatest works may be thrust into a corner of the epic,
+or barely alluded to, or left out altogether. Their greatness in epic
+may be quite a different kind of greatness from that of their true
+history and where there are many poems belonging to the same cycle
+there may be the greatest discrepancy among the views taken of the
+same hero by different authors, and all the views may be alike remote
+from the prosaic or scientific view. There is no constant or
+self-consistent opinion about the character of Charles the Emperor in
+old French poetry: there is one view in the <i>Chanson de Roland</i>,
+another in the <i>P&#232;lerinage</i>, another in the <i>Coronemenz Loo&#239;s</i>: none
+of the opinions is anything like an elaborate or detailed historical
+judgment. Attila, though he loses his political importance and most of
+his historical acquisitions in the Teutonic heroic poems in which he
+appears, may retain in some of them his ruthlessness and strength; at
+other times he may be a wise and peaceful king. All that is constant,
+or common, in the different poetical reports of him, is that he was
+great. What touches the mind of the poet out of the depths of the past
+is nothing but the tradition, undefined, of something lordly. This
+vagueness of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> tradition does not imply that tradition is impotent or
+barren; only that it leaves all the execution, the growth of detail,
+to the freedom of the poet. He is bound to the past, in one way; it is
+laid upon him to tell the stories of the great men of his own race.
+But in those stories, as they come to him, what is most lively is not
+a set and established series of incidents, true or false, but
+something to which the standards of truth and falsehood are scarcely
+applicable; something stirring him up to admiration, a compulsion or
+influence upon him requiring him to make the story again in his own
+way; not to interpret history, but to make a drama of his own, filled
+somehow with passion and strength of mind. It does not matter in what
+particular form it may be represented, so long as in some form or
+other the power of the national glory is allowed to pass into his
+work.</p>
+
+<p>This vagueness and generality in the relation of heroic poetry to the
+historical events and persons of an heroic age is of course quite a
+different thing from vagueness in the poetry itself. Gunther and
+Attila, Roland and Charlemagne, in poetry, are very vaguely connected
+with their antitypes in history; but that does not prevent them from
+being characterised minutely, if it should agree with the poet's taste
+or lie within his powers to have it so. The strange thing is that this
+vague relation should be so necessary to heroic poetry; that it should
+be impossible at any stage of literature or in any way by taking
+thought to make up for the want of it.</p>
+
+<p>The place of Gunther the Burgundian, Sigfred the Frank, and Attila the
+Hun, in the poetical stories of the Niblung treasure may be in one
+sense accidental. The fables of the treasure with a curse upon it, the
+killing of the dragon, the sleeping princess, the wavering flame, are
+not limited to this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> particular course of tradition, and, further, the
+traditional motives of the Niblung story have varied enormously not
+only in different countries, but in one and the same language at the
+same time. The story is never told alike by two narrators; what is
+common and essential in it is nothing palpable or fixed, but goes from
+poet to poet &quot;like a shadow from dream to dream.&quot; And the historical
+names are apparently unessential; yet they remain. To look for the
+details of the Niblung story in the sober history of the Goths and
+Huns, Burgundians and Franks, is like the vanity confessed by the
+author of the <i>Roman de Rou</i>, when he went on a sentimental journey to
+Broceliande, and was disappointed to find there only the common
+daylight and nothing of the Faerie. Nevertheless it is the historical
+names, and the vague associations about them, that give to the Niblung
+story, not indeed the whole of its plot, but its temper, its pride and
+glory, its heroic and epic character.</p>
+
+<p>Heroic poetry is not, as a rule, greatly indebted to historical fact
+for its material. The epic poet does not keep record of the great
+victories or the great disasters. He cannot, however, live without the
+ideas and sentiments of heroism that spring up naturally in periods
+like those of the Teutonic migrations. In this sense the historic
+Gunther and Attila are necessary to the Niblung story. The wars and
+fightings of generation on generation went to create the heroism, the
+loftiness of spirit, expressed in the Teutonic epic verse. The plots
+of the stories may be commonplace, the common property of all popular
+tales. The temper is such as is not found everywhere, but only in
+historical periods of great energy. The names of Ermanaric and Attila
+correspond to hardly anything of literal history in the heroic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> poems;
+but they are the sign of conquests and great exploits that have gone
+to form character, though their details are forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>It may be difficult to appreciate and understand in detail this vague
+relation of epic poetry to the national life and to the renown of the
+national heroes, but the general fact is not less positive or less
+capable of verification than the date of the battle of Ch&#226;lons, or the
+series of the Gothic vowels. All that is needed to prove this is to
+compare the poetry of a national cycle with the poetry that comes in
+its place when the national cycle is deserted for other heroes.</p>
+
+<p>The secondary or adopted themes may be treated with so much of the
+manner of the original poetry as to keep little of their foreign
+character. The rhetoric, the poetical habit, of the original epic may
+be retained. As in the Saxon poem on the Gospel history, the
+<i>H&#234;liand</i>, the twelve disciples may be represented as Thanes owing
+loyalty to their Prince, in common poetic terms befitting the men of
+Beowulf or Byrhtnoth. As in the French poems on Alexander the Great,
+Alexander may become a feudal king, and take over completely all that
+belongs to such a rank. There may be no consciousness of any need for
+a new vocabulary or a new mode of expression to fit the foreign
+themes. In France, it is true, there is a general distinction of form
+between the <i>Chansons de Geste</i> and the romances; though to this there
+are exceptions, themes not French, and themes not purely heroic, being
+represented in the epic form. In the early Teutonic poetry there is no
+distinction of versification, vocabulary, or rhetoric between the
+original and the secondary narrative poems; the alliterative verse
+belongs to both kinds equally. Nor is it always the case that subjects
+derived from books<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> or from abroad are handled with less firmness than
+the original and traditional plots. Though sometimes a prevailing
+affection for imported stories, for Celtic or Oriental legend, may be
+accompanied by a relaxation in the style, the superiority of national
+to foreign subjects is not always proved by greater strength or
+eloquence. Can it be said that the Anglo-Saxon <i>Judith</i>, for instance,
+is less heroic, less strong and sound, than the somewhat damaged and
+motley accoutrements of Beowulf?</p>
+
+<p>The difference is this, that the more original and native kind of epic
+has immediate association with all that the people know about
+themselves, with all their customs, all that part of their experience
+which no one can account for or refer to any particular source. A poem
+like <i>Beowulf</i> can play directly on a thousand chords of association;
+the range of its appeal to the minds of an audience is almost
+unlimited; on no side is the poet debarred from freedom of movement,
+if only he remember first of all what is due to the hero. He has all
+the life of his people to strengthen him.</p>
+
+<p>A poem like the <i>H&#234;liand</i> is under an obligation to a literary
+original, and cannot escape from this restriction. It makes what use
+it can of the native associations, but with whatever perseverance the
+author may try to bend his story into harmony with the laws of his own
+country, there is an untranslated residue of foreign ideas.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever the defects or excesses of <i>Beowulf</i> may be, the characters
+are not distressed by any such unsolved contradiction as in the Saxon
+<i>H&#234;liand</i>, or in the old English <i>Exodus</i>, or <i>Andreas</i>, or the other
+poems taken from the Bible or the lives of saints. They have not, like
+the personages of the second order of poems, been translated from one
+realm of ideas to another, and made to take up burdens and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> offices
+not their own. They have grown naturally in the mind of a poet, out of
+the poet's knowledge of human nature, and the traditional ethical
+judgments of which he is possessed.</p>
+
+<p>The comparative freedom of <i>Beowulf</i> in its relation to historical
+tradition and traditional ethics, and the comparative limitation of
+the <i>H&#234;liand</i>, are not in themselves conditions of either advantage or
+inferiority. They simply mark the difference between two types of
+narrative poem. To be free and comprehensive in relation to history,
+to summarise and represent in epic characters the traditional
+experience of an heroic age, is not the proper virtue of every kind of
+poetry, though it is proper to the Homeric kind. The freedom that
+belongs to the <i>Iliad</i> and the <i>Odyssey</i> is also shared by many a
+dismal and interminable poem of the Middle Ages. That foreign or
+literary subjects impose certain limitations, and interfere with the
+direct use of matter of experience in poetry, is nothing against them.
+The Anglo-Saxon <i>Judith</i>, which is thus restricted as compared with
+<i>Beowulf</i>, may be more like Milton for these restrictions, if it be
+less like Homer. Exemption from them is not a privilege, except that
+it gives room for the attainment of a certain kind of excellence, the
+Homeric kind; as, on the other hand, it excludes the possibility of
+the literary art of Virgil or Milton.</p>
+
+<p>The relation of epic poetry to its heroic age is not to be found in
+the observance of any strict historical duty. It lies rather in the
+epic capacity for bringing together all manner of lively passages from
+the general experience of the age, in a story about famous heroic
+characters. The plot of the story gives unity and harmony to the
+composition, while the variety of its matter is permitted and
+justified by the dramatic variety of the characters and their
+interests.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>By its comprehensiveness and the variety of its substance, which are
+the signs and products of its dramatic imagination, epic poetry of the
+heroic age is distinguished from the more abstract kinds of narrative,
+such as the artificial epic, and from all kinds of imagination or
+fancy that are limited in their scope.</p>
+
+<p>In times when &quot;the Epic Poem&quot; was a more attractive, if not more
+perilous theme of debate than it now is, there was a strong
+controversy about the proper place and the proper kind of miraculous
+details to be admitted. The question was debated by Tasso in his
+critical writings, against the strict and pedantic imitators of
+classical models, and with a strong partiality for Ariosto against
+Trissino. Tasso made less of a distinction between romance and epic
+than was agreeable to some of his successors in criticism; and the
+controversy went on for generations, always more or less concerned
+with the great Italian heroic poems, <i>Orlando</i> and <i>Jerusalem</i>. Some
+record of it will be found in Dr. Hurd's <i>Letters on Chivalry and
+Romance</i> (1762). If the controversy has any interest now, it must be
+because it provided the most extreme statements of abstract literary
+principles, which on account of their thoroughness are interesting.
+From the documents it can be ascertained how near some of the critics
+came to that worship of the Faultless Hero with which Dryden in his
+heroic plays occasionally conformed, while he guarded himself against
+misinterpretation in his prefaces.</p>
+
+<p>The epic poetry of the more austere critics was devised according to
+the strictest principles of dignity and sublimity, with a precise
+exclusion of everything &quot;Gothic&quot; and romantic. Davenant's Preface to
+<i>Gondibert</i>&#8212;&quot;the Author's Preface to his much<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> Honour'd friend, Mr
+Hobs&quot;&#8212;may show how the canon of epic was understood by poets who took
+things seriously; &quot;for I will yield to their opinion, who permit not
+<i>Ariosto</i>, no, not <i>Du Bartas</i>, in this eminent rank of the
+<i>Heroicks</i>; rather than to make way by their admission for <i>Dante</i>,
+<i>Marino</i>, and others.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It is somewhat difficult to find a common measure for these names, but
+it is clear that what is most distasteful to the writer, in theory at
+any rate, is variety. Epic is the most solemn, stately, and frigid of
+all kinds of composition. This was the result attained by the perverse
+following of precepts supposed to be classical. The critics of the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were generally right in
+distinguishing between Epic and Romance, and generally wrong in
+separating the one kind from the other as opposite and mutually
+exclusive forms, instead of seeing with Tasso, in his critical
+discourses, that romance may be included in epic. Against the manifold
+perils of the Gothic fantasy they set up the image of the Abstract
+Hero, and recited the formulas of the decorous and symmetrical
+abstract heroic poem. They were occasionally troubled by the &quot;Gothic&quot;
+elements in Homer, of which their adversaries were not slow to take
+advantage.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most orthodox of all the formalists, who for some reason
+came to be very much quoted in England, Bossu, in his discourse on the
+Epic Poem, had serious difficulties with the adventures of Ulysses,
+and his stories told in Phaeacia. The episodes of Circe, of the
+Sirens, and of Polyphemus, are <i>machines</i>; they are also not quite
+easy to understand. &quot;They are necessary to the action, and yet they
+are not humanly probable.&quot; But see how Homer gets over the difficulty
+and brings back these <i>machines</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> to the region of human probability.
+&quot;Hom&#232;re les fait adroitement rentrer dans la Vraisemblance humaine par
+la simplicit&#233; de ceux devant qui il fait faire ses r&#233;cits fabuleux. Il
+dit assez plaisamment que les Ph&#233;aques habitoient dans une Isle
+&#233;loign&#233;e des lieux o&#249; demeurent les hommes qui ont de l'esprit.
+<span title="Greek: heisen d' en Scheri&#234; hekas andr&#244;n alph&#234;sta&#244;n">&#949;&#953;&#963;&#949;&#957; &#948;' &#949;&#957; &#931;&#967;&#949;&#961;&#953;&#951; &#949;&#954;&#945;&#962; &#945;&#957;&#948;&#961;&#969;&#957; &#945;&#955;&#966;&#951;&#963;&#964;&#945;&#969;&#957;</span>. Ulysses les
+avoit connus avant que de se faire conno&#238;tre &#224; eux: et aiant observ&#233;
+qu'ils avoient toutes les qualit&#233;s de ces fain&#233;ans qui n'admirent rien
+avec plus de plaisir que les aventures Romanesques: il les satisfait
+par ces r&#233;cits accommodez &#224; leur humeur. Mais le Po&#235;te n'y a pas
+oubli&#233; les Lecteurs raisonnables. Il leur a donn&#233; en ces Fables tout
+le plaisir que l'on peut tirer des v&#233;ritez Morales, si agr&#233;ablement
+d&#233;guis&#233;es sous ces miraculeuses all&#233;gories. C'est ainsi qu'il a r&#233;duit
+ces Machines dans la v&#233;rit&#233; et dans la Vraisemblance Po&#235;tique.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></p>
+
+<p>Although the world has fallen away from the severity of this critic,
+there is still a meaning at the bottom of his theory of machines. He
+has at any rate called attention to one of the most interesting parts
+of Epic, and has found the right word for the episodes of the
+Phaeacian story of Odysseus. Romance is the word for them, and Romance
+is at the same time one of the constituent parts and one of the
+enemies of epic poetry. That it was dangerous was seen by the
+academical critics. They provided against it, generally, by treating
+it with contempt and proscribing it, as was done by those French
+critics who were offended by Ariosto and perplexed by much of the
+Gothic machinery of Tasso. They did not readily admit that epic poetry
+is as complex as the plays of Shakespeare, and as incongruous as these
+in its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> composition, if the different constituents be taken out
+separately in the laboratory and then compared.</p>
+
+<p>Romance by itself is a kind of literature that does not allow the full
+exercise of dramatic imagination; a limited and abstract form, as
+compared with the fulness and variety of Epic; though episodes of
+romance, and romantic moods and digressions, may have their place,
+along with all other human things, in the epic scheme.</p>
+
+<p>The difference between the greater and the lesser kinds of narrative
+literature is vital and essential, whatever names may be assigned to
+them. In the one kind, of which Aristotle knew no other examples than
+the <i>Iliad</i> and the <i>Odyssey</i>, the personages are made individual
+through their dramatic conduct and their speeches in varying
+circumstances; in the other kind, in place of the moods and sentiments
+of a multitude of different people entering into the story and working
+it out, there is the sentiment of the author in his own person; there
+is one voice, the voice of the story-teller, and his theory of the
+characters is made to do duty for the characters themselves. There may
+be every poetic grace, except that of dramatic variety; and wherever,
+in narrative, the independence of the characters is merged in the
+sequence of adventures, or in the beauty of the landscape, or in the
+effusion of poetic sentiment, the narrative falls below the highest
+order, though the art be the art of Ovid or of Spenser.</p>
+
+<p>The romance of Odysseus is indeed &quot;brought into conformity with poetic
+verisimilitude,&quot; but in a different way from that of Bossu <i>On the
+Epic Poem</i>. It is not because the Phaeacians are romantic in their
+tastes, but because it belongs to Odysseus, that the Phaeacian night's
+entertainment has its place in the <i>Odyssey</i>. The <i>Odyssey</i> is the
+story of his home<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>-coming, his recovery of his own. The great action
+of the drama of Odysseus is in his dealings with Penelope, Eumaeus,
+Telemachus, the suitors. The Phaeacian story is indeed episodic; the
+interest of those adventures is different from that of the meeting
+with Penelope. Nevertheless it is all kept in harmony with the
+stronger part of the poem. It is not pure fantasy and &quot;Faerie,&quot; like
+the voyage of Maelduin or the vigil in the castle of Busirane.
+Odysseus in the house of Alcinous is not different from Odysseus of
+the return to Ithaca. The story is not pure romance, it is a dramatic
+monologue; and the character of the speaker has more part than the
+wonders of the story in the silence that falls on the listeners when
+the story comes to an end.</p>
+
+<p>In all early literature it is hard to keep the story within limits, to
+observe the proportion of the <i>Odyssey</i> between strong drama and
+romance. The history of the early heroic literature of the Teutonic
+tongues, and of the epics of old France, comes to an end in the
+victory of various romantic schools, and of various restricted and
+one-sided forms of narrative. From within and without, from the
+resources of native mythology and superstition and from the
+fascination of Welsh and Arabian stories, there came the temptation to
+forget the study of character, and to part with an inheritance of
+tragic fables, for the sake of vanities, wonders, and splendours among
+which character and the tragic motives lost their pre-eminent interest
+and their old authority over poets and audience.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="I.III"></a>III</h3>
+
+<h3>ROMANTIC MYTHOLOGY</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Between</span> the dramatic qualities of epic poetry and the myths and
+fancies of popular tradition there must inevitably be a conflict and a
+discrepancy. The greatest scenes of the <i>Iliad</i> and the <i>Odyssey</i> have
+little to do with myth. Where the characters are most vividly realised
+there is no room for the lighter kinds of fable; the epic &quot;machines&quot;
+are superfluous. Where all the character of Achilles is displayed in
+the interview with Priam, all his generosity, all his passion and
+unreason, the imagination refuses to be led away by anything else from
+looking on and listening. The presence of Hermes, Priam's guide, is
+forgotten. Olympus cannot stand against the spell of words like those
+of Priam and Achilles; it vanishes like a parched scroll. In the great
+scene in the other poem where the disguised Odysseus talks with
+Penelope, but will not make himself known to her for fear of spoiling
+his plot, there is just as little opportunity for any intervention of
+the Olympians. &quot;Odysseus pitied his wife as she wept, but his eyes
+were firm as horn or steel, unwavering in his eyelids, and with art he
+concealed his tears.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a>&quot;</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span></p>
+<p>In passages like these the epic poet gets clear away from the cumbrous
+inheritance of traditional fancies and stories. In other places he is
+inevitably less strong and self-sustained; he has to speak of the gods
+of the nation, or to work into his large composition some popular and
+improbable histories. The result in Homer is something like the result
+in Shakespeare, when he has a more than usually childish or
+old-fashioned fable to work upon. A story like that of the <i>Three
+Caskets</i> or the <i>Pound of Flesh</i> is perfectly consistent with itself
+in its original popular form. It is inconsistent with the form of
+elaborate drama, and with the lives of people who have souls of their
+own, like Portia or Shylock. Hence in the drama which uses the popular
+story as its ground-plan, the story is never entirely reduced into
+conformity with the spirit of the chief characters. The caskets and
+the pound of flesh, in despite of all the author's pains with them,
+are imperfectly harmonised; the primitive and barbarous imagination in
+them retains an inconvenient power of asserting its discordance with
+the principal parts of the drama. Their unreason is of no great
+consequence, yet it is something; it is not quite kept out of sight.</p>
+
+<p>The epic poet, at an earlier stage of literature than Shakespeare, is
+even more exposed to this difficulty. Shakespeare was free to take his
+plots where he chose, and took these old wives' tales at his own risk.
+The epic poet has matter of this sort forced upon him. In his
+treatment of it, it will be found that ingenuity does not fail him,
+and that the transition from the unreasonable or old-fashioned part of
+his work to the modern and dramatic part is cunningly worked out. &quot;He
+gets over the unreason by the grace and skill of his handling,&quot;<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a>
+says Aristotle<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> of a critical point in the &quot;machinery&quot; of the
+<i>Odyssey</i>, where Odysseus is carried ashore on Ithaca in his sleep.
+There is a continual play in the <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i> between the
+wonders of mythology and the spirit of the drama. In this, as in other
+things, the Homeric poems observe the mean: the extremes may be found
+in the heroic literature of other nations; the extreme of marvellous
+fable in the old Irish heroic legends, for example; the extreme of
+plainness and &quot;soothfastness&quot; in the old English lay of <i>Maldon</i>. In
+some medieval compositions, as in <i>Huon of Bordeaux</i>, the two extremes
+are brought together clumsily and without harmony. In other medieval
+works again it is possible to find something like the Homeric
+proportion&#8212;the drama of strong characters, taking up and transforming
+the fanciful products of an earlier world, the inventions of minds not
+deeply or especially interested in character.</p>
+
+<p>The defining and shaping of myths in epic poetry is a process that
+cannot go on in a wholly simple and unreflecting society. On the
+contrary, this process means that the earlier stages of religious
+legend have been succeeded by a time of criticism and selection. It is
+hard on the old stories of the gods when men come to appreciate the
+characters of Achilles and Odysseus. The old stories are not all of
+equal value and authority; they cannot all be made to fit in with the
+human story; they have to be tested, and some have to be rejected as
+inconvenient. The character of the gods is modified under the
+influence of the chief actors in the drama. Agamemnon, Diomede,
+Odysseus, Ajax, and Achilles set the standard by which the gods are
+judged. The Homeric view of the gods is already more than half-way to
+the view of a modern poet. The gods lose their old tyranny and their
+right to the steam of sacrifice as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> they gain their new poetical
+empire, from which they need not fear to be banished; not, at any
+rate, for any theological reasons.</p>
+
+<p>In Shakespearean drama, where each man is himself, with his own
+character and his own fortune to make, there is small scope for any
+obvious Divine interposition in the scene. The story of human actions
+and characters, the more fully it is developed, leaves the less
+opportunity for the gods to interfere in it. Something of this sort
+was felt by certain medieval historians; they found it necessary to
+begin with an apologetic preface explaining the long-suffering of God,
+who has given freedom to the will of man to do good or evil. It was
+felt to be on the verge of impiety to think of men as left to
+themselves and doing what they pleased. Those who listen to a story
+might be tempted to think of the people in it as self-sufficient and
+independent powers, trespassing on the domain of Providence. A pious
+exculpation was required to clear the author of blame.<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></p>
+
+<p>In the <i>Iliad</i> this scrupulous conscience has less need to deliver
+itself. The gods are not far away;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> the heroes are not left alone. But
+the poet has already done much to reduce the immediate power of the
+gods, not by excluding them from the action, certainly, nor by any
+attenuation of their characters into allegory, but by magnifying and
+developing the characters of men. In many occasional references it
+would seem that an approach was being made to that condition of mind,
+at ease concerning the gods, so common in the North, in Norway and
+Iceland, in the last days of heathendom. There is the great speech of
+Hector to Polydamas&#8212;&quot;we defy augury&quot;<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a>&#8212;there is the speech of
+Apollo himself to Aeneas<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> about those who stand up for their own
+side, putting trust in their own strength. But passages like these do
+not touch closely on the relations of gods and men as they are
+depicted in the story. As so depicted, the gods are not shadowy or
+feeble abstractions and personifications; yet they are not of the
+first value to the poem, they do not set the tone of it.</p>
+
+<p>They are subsidiary, like some other of the most beautiful things in
+the poem; like the similes of clouds and winds, like the pictures on
+the Shield. They are there because the whole world is included in epic
+poetry; the heroes, strong in themselves as they could be if they were
+left alone in the common day, acquire an additional strength and
+beauty from their fellowship with the gods. Achilles talking with the
+Embassy is great; he is great in another way when he stands at the
+trench with the flame of Athena on his head. These two scenes belong
+to two different kinds of imagination. It is because the first is
+there that the second takes effect. It is the hero that gives meaning
+and glory to the light of the goddess. It is of some importance that
+it is Achilles, and not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> another, that here is crowned with the light
+of heaven and made terrible to his enemies.</p>
+
+<p>There is a double way of escape for young nations from their outgrown
+fables and mythologies. They start with enormous, monstrous, and
+inhuman beliefs and stories. Either they may work their way out of
+them, by gradual rejection of the grosser ingredients, to something
+more or less positive and rational; or else they may take up the myths
+and transmute them into poetry.</p>
+
+<p>The two processes are not independent of one another. Both are found
+together in the greater artists of early times, in Homer most notably;
+and also in artists less than Homer; in the poem of <i>Beowulf</i>, in the
+stories of Sigfred and Brynhild.</p>
+
+<p>There are further, under the second mode, two chief ways of operation
+by which the fables of the gods may be brought into poetry.</p>
+
+<p>It is possible to take them in a light-hearted way and weave them into
+poetical stories, without much substance or solemnity; enhancing the
+beauty that may be inherent in any part of the national legend, and
+either rejecting the scandalous chronicle of Olympus or Asgard
+altogether, or giving it over to the comic graces of levity and irony,
+as in the Phaeacian story of Ares and Aphrodite, wherein the Phaeacian
+poet digressed from his tales of war in the spirit of Ariosto, and
+with an equally accomplished and elusive defiance of censure.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a></p>
+
+<p>There is another way in which poetry may find room for fable.</p>
+
+<p>It may treat the myths of the gods as material for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> the religious or
+the ethical imagination, and out of them create ideal characters,
+analogous in poetry to the ideal divine or heroic figures of painting
+and sculpture. This is the kind of imagination in virtue of which
+modern poets are best able to appropriate the classical mythology; but
+this modern imagination is already familiar to Homer, and that not
+only in direct description, as in the description of the majesty of
+Zeus, but also, more subtly, in passages where the character of the
+divinity is suggested by comparison with one of the human personages,
+as when Nausicaa is compared to Artemis,<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> a comparison that
+redounds not less to the honour of the goddess than of Nausicaa.</p>
+
+<p>In Icelandic literature there are many instances of the trouble
+arising from inconsiderate stories of the gods, in the minds of people
+who had got beyond the more barbarous kind of mythology. They took the
+boldest and most conclusive way out of the difficulty; they made the
+barbarous stories into comedy. The <i>Lokasenna</i>, a poem whose author
+has been called the Aristophanes of the Western Islands, is a dramatic
+piece in which Loki, the Northern Satan, appearing in the house of the
+gods, is allowed to bring his railing accusations against them and
+remind them of their doings in the &quot;old days.&quot; One of his victims
+tells him to &quot;let bygones be bygones.&quot; The gods are the subject of
+many stories that are here raked up against them, stories of another
+order of belief and of civilisation than those in which Odin appears
+as the wise and sleepless counsellor. This poem implies a great amount
+of independence in the author of it. It is not a satire on the gods;
+it is pure comedy; that is, it belongs to a type of literature which
+has risen above prejudices and which has an air of levity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> because it
+is pure sport&#8212;or pure art&#8212;and therefore is freed from bondage to
+the matter which it handles. This kind of invention is one that tests
+the wit of its audience. A serious-minded heathen of an older school
+would no doubt have been shocked by the levity of the author's manner.
+Not much otherwise would the poem have affected a serious adversary of
+heathendom, or any one whose education had been entirely outside of
+the circle of heathen or mythological tradition. An Englishman of the
+tenth century, familiar with the heroic poetry of his own tongue,
+would have thought it indecent. If chance had brought such an one to
+hear this <i>Lokasenna</i> recited at some entertainment in a great house
+of the Western Islands, he might very well have conceived the same
+opinion of his company and their tastes in literature as is ascribed
+by Bossu to Ulysses among the Phaeacians.</p>
+
+<p>This genius for comedy is shown in other Icelandic poems. As soon as
+the monstrosities of the old traditions were felt to be monstrous,
+they were overcome (as Mr. Carlyle has shown) by an appreciation of
+the fun of them, and so they ceased to be burdensome. It is something
+of this sort that has preserved old myths, for amusement, in popular
+tales all over the world. The Icelandic poets went further, however,
+than most people in their elaborate artistic treatment of their myths.
+There is with them more art and more self-consciousness, and they give
+a satisfactory and final poetical shape to these things, extracting
+pure comedy from them.</p>
+
+<p>The perfection of this ironical method is to be found in the <i>Edda</i>, a
+handbook of the Art of Poetry, written in the thirteenth century by a
+man of liberal genius, for whom the &#198;sir were friends of the
+imagination, without any prejudice to the claims of the Church<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> or of
+his religion. In the view of Snorri Sturluson, the old gods are exempt
+from any touch of controversy. Belief has nothing to do with them;
+they are free. It may be remembered that some of the greatest English
+writers of the seventeenth century have come short of this security of
+view, and have not scrupled to repeat the calumny of the missionaries
+and the disputants against the ancient gods, that Jupiter and Apollo
+were angels of the bottomless pit, given over to their own devices for
+a season, and masking as Olympians.</p>
+
+<p>In this freedom from embarrassing and irrelevant considerations in
+dealing with myth, the author of the <i>Edda</i> follows in his prose the
+spirit of mythological poems three centuries older, in which, even
+before the change of faith in the North, the gods were welcomed
+without fear as sharing in many humorous adventures.</p>
+
+<p>And at the same time, along with this detached and ironical way of
+thinking there is to be found in the Northern poetry the other, more
+reverent mode of shaping the inherited fancies; the mode of Pindar,
+rejecting the vain things fabled about the gods, and holding fast to
+the more honourable things. The humours of Thor in the fishing for the
+serpent and the winning of the hammer may be fairly likened to the
+humours of Hermes in the Greek hymn. The <i>Lokasenna</i> has some likeness
+to the Homeric description of the brawls in heaven. But in the poems
+that refer to the death of Balder and the sorrow of the gods there is
+another tone; and the greatest of them all, the <i>Sibyl's Prophecy</i>, is
+comparable, not indeed in volume of sound, but in loftiness of
+imagination, to the poems in which Pindar has taken up the myths of
+most inexhaustible value and significance&#8212;the Happy Islands, the
+Birth of Athena.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The poet who lives in anything like an heroic or Homeric age has it in
+his power to mingle the elements of mythology and of human
+story&#8212;Phaeacia and Ithaca&#8212;in any proportion he pleases. As a matter
+of fact, all varieties of proportion are to be found in medieval
+documents. At the one extreme is the mythological romance and fantasy
+of Celtic epic, and at the other extreme the plain narrative of human
+encounters, in the old English battle poetry or the Icelandic family
+histories. As far as one can judge from the extant poems, the old
+English and old German poetry did not make such brilliant romance out
+of mythological legend as was produced by the Northern poets. These
+alone, and not the poets of England or Saxony, seem to have
+appropriated for literature, in an Homeric way, the histories of the
+gods. Myth is not wanting in old English or German poetry, but it does
+not show itself in the same clear and delightful manner as in the
+Northern poems of Thor, or in the wooing of Frey.</p>
+
+<p>Thus in different places there are different modes in which an
+inheritance of mythical ideas may be appreciated and used. It may
+become a treasury for self-possessed and sure-handed artists, as in
+Greece, and so be preserved long after it has ceased to be adequate to
+all the intellectual desires. It may, by the fascination of its
+wealth, detain the minds of poets in its enchanted ground, and prevent
+them from ever working their way through from myth to dramatic
+imagination, as in Ireland.</p>
+
+<p>The early literature, and therewith the intellectual character and
+aptitudes, of a nation may be judged by their literary use of
+mythology. They may neglect it, like the Romans; they may neglect all
+things for the sake of it, like the Celts; they may harmonise it, as
+the Greeks did, in a system of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> imaginative creations where the
+harmony is such that myth need never be felt as an encumbrance or an
+absurdity, however high or far the reason may go beyond it in any
+direction of art or science.</p>
+
+<p>At the beginning of modern literature there are to be found the
+attempts of Irish and Welsh, of English and Germans, Danes and
+Northmen, to give shape to myth, and make it available for literature.
+Together with that, and as part of the same process, there is found
+the beginning of historical literature in an heroic or epic form. The
+results are various; but one thing may be taken as certain, that
+progress in literature is most assured when the mythology is so far
+under control as to leave room for the drama of epic characters; for
+epic, as distinguished from romance.</p>
+
+<p>Now the fortunes of these people were such as to make this
+self-command exceedingly difficult for them, and to let in an enormous
+extraneous force, encouraging the native mythopoetic tendencies, and
+unfavourable to the growth of epic. They had to come to an
+understanding with themselves about their own heathen traditions, to
+bring the extravagances of them into some order, so as to let the epic
+heroes have free play. But they were not left to themselves in this
+labour of bringing mythology within bounds; even before they had
+fairly escaped from barbarism, before they had made a fair beginning
+of civilisation and of reflective literature on their own account,
+they were drawn within the Empire, into Christendom. Before their
+imaginations had fully wakened out of the primeval dream, the
+cosmogonies and theogonies, gross and monstrous, of their national
+infancy, they were asked to have an opinion about the classical
+mythology, as represented by the Latin poets; they were made
+acquainted with the miracles of the lives of saints.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>More than all this, even, their minds were charmed away from the
+labour of epic invention, by the spell of the preacher. The task of
+representing characters&#8212;Waldere or Theodoric or Attila&#8212;was forgotten
+in the lyrical rapture of devotion, in effusion of pathos. The
+fascination of religious symbolism crept over minds that had hardly
+yet begun to see and understand things as they are; and in all their
+reading the &quot;moral,&quot; &quot;anagogical,&quot; and &quot;tropological&quot; significations
+prevailed against the literal sense.</p>
+
+<p>One part of medieval history is concerned with the progress of the
+Teutonic nations, in so far as they were left to themselves, and in so
+far as their civilisation is home-made. The <i>Germania</i> of Tacitus, for
+instance, is used by historians to interpret the later development of
+Teutonic institutions. But this inquiry involves a good deal of
+abstraction and an artificial limitation of view. In reality, the
+people of Germania were never left to themselves at all, were never
+beyond the influence of Southern ideas; and the history of the
+influence of Southern ideas on the Northern races takes up a larger
+field than the isolated history of the North. Nothing in the world is
+more fantastic. The logic of Aristotle and the art of Virgil are
+recommended to people whose chief men, barons and earls, are commonly
+in their tastes and acquirements not very different from the suitors
+in the <i>Odyssey</i>. Gentlemen much interested in raids and forays, and
+the profits of such business, are confronted with a literature into
+which the labours of all past centuries have been distilled. In a
+society that in its native elements is closely analogous to Homer's
+Achaeans, men are found engaged in the study of Boethius <i>On the
+Consolation of Philosophy</i>, a book that sums up the whole course of
+Greek philosophical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> speculation. Ulysses quoting Aristotle is an
+anachronism; but King Alfred's translation of Boethius is almost as
+much of a paradox. It is not easy to remain unmoved at the thought of
+the medieval industry bestowed on authors like Martianus Capella <i>de
+Nuptiis Philologiae</i>, or Macrobius <i>de Somnio Scipionis</i>. What is to
+be said of the solemnity with which, in their pursuit of authoritative
+doctrine, they applied themselves to extract the spiritual meaning of
+Ovid's <i>Metamorphoses</i>, and appropriate the didactic system of the
+<i>Art of Love</i>?</p>
+
+<p>In medieval literature, whatever there is of the Homeric kind has an
+utterly different relation to popular standards of appreciation from
+that of the Homeric poems in Greece. Here and there some care may be
+taken, as by Charlemagne and Alfred, to preserve the national heroic
+poetry. But such regard for it is rare; and even where it is found, it
+comes far short of the honour paid to Homer by Alexander. English Epic
+is not first, but one of the least, among the intellectual and
+literary interests of King Alfred. Heroic literature is only one
+thread in the weft of medieval literature.</p>
+
+<p>There are some curious documents illustrative of its comparative
+value, and of the variety and complexity of medieval literature.</p>
+
+<p>Hauk Erlendsson, an Icelander of distinction in the fourteenth
+century, made a collection of treatises in one volume for his own
+amusement and behoof. It contains the <i>Volosp&#225;</i>, the most famous of
+all the Northern mythical poems, the Sibyl's song of the doom of the
+gods; it contains also the <i>Landn&#225;mab&#243;k</i>, the history of the
+colonisation of Iceland; <i>Kristni Saga</i>, the history of the conversion
+to Christianity; the history of <i>Eric the Red</i>, and <i>F&#243;stbr&#230;&#240;ra Saga</i>,
+the story of the two sworn brethren, Thorgeir and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> Thormod the poet.
+Besides these records of the history and the family traditions of
+Iceland and Greenland, there are some mythical stories of later date,
+dealing with old mythical themes, such as the life of Ragnar Lodbrok.
+In one of them, the <i>Heidreks Saga</i>, are embedded some of the most
+memorable verses, after <i>Volosp&#225;</i>, in the old style of Northern
+poetry&#8212;the poem of the <i>Waking of Angantyr</i>. The other contents of
+the book are as follows: geographical, physical, and theological
+pieces; extracts from St. Augustine; the <i>History of the Cross</i>; the
+<i>Description of Jerusalem</i>; the <i>Debate of Body and Soul</i>;
+<i>Algorismus</i> (by Hauk himself, who was an arithmetician); a version of
+the <i>Brut</i> and of <i>Merlin's Prophecy</i>; <i>Lucidarium</i>, the most popular
+medieval handbook of popular science. This is the collection, to which
+all the ends of the earth have contributed, and it is in strange and
+far-fetched company like this that the Northern documents are found.
+In Greece, whatever early transactions there may have been with the
+wisdom of Egypt or Phoenicia, there is no such medley as this.</p>
+
+<p>Another illustration of the literary chaos is presented, even more
+vividly than in the contents of Hauk's book, by the whalebone casket
+in the British Museum. Weland the smith (whom Alfred introduced into
+his <i>Boethius</i>) is here put side by side with the Adoration of the
+Magi; on another side are Romulus and Remus; on another, Titus at
+Jerusalem; on the lid of the casket is the defence of a house by one
+who is shooting arrows at his assailants; his name is written over
+him, and his name is <i>&#198;gili</i>,&#8212;Egil the master-bowman, as Weland is
+the master-smith, of the Northern mythology. Round the two companion
+pictures, Weland on the left and the Three Kings on the right, side by
+side, there go<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> wandering runes, with some old English verses about
+the &quot;whale,&quot; or walrus, from which the ivory for these engravings was
+obtained. The artist plainly had no more suspicion than the author of
+<i>Lycidas</i> that there was anything incorrect or unnatural in his
+combinations. It is under these conditions that the heroic poetry of
+Germania has been preserved; never as anything more than an accident
+among an infinity of miscellaneous notions, the ruins of ancient
+empires, out of which the commonplaces of European literature and
+popular philosophy have been gradually collected.</p>
+
+<p>The fate of epic poetry was the same as that of the primitive German
+forms of society. In both there was a progress towards independent
+perfection, an evolution of the possibilities inherent in them,
+independent of foreign influences. But both in Teutonic society, and
+in the poetry belonging to it and reflecting it, this independent
+course of life is thwarted and interfered with. Instead of independent
+strong Teutonic national powers, there are the more or less Romanised
+and blended nationalities possessing the lands that had been conquered
+by Goths and Burgundians, Lombards and Franks; instead of Germania,
+the Holy Roman Empire; instead of Epic, Romance; not the old-fashioned
+romance of native mythology, not the natural spontaneous romance of
+the Irish legends or the Icelandic stories of gods and giants, but the
+composite far-fetched romance of the age of chivalry, imported from
+all countries and literatures to satisfy the medieval appetite for
+novel and wonderful things.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, the stronger kind of poetry had still something to show,
+before all things were overgrown with imported legend, and before the
+strong enunciation of the older manner was put out of fashion by the
+medieval clerks and rhetoricians.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="I.IV"></a>IV</h3>
+
+<h3>THE THREE SCHOOLS&#8212;TEUTONIC EPIC&#8212;FRENCH EPIC&#8212;THE ICELANDIC HISTORIES</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> Teutonic heroic poetry was menaced on all hands from the earliest
+times; it was turned aside from the national heroes by saints and
+missionaries, and charmed out of its sterner moods by the spell of
+wistful and regretful meditation. In continental Germany it appears to
+have been early vanquished. In England, where the epic poetry was
+further developed than on the Continent, it was not less exposed to
+the rivalry of the ideas and subjects that belonged to the Church.</p>
+
+<p>The Anglo-Saxon histories of St. Andrew and St. Helen are as full of
+romantic passages as those poems of the fourteenth century in which
+the old alliterative verse is revived to tell the tale of Troy or of
+the <i>Mort Arthur</i>. The national subjects themselves are not proof
+against the ideas of the Church; even in the fragments of <i>Waldere</i>
+they are to be found; and the poem of <i>Beowulf</i> has been filled, like
+so much of the old English poetry, with the melancholy of the
+preacher, and the sense of the vanity of earthly things. But the
+influence of fantasy and pathos could not dissolve the strength of
+epic beyond recovery, or not until it had done something to show<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> what
+it was worth. Not all the subjects are treated in the romantic manner
+of Cynewulf and his imitators. The poem of <i>Maldon</i>, written at the
+very end of the tenth century, is firm and unaffected in its style,
+and of its style there can be no question that it is heroic.</p>
+
+<p>The old Norse poetry was beyond the influence of most of the
+tendencies and examples that corrupted the heroic poetry of the
+Germans, and changed the course of poetry in England. It was not till
+the day of its glory was past that it took to subjects like those of
+Cynewulf and his imitators. But it was hindered in other ways from
+representing the lives of heroes in a consistent epic form. If it knew
+less of the miracles of saints, it knew more of the old mythology; and
+though it was not, like English and German poetry, taken captive by
+the preachers, it was stirred and thrilled by the beauty of its own
+stories in a way that inclined to the lyrical rather than the epic
+tone. Yet here also there are passages of graver epic, where the tone
+is more assured and the composition more stately.</p>
+
+<p>The relation of the French epics to French romance is on the one side
+a relation of antagonism, in which the older form gives way to the
+newer, because &quot;the newer song is sweeter in the ears of men.&quot; The
+<i>Chanson de Geste</i> is driven out by poems that differ from it in
+almost every possible respect; in the character of their original
+subject-matter, in their verse, their rhetoric, and all their gear of
+commonplaces, and all the devices of their art. But from another point
+of view there may be detected in the <i>Chansons de Geste</i> no small
+amount of the very qualities that were fatal to them, when the
+elements were compounded anew in the poems of <i>Erec</i> and <i>Lancelot</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The French epics have many points of likeness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> with the Teutonic
+poetry of <i>Beowulf</i> or <i>Finnesburh</i>, or of the Norse heroic songs.
+They are epic in substance, having historical traditions at the back
+of them, and owing the materials of their picture to no deliberate
+study of authorities. They differ from <i>Beowulf</i> in this respect,
+among others, that they are the poems of feudal society, not of the
+simpler and earlier communities. The difference ought not to be
+exaggerated. As far as heroic poetry is concerned, the difference lies
+chiefly in the larger frame of the story. The kingdom of France in the
+French epics is wider than the kingdom of Hrothgar or Hygelac. The
+scale is nearer that of the <i>Iliad</i> than of the <i>Odyssey</i>. The
+&quot;Catalogue of the Armies sent into the Field&quot; is longer, the mass of
+fighting-men is more considerable, than in the epic of the older
+school. There is also, frequently, a much fuller sense of the national
+greatness and the importance of the defence of the land against its
+enemies, a consciousness of the dignity of the general history, unlike
+the carelessness with which the Teutonic poets fling themselves into
+the story of individual lives, and disregard the historical
+background. Generally, however, the Teutonic freedom and rebellious
+spirit is found as unmistakably in the <i>Chansons de Geste</i> as in the
+alliterative poems. Feudalism appears in heroic poetry, and indeed in
+prosaic history, as a more elaborate form of that anarchy which is the
+necessary condition of an heroic age. It does not deprive the poet of
+his old subjects, his family enmities, and his adventures of private
+war. Feudalism did not invent, neither did it take away, the virtue of
+loyalty that has so large a place in all true epic, along with its
+counterpart of defiance and rebellion, no less essential to the story.
+It intensified the poetical value of both motives, but they are older
+than the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> <i>Iliad</i>. It provided new examples of the &quot;wrath&quot; of injured
+or insulted barons; it glorified to the utmost, it honoured as
+martyrs, those who died fighting for their lord.<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></p>
+
+<p>In all this it did nothing to change the essence of heroic poetry. The
+details were changed, the scene was enlarged, and so was the number of
+the combatants. But the details of feudalism that make a difference
+between Beowulf, or the men of Attila, and the epic paladins of
+Charlemagne in the French poems of the eleventh and twelfth centuries,
+need not obscure the essential resemblance between one heroic period
+and another.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, it is plain from the beginning that French epic had
+to keep its ground with some difficulty against the challenge of
+romantic skirmishers. In one of the earliest of the poems about
+Charlemagne, the Emperor and his paladins are taken to the East by a
+poet whom Bossu would hardly have counted &quot;honest.&quot; In the poem of
+<i>Huon of Bordeaux</i>, much later, the story of Oberon and the magic horn
+has been added to the plot of a feudal tragedy, which in itself is
+compact and free from extravagance. Between those extreme cases there
+are countless examples of the mingling of the graver epic with more or
+less incongruous strains. Sometimes there is magic, sometimes the
+appearance of a Paynim giant, often the repetition of long prayers
+with allusions to the lives of saints and martyrs, and throughout
+there is the constant presence of ideas derived from homilies and the
+common teaching of the Church. In some of these respects<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> the French
+epics are in the same case as the old English poems which, like
+<i>Beowulf</i>, show the mingling of a softer mood with the stronger; of
+new conventions with old. In some respects they show a further
+encroachment of the alien spirit.</p>
+
+<p>The English poem of <i>Maldon</i> has some considerable likeness in the
+matter of its story, and not a little in its ideal of courage, with
+the <i>Song of Roland</i>. A comparison of the two poems, in those respects
+in which they are commensurable, will show the English poem to be
+wanting in certain elements of mystery that are potent in the other.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Song of Maldon</i> and the <i>Song of Roncesvalles</i> both narrate the
+history of a lost battle, of a realm defended against its enemies by a
+captain whose pride and self-reliance lead to disaster, by refusing to
+take fair advantage of the enemy and put forth all his available
+strength. Byrhtnoth, fighting the Northmen on the shore of the Essex
+river, allows them of his own free will to cross the ford and come to
+close quarters. &quot;He gave ground too much to the adversary; he called
+across the cold river and the warriors listened: 'Now is space granted
+to you; come speedily hither and fight; God alone can tell who will
+hold the place of battle.' Then the wolves of blood, the rovers, waded
+west over Panta.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This unnecessary magnanimity has for the battle of Maldon the effect
+of Roland's refusal to sound the horn at the battle of Roncesvalles;
+it is the tragic error or transgression of limit that brings down the
+crash and ruin at the end of the day.</p>
+
+<p>In both poems there is a like spirit of indomitable resistance. The
+close of the battle of Maldon finds the loyal companions of Byrhtnoth
+fighting round his body, abandoned by the cowards who have run away,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>
+but themselves convinced of their absolute strength to resist to the
+end.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Byrhtwold spoke and grasped his shield&#8212;he was an old
+companion&#8212;he shook his ashen spear, and taught courage to
+them that fought:&#8212;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Thought shall be the harder, heart the keener, mood shall
+be the more, as our might lessens. Here our prince lies low,
+they have hewn him to death! Grief and sorrow for ever on
+the man that leaves this war-play! I am old of years, but
+hence I will not go; I think to lay me down by the side of
+my lord, by the side of the man I cherished.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<p>The story of Roncesvalles tells of an agony equally hopeless and
+equally secure from every touch of fear.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Song of Maldon</i> is a strange poem to have been written in the
+reign of Ethelred the Unready. But for a few phrases it might, as far
+as the matter is concerned, have been written before the conversion of
+England, and although it is a battle in defence of the country, and
+not a mere incident of private war, the motive chiefly used is not
+patriotism, but private loyalty to the captain. Roland is full of the
+spirit of militant Christendom, and there is no more constant thought
+in the poem than that of the glory of France. The virtue of the
+English heroes is the old Teutonic virtue. The events of the battle
+are told plainly and clearly; nothing adventitious is brought in to
+disturb the effect of the plain story; the poetical value lies in the
+contrast between the grey landscape (which is barely indicated), the
+severe and restrained description of the fighters, on the one hand,
+and on the other the sublimity of the spirit expressed in the last
+words of the &quot;old companion.&quot; In the narrative of events there are no
+extraneous beauties to break the overwhelming strength of the
+eloquence in which the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> meaning of the whole thing is concentrated.
+With Roland at Roncesvalles the case is different. He is not shown in
+the grey light of the Essex battlefield. The background is more
+majestic. There is a mysterious half-lyrical refrain throughout the
+tale of the battle: &quot;high are the mountains and dark the valleys&quot;
+about the combatants in the pass; they are not left to themselves like
+the warriors of the poem of <i>Maldon</i>. It is romance, rather than epic
+or tragedy, which in this way recognises the impersonal power of the
+scene; the strength of the hills under which the fight goes on. In the
+first part of the <i>Odyssey</i> the spell of the mystery of the sea is all
+about the story of Odysseus; in the later and more dramatic part the
+hero loses this, and all the strength is concentrated in his own
+character. In the story of Roland there is a vastness and vagueness
+throughout, coming partly from the numbers of the hosts engaged,
+partly from the author's sense of the mystery of the Pyrenean valleys,
+and, in a very large measure, from the heavenly aid accorded to the
+champion of Christendom. The earth trembles, there is darkness over
+all the realm of France even to the Mount St. Michael:</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+C'est la dulur pur la mort de Rollant.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>St. Gabriel descends to take from the hand of Roland the glove that he
+offers with his last confession; and the three great angels of the
+Lord are there to carry his soul to Paradise.</p>
+
+<p>There is nothing like this in the English poem. The battle is fought
+in the light of an ordinary day; there is nothing to greet the eyes of
+Byrhtnoth and his men except the faces of their enemies.</p>
+
+<p>It is not hard to find in old English poetry descriptions less austere
+than that of <i>Maldon</i>; there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> may be found in the French <i>Chansons de
+Geste</i> great spaces in which there is little of the majestic light and
+darkness of Roncesvalles. But it is hard to escape the conviction that
+the poem of <i>Maldon</i>, late as it is, has uttered the spirit and
+essence of the Northern heroic literature in its reserved and simple
+story, and its invincible profession of heroic faith; while the poem
+of Roncesvalles is equally representative of the French epic spirit,
+and of the French poems in which the ideas common to every heroic age
+are expressed with all the circumstances of the feudal society of
+Christendom, immediately before the intellectual and literary
+revolutions of the twelfth century. The French epics are full of omens
+of the coming victory of romance, though they have not yet given way.
+They still retain, in spite of their anticipations of the Kingdom of
+the Grail, an alliance in spirit with the older Teutonic poetry, and
+with those Icelandic histories that are the highest literary
+expression of the Northern spirit in its independence of feudalism.</p>
+
+<p>The heroic age of the ancient Germans may be said to culminate, and
+end, in Iceland in the thirteenth century. The Icelandic <i>Sagas</i>&#8212;the
+prose histories of the fortunes of the great Icelandic houses&#8212;are the
+last and also the finest expression and record of the spirit and the
+ideas belonging properly to the Germanic race in its own right, and
+not derived from Rome or Christendom. Those of the German nations who
+stayed longest at home had by several centuries the advantage of the
+Goths and Franks, and had time to complete their native education
+before going into foreign subjects. The English were less exposed to
+Southern influences than the continental Germans; the Scandinavian
+nations less than the Angles and Saxons. In Norway particularly,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> the
+common German ideas were developed in a way that produced a code of
+honour, a consciousness of duty, and a strength of will, such as had
+been unknown in the German nations who were earlier called upon to
+match themselves against Rome. Iceland was colonised by a picked lot
+of Norwegians; by precisely those Norwegians who had this strength of
+will in its highest degree.</p>
+
+<p>Political progress in the Middle Ages was by way of monarchy; but
+strong monarchy was contrary to the traditions of Germania, and in
+Norway, a country of great extent and great difficulties of
+communication, the ambition of Harold Fairhair was resisted by numbers
+of chieftains who had their own local following and their own family
+dignity to maintain, in their firths and dales. Those men found Norway
+intolerable through the tyranny of King Harold, and it was by them
+that Iceland was colonised through the earlier colonies in the
+west&#8212;in Scotland, in Ireland, in Shetland and the other islands.</p>
+
+<p>The ideas that took the Northern colonists to Iceland were the ideas
+of Germania,&#8212;the love of an independent life, the ideal of the
+old-fashioned Northern gentleman, who was accustomed to consideration
+and respect from the freemen, his neighbours, who had authority by his
+birth and fortune to look after the affairs of his countryside, who
+would not make himself the tenant, vassal, or steward of any king. In
+the new country these ideas were intensified and defined. The ideal of
+the Icelandic Commonwealth was something more than a vague motive, it
+was present to the minds of the first settlers in a clear and definite
+form. The most singular thing in the heroic age of Iceland is that the
+heroes knew what they were about. The heroic age of Iceland begins in
+a commonwealth founded by a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> social contract. The society that is
+established there is an association of individuals coming to an
+agreement with one another to invent a set of laws and observe them.
+Thus while Iceland on the one hand is a reactionary state, founded by
+men who were turning their backs on the only possible means of
+political progress, cutting themselves off from the world, and
+adhering obstinately to forms of life with no future before them, on
+the other hand this reactionary commonwealth, this fanatical
+representative of early Germanic use and wont, is possessed of a
+clearness of self-consciousness, a hard and positive clearness of
+understanding, such as is to be found nowhere else in the Middle Ages
+and very rarely at all in any polity.</p>
+
+<p>The prose literature of Iceland displays the same two contradictory
+characters throughout. The actions described, and the customs, are
+those of an early heroic age, with rather more than the common amount
+of enmity and vengeance, and an unequalled power of resistance and
+rebellion in the individual wills of the personages. The record of all
+this anarchy is a prose history, rational and unaffected, seeing all
+things in a dry light; a kind of literature that has not much to learn
+from any humanism or rationalism, in regard to its own proper subjects
+at any rate.</p>
+
+<p>The people of Iceland were not cut off from the ordinary European
+learning and its commonplaces. They read the same books as were read
+in England or Germany. They read St. Gregory <i>de Cura Pastorali</i>, they
+read <i>Ovidius Epistolarum</i>, and all the other popular books of the
+Middle Ages. In time those books and the world to which they belonged
+were able to obtain a victory over the purity of the Northern
+tradition and manners, but not until the Northern tradition had
+exhausted itself, and the Icelandic polity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> began to break up. The
+literature of the maturity of Iceland just before the fall of the
+Commonwealth is a literature belonging wholly and purely to Iceland,
+in a style unmodified by Latin syntax and derived from the colloquial
+idiom. The matter is the same in kind as the common matter of heroic
+poetry. The history represents the lives of adventurers, the rivalries
+and private wars of men who are not ignorant of right and honour, but
+who acknowledge little authority over them, and are given to choose
+their right and wrong for themselves, and abide the consequences. This
+common matter is presented in a form which may be judged on its own
+merits, and there is no need to ask concessions from any one in
+respect of the hard or unfavourable conditions under which this
+literature was produced. One at least of the Icelandic Sagas is one of
+the great prose works of the world&#8212;the story of Njal and his sons.</p>
+
+<p>The most perfect heroic literature of the Northern nations is to be
+found in the country where the heroic polity and society had most room
+and leisure; and in Iceland the heroic ideals of life had conditions
+more favourable than are to be discovered anywhere else in history.
+Iceland was a world divided from the rest, outside the orbit of all
+the states of Europe; what went on there had little more than an ideal
+relation to the course of the great world; it had no influence on
+Europe, it was kept separate as much as might be from the European
+storms and revolutions. What went on in Iceland was the progress in
+seclusion of the old Germanic life&#8212;a life that in the rest of the
+world had been blended and immersed in other floods and currents.
+Iceland had no need of the great movements of European history.</p>
+
+<p>They had a humanism of their own, a rationalism of their own, gained
+quite apart from the great<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> European tumults, and gained prematurely,
+in comparison with the rest of Europe. Without the labour of the
+Middle Ages, without the storm and stress of the reform of learning,
+they had the faculty of seeing things clearly and judging their values
+reasonably, without superstition. They had to pay the penalty of their
+opposition to the forces of the world; there was no cohesion in their
+society, and when once the balance of power in the island was
+disturbed, the Commonwealth broke up. But before that, they
+accomplished what had been ineffectually tried by the poet of
+<i>Beowulf</i>, the poet of <i>Roland</i>; they found an adequate form of heroic
+narrative. Also in their use of this instrument they were led at last
+to a kind of work that has been made nowhere else in the world, for
+nowhere else does the form of heroic narrative come to be adapted to
+contemporary events, as it was in Iceland, by historians who were
+themselves partakers in the actions they described. Epic, if the Sagas
+are epic, here coincides with autobiography. In the <i>Sturlunga Saga</i>,
+written by Sturla, Snorri's nephew, the methods of heroic literature
+are applied by an eye-witness to the events of his own time, and there
+is no discrepancy or incongruity between form and matter. The age
+itself takes voice and speaks in it; there is no interval between
+actors and author. This work is the end of the heroic age, both in
+politics and in literature. After the loss of Icelandic freedom there
+is no more left of Germania, and the <i>Sturlunga Saga</i> which tells the
+story of the last days of freedom is the last word of the Teutonic
+heroic age. It is not a decrepit or imitative or secondary thing; it
+is a masterpiece; and with this true history, this adaptation of an
+heroic style to contemporary realities, the sequence of German heroic
+tradition comes to an end.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h1>THE TEUTONIC EPIC</h1>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="II.I"></a>I</h3>
+
+<h3>THE TRAGIC CONCEPTION</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Of</span> the heroic poetry in the Teutonic alliterative verse, the history
+must be largely conjectural. The early stages of it are known merely
+through casual references like those of Tacitus. We know that to the
+mind of the Emperor Julian, the songs of the Germans resembled the
+croaking of noisy birds; but this criticism is not satisfactory,
+though it is interesting. The heroes of the old time before Ermanaric
+and Attila were not without their poets, but of what sort the poems
+were in which their praises were sung, we can only vaguely guess. Even
+of the poems that actually remain it is difficult to ascertain the
+history and the conditions of their production. The variety of styles
+discoverable in the extant documents is enough to prevent the easy
+conclusion that the German poetry of the first century was already a
+fixed type, repeated by successive generations of poets down to the
+extinction of alliterative verse as a living form.</p>
+
+<p>After the sixth century things become a little clearer, and it is
+possible to speak with more certainty. One thing at any rate of the
+highest importance may be regarded as beyond a doubt. The passages in
+which Jordanes tells of Suanihilda trampled to death<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> by the horses of
+Ermanaric, and of the vengeance taken by her brothers Sarus and
+Ammius, are enough to prove that the subjects of heroic poetry had
+already in the sixth century, if not earlier, formed themselves
+compactly in the imagination. If Jordanes knew a Gothic poem on
+Ermanaric and the brothers of Suanihilda, that was doubtless very
+different from the Northern poem of Sorli and Hamther, which is a
+later version of the same story. But even if the existence of a Gothic
+ballad of Swanhild were doubted,&#8212;and the balance of probabilities is
+against the doubter,&#8212;it follows indisputably from the evidence that
+in the time of Jordanes people were accustomed to select and dwell
+upon dramatic incidents in what was accepted as history; the
+appreciation of tragedy was there, the talent to understand a tragic
+situation, to shape a tragic plot, to bring out the essential matter
+in relief and get rid of irrelevant particulars.</p>
+
+<p>In this respect at any rate, and it is one of the most important,
+there is continuity in the ancient poetry, onward from this early
+date. The stories of Alboin in the Lombard history of Paulus Diaconus,
+the meaning of which for the history of poetry is explained so
+admirably in the Introduction to <i>Corpus Poeticum Boreale</i>, by Dr.
+Vigfusson and Mr. York Powell, are further and more vivid
+illustrations of the same thing. In the story of the youth of Alboin,
+and the story of his death, there is matter of the same amount as
+would suffice for one of the short epics of the kind we know,&#8212;a poem
+of the same length as the Northern lay of the death of Ermanaric, of
+the same compass as <i>Waltharius</i>,&#8212;or, to take another standard of
+measurement, matter for a single tragedy with the unities preserved.
+Further, there is in both of them exactly that resolute comprehension
+and exposition of tragic meaning which is the virtue<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> of the short
+epics. The tragic contradiction in them could not be outdone by Victor
+Hugo. It is no wonder that the story of Rosamond and Albovine king of
+the Lombards became a favourite with dramatists of different schools,
+from the first essays of the modern drama in the <i>Rosmunda</i> of
+Rucellai, passing by the common way of the novels of Bandello to the
+Elizabethan stage. The earlier story of Alboin's youth, if less
+valuable for emphatic tragedy, being without the baleful figure of a
+Rosamond or a Clytemnestra, is even more perfect as an example of
+tragic complication. Here again is the old sorrow of Priam; the slayer
+of the son face to face with the slain man's father, and not in
+enmity. In beauty of original conception the story is not finer than
+that of Priam and Achilles; and it is impossible to compare the
+stories in any other respect than that of the abstract plot. But in
+one quality of the plot the Lombard drama excels or exceeds the story
+of the last book of the <i>Iliad</i>. The contradiction is strained with a
+greater tension; the point of honour is more nearly absolute. This
+does not make it a better story, but it proves that the man who told
+the story could understand the requirements of a tragic plot, could
+imagine clearly a strong dramatic situation, could refrain from
+wasting or obliterating the outline of a great story.</p>
+
+<p>The Lombards and the Gepidae were at war. Alboin, son of the Lombard
+king Audoin, and Thurismund, son of the Gepid king Thurisvend, met in
+battle, and Alboin killed Thurismund. After the battle, the Lombards
+asked King Audoin to knight his son. But Audoin answered that he would
+not break the Lombard custom, according to which it was necessary for
+the young man to receive arms first from the king of some other
+people. Alboin<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> when he heard this set out with forty of the Lombards,
+and went to Thurisvend, whose son he had killed, to ask this honour
+from him. Thurisvend welcomed him, and set him down at his right hand
+in the place where his son used to sit.</p>
+
+<p>Then follows the critical point of the action. The contradiction is
+extreme; the reconciliation also, the solution of the case, is
+perfect. Things are stretched to the breaking-point before the release
+comes; nothing is spared that can possibly aggravate the hatred
+between the two sides, which is kept from breaking out purely by the
+honour of the king. The man from whom an infinite debt of vengeance is
+owing, comes of his own will to throw himself on the generosity of his
+adversary. This, to begin with, is hardly fair to simple-minded people
+like the Gepid warriors; they may fairly think that their king is
+going too far in his reading of the law of honour:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>And it came to pass while the servants were serving at the
+tables, that Thurisvend, remembering how his son had been
+lately slain, and calling to mind his death, and beholding
+his slayer there beside him in his very seat, began to draw
+deep sighs, for he could not withhold himself any longer,
+and at last his grief burst forth in words. &quot;Very pleasant
+to me,&quot; quoth he, &quot;is the seat, but sad enough it is to see
+him that is sitting therein.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>By his confession of his thoughts the king gives an opening to those
+who are waiting for it, and it is taken at once. Insult and rejoinder
+break out, and it is within a hair's breadth of the irretrievable
+plunge that the king speaks his mind. He is lord in that house, and
+his voice allays the tumult; he takes the weapons of his son
+Thurismund, and gives them to Alboin and sends him back in peace and
+safety to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> his father's kingdom. It is a great story, even in a prose
+abstract, and the strength of its tragic problem is invincible. It is
+with strength like that, with a knowledge not too elaborate or minute,
+but sound and clear, of some of the possibilities of mental conflict
+and tragic contradiction, that heroic poetry first reveals itself
+among the Germans. It is this that gives strength to the story of the
+combat between Hildebrand and his son, of the flight of Walter and
+Hildegund, of the death of Brynhild, of Attila and Gudrun. Some of the
+heroic poems and plots are more simple than these. The battle of
+Maldon is a fair fight without any such distressful circumstances as
+in the case of Hildebrand or of Walter of Aquitaine. The adventures of
+Beowulf are simple, also; there is suspense when he waits the attack
+of the monster, but there is nothing of the deadly crossing of
+passions that there is in other stories. Even in <i>Maldon</i>, however,
+there is the tragic error; the fall and defeat of the English is
+brought about by the over-confidence and over-generosity of Byrhtnoth,
+in allowing the enemy to come to close quarters. In <i>Beowulf</i>, though
+the adventures of the hero are simple, other less simple stories are
+referred to by the way. One of these is a counterpart to the story of
+the youth of Alboin and the magnanimity of Thurisvend. One of the most
+famous of all the old subjects of heroic poetry was the vengeance of
+Ingeld for the death of his father, King Froda. The form of this story
+in <i>Beowulf</i> agrees with that of Saxo Grammaticus in preserving the
+same kind of opposition as in the story of Alboin, only in this case
+there is a different solution. Here a deadly feud has been put to rest
+by a marriage, and the daughter of Froda's slayer is married to
+Froda's son. But as in the Lombard history and in so many of the
+stories of Iceland, this reconciliation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> is felt to be intolerable and
+spurious; the need of vengeance is real, and it finds a spokesman in
+an old warrior, who cannot forget his dead lord, nor endure the sight
+of the new bride's kinsmen going free and wearing the spoils of their
+victory. So Ingeld has to choose between his wife, wedded to him out
+of his enemy's house, and his father, whom that enemy has killed. And
+so everywhere in the remains, not too voluminous, of the literature of
+the heroic age, one encounters this sort of tragic scheme. One of
+those ancient plots, abstracted and written out fair by Saxo, is the
+plot of <i>Hamlet</i>.</p>
+
+<p>There is not one of the old Northern heroic poems, as distinct from
+the didactic and mythological pieces, that is without this tragic
+contradiction; sometimes expressed with the extreme of severity, as in
+the lay of the death of Ermanaric; sometimes with lyrical
+effusiveness, as in the lament of Gudrun; sometimes with a mystery
+upon it from the under-world and the kingdom of the dead, as in the
+poems of Helgi, and of the daughter of Angantyr.</p>
+
+<p>The poem of the death of Ermanaric is a version of the story told by
+Jordanes, which since his time had come to be attached to the cycle of
+the Niblungs.</p>
+
+<p>Swanhild, the daughter of Sigurd and Gudrun, was wedded to Ermanaric,
+king of the Goths. The king's counsellor wrought on his mind with
+calumnies against the queen, and he ordered her to be trampled to
+death under horses' feet, and so she died, though the horses were
+afraid of the brightness of her eyes and held back until her eyes were
+covered. Gudrun stirred up her sons, Sorli and Hamther, to go and
+avenge their sister. As they set out, they quarrelled with their
+base-born brother Erp, and killed him,&#8212;the tragic error in this
+history, for it was the want of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> a third man that ruined them, and Erp
+would have helped them if they had let him. In the hall of the Goths
+they defy their enemy and hew down his men; no iron will bite in their
+armour; they cut off the hands and feet of Ermanaric. Then, as happens
+so often in old stories, they go too far, and a last insult alters the
+balance against them, as Odysseus alters it at the leave-taking with
+Polyphemus. The last gibe at Ermanaric stirs him as he lies, and he
+calls on the remnant of the Goths to stone the men that neither sword
+nor spear nor arrow will bring down. And that was the end of them.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&quot;We have fought a good fight; we stand on slain Goths that
+have had their fill of war. We have gotten a good report,
+though we die to-day or to-morrow. No man can live over the
+evening, when the word of the Fates has gone forth.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There fell Sorli at the gable of the hall, and Hamther was
+brought low at the end of the house.</p></div>
+
+<p>Among the Norse poems it is this one, the <i>Ham&#240;ism&#225;l</i>, that comes
+nearest to the severity of the English <i>Maldon</i> poem. It is wilder and
+more cruel, but the end attains to simplicity.</p>
+
+<p>The gap in <i>Codex Regius</i>, the &quot;Elder&quot; or &quot;Poetic Edda,&quot; has destroyed
+the poems midway between the beginning and end of the tragedy of
+Sigfred and Brynhild, and among them the poem of their last meeting.
+There is nothing but the prose paraphrase to tell what that was, but
+the poor substitute brings out all the more clearly the strength of
+the original conception, the tragic problem.</p>
+
+<p>After the gap in the manuscript there are various poems of Brynhild
+and Gudrun, in which different views of the story are taken, and in
+all of them the tragic contradiction is extreme: in Brynhild's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>
+vengeance on Sigurd, in Gudrun's lament for her husband slain by her
+brothers, and in the later fortunes of Gudrun. In some of these poems
+the tragedy becomes lyrical, and two kinds of imagination, epic and
+elegiac, are found in harmony.</p>
+
+<p>The story of Helgi and Sigrun displays this rivalry of moods&#8212;a tragic
+story, carried beyond the tragic stress into the mournful quiet of the
+shadows.</p>
+
+<p>Helgi is called upon by Sigrun to help her against Hodbrodd, and save
+her from a hateful marriage. Helgi kills Hodbrodd, and wins Sigrun;
+but he has also killed Sigrun's father Hogni and her elder brother.
+The younger brother Dag takes an oath to put away enmity, but breaks
+his oath and kills Helgi.</p>
+
+<p>It is a story like all the others in which there is a conflict of
+duties, between friendship and the duty of vengeance, a plot of the
+same kind as that of Froda and Ingeld. Sigrun's brother is tried in
+the same way as Ingeld in the story told by Saxo and mentioned in
+<i>Beowulf</i>. But it does not end with the death of Helgi. Sigrun looks
+for Helgi to come back in the hour of the &quot;Assembly of Dreams,&quot; and
+Helgi comes and calls her, and she follows him:&#8212;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&quot;Thy hair is thick with rime, thou art wet with the dew of
+death, thy hands are cold and dank.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It is thine own doing, Sigrun from Sevafell, that Helgi is
+drenched with deadly dew; thou weepest cruel tears, thou
+gold-dight, sunbright lady of the South, before thou goest
+to sleep; every one of them falls with blood, wet and chill,
+upon my breast. Yet precious are the draughts that are
+poured for us, though we have lost both love and land, and
+no man shall sing a song of lamentation though he see the
+wounds on my breast, for kings' daughters have come among
+the dead.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have made thee a bed, Helgi, a painless bed, thou son of
+the Wolfings. I shall sleep in thine arms, O king, as I
+should if thou wert alive.&quot;</p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This is something different from epic or tragedy, but it does not
+interfere with the tragedy of which it is the end.</p>
+
+<p>The poem of the <i>Waking of Angantyr</i> is so filled with mystery and
+terror that it is hard to find in it anything else. After the
+<i>Volosp&#225;</i> it is the most wonderful of all the Northern poems.</p>
+
+<p>Hervor, daughter of Angantyr, is left alone to avenge her father and
+her eleven brothers, killed by Arrow Odd before her birth. In her
+father's grave is the sword of the Dwarfs that never is drawn in vain,
+and she comes to his grave to find it. The island where he lies is
+full of death-fires, and the dead are astir, but Hervor goes on. She
+calls on her father and her brothers to help her:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&quot;Awake, Angantyr! It is Hervor that bids thee awake. Give me
+the sword of the Dwarfs! Hervard! Hiorvard! Rani! Angantyr!
+I bid you all awake!&quot;</p></div>
+
+<p>Her father answers from the grave; he will not give up the sword, for
+the forgers of it when it was taken from them put a curse on those who
+wear it. But Hervor will not leave him until he has yielded to her
+prayers, and at last she receives the sword from her father's
+hands.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a></p>
+
+<p>Although the poem of Hervor lies in this way &quot;between the worlds&quot; of
+Life and Death,&#8212;the phrase is Hervor's own,&#8212;although the action is
+so strange and so strangely encompassed with unearthly fire and
+darkness, its root is not set in the dim borderland where the dialogue
+is carried on. The root is tragic, and not fantastic, nor is there any
+excess, nor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> anything strained beyond the limit of tragedy, in the
+passion of Hervor.</p>
+
+<p>Definite imagination of a tragic plot, and sure comprehension of the
+value of dramatic problems, are not enough in themselves to make a
+perfect poem. They may go along with various degrees of imperfection
+in particular respects; faults of diction, either tenuity or
+extravagance of phrasing may accompany this central imaginative power.
+Strength of plot is partly independent of style; it bears translation,
+it can be explained, it is something that can be abstracted from the
+body of a poem and still make itself impressive. The dramatic value of
+the story of the death of Alboin is recognisable even when it is
+stated in the most general terms, as a mere formula; the story of
+<i>Waltharius</i> retains its life, even in the Latin hexameters; the plot
+of <i>Hamlet</i> is interesting, even in Saxo; the story of the Niblungs,
+even in the mechanical prose paraphrase. This gift of shaping a plot
+and letting it explain itself without encumbrances is not to be
+mistaken for the whole secret of the highest kind of poetry. But, if
+not the whole, it is the spring of the whole. All the other gifts may
+be there, but without this, though all but the highest kind of epic or
+tragic art may be attainable, the very highest will not be attained.</p>
+
+<p>Aristotle may be referred to again. As he found it convenient in his
+description of epic to insist on its dramatic nature, in his
+description of tragedy it pleased him to lay emphasis on that part of
+the work which is common to tragedy and epic&#8212;the story, the plot. It
+may be remarked how well the barbarous poetry conforms to the pattern
+laid down in Aristotle's description. The old German epic, in
+<i>Hildebrand</i>, <i>Waldere</i>, <i>Finnesburh</i>, <i>Byrhtnoth</i>, besides all the
+Northern lays of Sigurd, Brynhild, and Gudrun, is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> dramatic in its
+method, letting the persons speak for themselves as much as may be. So
+far it complies with Aristotle's delineation of epic. And further, all
+this dramatic bent may be seen clearly to have its origin in the mere
+story,&#8212;in the dramatic situation, in fables that might be acted by
+puppets or in a dumb show, and yet be tragical. No analytic or
+psychological interest in varieties of character&#8212;in
+<span title="Greek: &#234;th&#234;">&#951;&#952;&#951;</span>&#8212;could have uttered the passion of Brynhild or of Gudrun.
+Aristotle knew that psychological analysis and moral rhetoric were not
+the authors of Clytemnestra or Oedipus. The barbarian poets are on a
+much lower and more archaic level than the poets with whom Aristotle
+is concerned, but here, where comparison is not meaningless nor
+valueless, their imaginations are seen to work in the same sound and
+productive way as the minds of Aeschylus or Sophocles, letting the
+seed&#8212;the story in its abstract form, the mere plot&#8212;develop itself
+and spring naturally into the fuller presentation of the characters
+that are implied in it. It is another kind of art that studies
+character in detail, one by one, and then sets them playing at chance
+medley, and trusts to luck that the result will be entertaining.</p>
+
+<p>That Aristotle is confirmed by these barbarian auxiliaries is of no
+great importance to Aristotle, but it is worth arguing that the
+barbarous German imagination at an earlier stage, relatively, than the
+Homeric, is found already possessed of something like the sanity of
+judgment, the discrimination of essentials from accidents, which is
+commonly indicated by the term classical. Compared with Homer these
+German songs are prentice work; but they are begun in the right way,
+and therefore to compare them with a masterpiece in which the same way
+is carried out to its end is not unjustifiable.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="II.II"></a>II</h3>
+
+<h3>SCALE OF THE POEMS</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> following are the extant poems on native heroic themes, written in
+one or other of the dialects of the Teutonic group, and in unrhymed
+alliterative measures.</p>
+
+<p>(1) <i>Continental.</i>&#8212;The <i>Lay of Hildebrand</i> (<i>c.</i> <span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 800), a Low
+German poem, copied by High German clerks, is the only remnant of the
+heroic poetry of the continental Germans in which, together with the
+national metre, there is a national theme.</p>
+
+<p>(2) <i>English.</i>&#8212;The poems of this order in old English are <i>Beowulf</i>,
+<i>Finnesburh</i>, <i>Waldere</i>, and <i>Byrhtnoth</i>, or the <i>Lay of Maldon</i>.
+Besides these there are poems on historical themes preserved in the
+Chronicle, of which <i>Brunanburh</i> is the most important, and two
+dramatic lyrics, <i>Widsith</i> and <i>Deor</i>, in which there are many
+allusions to the mythical and heroic cycles.</p>
+
+<p>(3) <i>Scandinavian and Icelandic.</i>&#8212;The largest number of heroic poems
+in alliterative verse is found in the old Northern language, and in
+manuscripts written in Iceland. The poems themselves may have come
+from other places in which the old language of Norway was spoken, some
+of them perhaps from Norway itself, many of them probably from those<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
+islands round Britain to which a multitude of Norwegian settlers were
+attracted,&#8212;Shetland, the Orkneys, the Western Islands of
+Scotland.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a></p>
+
+<p>The principal collection is that of the manuscript in the King's
+Library at Copenhagen (2365, 4<sup>o</sup>) generally referred to as <i>Codex
+Regius</i> (R); it is this book, discovered in the seventeenth century,
+that has received the inaccurate but convenient names of <i>Elder Edda</i>,
+or <i>Poetic Edda</i>, or <i>Edda of S&#230;mund the Wise</i>, by a series of
+miscalculations fully described in the preface to the <i>Corpus Poeticum
+Boreale</i>. Properly, the name <i>Edda</i> belongs only to the prose treatise
+by Snorri Sturluson.</p>
+
+<p>The chief contents of <i>Codex Regius</i> are a series of independent poems
+on the Volsung story, beginning with the tragedies of <i>Helgi and
+Swava</i> and <i>Helgi and Sigrun</i> (originally unconnected with the Volsung
+legend), and going on in the order of events.</p>
+
+<p>The series is broken by a gap in which the poems dealing with some of
+the most important parts of the story have been lost. The matter of
+their contents is known from the prose paraphrase called <i>Volsunga
+Saga</i>. Before the Volsung series comes a number of poems chiefly
+mythological: the <i>Sibyl's Prophecy</i>, (Volosp&#225;); <i>the Wooing of Frey</i>,
+or the <i>Errand of Skirnir</i>; the <i>Flyting of Thor and Woden</i>
+(Harbarzli&#243;&#240;); <i>Thor's Fishing for the Midgarth Serpent</i> (Hymiskvi&#240;a);
+the <i>Railing of Loki</i> (Lokasenna); the <i>Winning of Thor's Hammer</i>
+(&#222;rymskvi&#240;a); the <i>Lay of Weland</i>. There are also some didactic poems,
+chief among them being the gnomic miscellany under the title
+<i>H&#225;vam&#225;l</i>; while besides this there are others, like <i>Vaf&#254;r&#250;&#240;nism&#225;l</i>,
+treating of mythical subjects in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> a more or less didactic and
+mechanical way. There are a number of prose passages introducing or
+linking the poems. The confusion in some parts of the book is great.</p>
+
+<p><i>Codex Regius</i> is not the only source; other mythic and heroic poems
+are found in other manuscripts. The famous poem of the <i>Doom of
+Balder</i> (Gray's &quot;Descent of Odin&quot;); the poem of the <i>Rescue of
+Menglad</i>, the enchanted princess; the verses preserved in the
+<i>Hei&#240;reks Saga</i>, belonging to the story of Angantyr; besides the poem
+of the <i>Magic Mill</i> (Grottas&#246;ngr) and the <i>Song of the Dart</i> (Gray's
+&quot;Fatal Sisters&quot;). There are many fragmentary verses, among them some
+from the <i>Biarkam&#225;l</i>, a poem with some curious points of likeness to
+the English <i>Lay of Finnesburh</i>. A Swedish inscription has preserved
+four verses of an old poem on Theodoric.</p>
+
+<p>Thus there is some variety in the original documents now extant out of
+the host of poems that have been lost. One conclusion at least is
+irresistible&#8212;that, in guessing at the amount of epic poetry of this
+order which has been lost, one is justified in making a liberal
+estimate. Fragments are all that we possess. The extant poems have
+escaped the deadliest risks; the fire at Copenhagen in 1728, the
+bombardment in 1807, the fire in the Cotton Library in 1731, in which
+<i>Beowulf</i> was scorched but not burned. The manuscripts of <i>Finnesburh</i>
+and <i>Maldon</i> have been mislaid; but for the transcripts taken in time
+by Hickes and Hearne they would have been as little known as the songs
+that the Sirens sang. The poor remnants of <i>Waldere</i> were found by
+Stephens in two scraps of bookbinders' parchment.</p>
+
+<p>When it is seen what hazards have been escaped by those bits of
+wreckage, and at the same time how distinct in character the several
+poems are, it is plain<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> that one may use some freedom in thinking of
+the amount of this old poetry that has perished.</p>
+
+<p>The loss is partly made good in different ways: in the Latin of the
+historians, Jordanes, Paulus Diaconus, and most of all in the
+paraphrases, prose and verse, by Saxo Grammaticus; in Ekkehard's Latin
+poem of <i>Waltharius</i> (<i>c.</i> <span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 930); in the <i>Volsunga Saga</i>, which
+has kept the matter of the lost poems of <i>Codex Regius</i> and something
+of their spirit; in the <i>Thidreks Saga</i>, a prose story made up by a
+Norwegian in the thirteenth century from current North German ballads
+of the Niblungs; in the German poems of the twelfth and thirteenth
+centuries, which, in a later form of the language and in rhyming
+verse, have preserved at any rate some matters of tradition, some
+plots of stories, if little of the peculiar manner and imagination of
+the older poetry.</p>
+
+<p>The casual references to Teutonic heroic subjects in a vast number of
+authors have been brought together in a monumental work, <i>die deutsche
+Heldensage</i>, by Wilhelm Grimm (1829).</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">The Western Group</span></h3>
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><b><i>Hildebrand</i>, <i>Finnesburh</i>, <i>Waldere</i>, <i>Beowulf</i>, <i>Byrhtnoth</i></b></p>
+
+<p>The Western group of poems includes all those that are not
+Scandinavian; there is only one among them which is not English, the
+poem of <i>Hildebrand</i>. They do not afford any very copious material for
+inferences as to the whole course and progress of poetry in the
+regions to which they belong. A comparison of the fragmentary
+<i>Hildebrand</i> with the fragments of <i>Waldere</i> shows a remarkable
+difference<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> in compass and fulness; but, at the same time, the
+vocabulary and phrases of <i>Hildebrand</i> declare that poem unmistakably
+to belong to the same family as the more elaborate <i>Waldere</i>.
+<i>Finnesburh</i>, the fragmentary poem of the lost Lambeth MS., seems
+almost as far removed as <i>Hildebrand</i> from the more expansive and
+leisurely method of <i>Waldere</i>; while <i>Waldere</i>, <i>Beowulf</i>, and the
+poem of <i>Maldon</i> resemble one another in their greater ease and
+fluency, as compared with the brevity and abruptness of <i>Hildebrand</i>
+or <i>Finnesburh</i>. The documents, as far as they go, bear out the view
+that in the Western German tongues, or at any rate in England, there
+was a development of heroic poetry tending to a greater amplitude of
+narration. This progress falls a long way short of the fulness of
+Homer, not to speak of the extreme diffuseness of some of the French
+<i>Chansons de Geste</i>. It is such, however, as to distinguish the
+English poems, <i>Waldere</i>, <i>Beowulf</i>, and <i>Byrhtnoth</i>, very obviously
+from the poem of <i>Hildebrand</i>. While, at the same time, the brevity of
+<i>Hildebrand</i> is not like the brevity of the Northern poems.
+<i>Hildebrand</i> is a poem capable of expansion. It is easy enough to see
+in what manner its outlines might be filled up and brought into the
+proportions of <i>Waldere</i> or <i>Beowulf</i>. In the Northern poems, on the
+other hand, there is a lyrical conciseness, and a broken emphatic
+manner of exposition, which from first to last prevented any such
+increase of volume as seems to have taken place in the old English
+poetry; though there are some poems, the <i>Atlam&#225;l</i> particularly, which
+indicate that some of the Northern poets wished to go to work on a
+larger scale than was generally allowed them by their traditions.</p>
+
+<p>In the Northern group there is a great variety in respect of the
+amount of incident that goes to a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> single poem; some poems deal with a
+single adventure, while others give an abstract of a whole heroic
+history. In the Western poems this variety is not to be found. There
+is a difference in this respect between <i>Hildebrand</i> and <i>Waldere</i>,
+and still more, at least on the surface, between <i>Hildebrand</i> and
+<i>Beowulf</i>; but nothing like the difference between the <i>Lay of the
+Hammer</i> (&#222;rymskvi&#240;a), which is an episode of Thor, and the <i>Lay of
+Weland</i> or the <i>Lay of Brynhild</i>, which give in a summary way a whole
+history from beginning to end.</p>
+
+<p><i>Hildebrand</i> tells of the encounter of father and son, Hildebrand and
+Hadubrand, with a few references to the past of Hildebrand and his
+relations to Odoacer and Theodoric. It is one adventure, a tragedy in
+one scene.</p>
+
+<p><i>Finnesburh</i>, being incomplete at the beginning and end, is not good
+evidence. What remains of it presents a single adventure, the fight in
+the hall between Danes and Frisians. There is another version of the
+story of <i>Finnesburh</i>, which, as reported in <i>Beowulf</i> (ll. 1068-1154)
+gives a good deal more of the story than is given in the separate
+<i>Finnesburh Lay</i>. This episode in <i>Beowulf</i>, where a poem of
+<i>Finnesburh</i> is chanted by the Danish minstrel, is not to be taken as
+contributing another independent poem to the scanty stock; the
+minstrel's story is reported, not quoted at full length. It has been
+reduced by the poet of <i>Beowulf</i>, so as not to take up too large a
+place of its own in the composition. Such as it is, it may very well
+count as direct evidence of the way in which epic poems were produced
+and set before an audience; and it may prove that it was possible for
+an old English epic to deal with almost the whole of a tragic history
+in one sitting. In this case the tragedy is far less complex than the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>
+tale of the Niblungs, whatever interpretation may be given to the
+obscure allusions in which it is preserved.</p>
+
+<p>Finn, son of Folcwalda, king of the Frisians, entertained Hn&#230;f the
+Dane, along with the Danish warriors, in the castle of Finnesburh.
+There, for reasons of his own, he attacked the Danes; who kept the
+hall against him, losing their own leader Hn&#230;f, but making a great
+slaughter of the Frisians.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Beowulf</i> episode takes up the story at this point.</p>
+
+<p>Hn&#230;f was slain in the place of blood. His sister Hildeburg, Finn's
+wife, had to mourn for brother and son.</p>
+
+<p>Hengest succeeded Hn&#230;f in command of the Danes and still kept the hall
+against the Frisians. Finn was compelled to make terms with the Danes.
+Hengest and his men were to live among the Frisians with a place of
+their own, and share alike with Finn's household in all the gifts of
+the king. Finn bound himself by an oath that Hengest and his men
+should be free of blame and reproach, and that he would hold any
+Frisian guilty who should cast it up against the Danes that they had
+followed their lord's slayer.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> Then, after the oaths, was held the
+funeral of the Danish and the Frisian prince, brother and son of
+Hildeburg the queen.</p>
+
+<p>Then they went home to Friesland, where Hengest stayed with Finn
+through the winter. With the spring he set out, meaning vengeance; but
+he dissembled and rendered homage, and accepted the sword the lord
+gives his liegeman. Death came upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> Finn in his house; for the Danes
+came back and slew him, and the hall was made red with the Frisian
+blood. The Danes took Hildeburg and the treasure of Finn and carried
+the queen and the treasure to Denmark.</p>
+
+<p>The whole story, with the exception of the original grievance or
+grudge of the Frisian king, which is not explained, and the first
+battle, which is taken as understood, is given in <i>Beowulf</i> as the
+contents of one poem, delivered in one evening by a harper. It is more
+complicated than the story of <i>Hildebrand</i>, more even than <i>Waldere</i>;
+and more than either of the two chief sections of <i>Beowulf</i> taken
+singly&#8212;&quot;Beowulf in Denmark&quot; and the &quot;Fight with the Dragon.&quot; It is
+far less than the plot of the long <i>Lay of Brynhild</i>, in which the
+whole Niblung history is contained. In its distribution of the action,
+it corresponds very closely to the story of the death of the Niblungs
+as given by the <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i> and the <i>Atlam&#225;l</i>. The discrepancies
+between these latter poems need not be taken into account here. In
+each of them and in the <i>Finnesburh</i> story there is a double climax;
+first the wrong, then the vengeance. <i>Finnesburh</i> might also be
+compared, as far as the arrangement goes, with the <i>Song of Roland</i>;
+the first part gives the treacherous attack and the death of the hero;
+then comes a pause between the two centres of interest, followed in
+the second part by expiation of the wrong.</p>
+
+<p>The story of <i>Finnesburh</i> is obscure in many respects; the tradition
+of it has failed to preserve the motive for Finn's attack on his
+wife's brother, without which the story loses half its value.
+Something remains, nevertheless, and it is possible to recognise in
+this episode a greater regard for unity and symmetry of narrative than
+is to be found in <i>Beowulf</i> taken as a whole.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Lambeth poem of <i>Finnesburh</i> most probably confined itself to the
+battle in the hall. There is no absolute proof of this, apart from the
+intensity of its tone, in the extant fragment, which would agree best
+with a short story limited, like <i>Hildebrand</i>, to one adventure. It
+has all the appearance of a short lay, a single episode. Such a poem
+might end with the truce of Finn and Hengest, and an anticipation of
+the Danes' vengeance:</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+It is marvel an the red blood run not, as the rain does in the street.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Yet the stress of this adventure is not greater than that of Roland,
+which does not end at Roncesvalles; it may be that the <i>Finnesburh</i>
+poem went on to some of the later events, as told in the <i>Finnesburh</i>
+abridgment in <i>Beowulf</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The story of Walter of Aquitaine as represented by the two fragments
+of old English verse is not greatly inconsistent with the same story
+in its Latin form of <i>Waltharius</i>. The Latin verses of <i>Waltharius</i>
+tell the story of the flight of Walter and Hildegund from the house of
+Attila, and of the treacherous attack on Walter by Gunther, king of
+the Franks, against the advice, but with the unwilling consent, of
+Hagen, his liegeman and Walter's friend. Hagen, Hildegund, and Walter
+were hostages with Attila from the Franks, Burgundians, and
+Aquitanians. They grew up together at the Court of Attila till
+Gunther, son of Gibicho, became king of the Franks and refused tribute
+to the Huns. Then Hagen escaped and went home. Walter and Hildegund
+were lovers, and they, too, thought of flight, and escaped into the
+forests, westward, with a great load of treasure, and some fowling and
+fishing gear for the journey.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>After they had crossed the Rhine, they were discovered by Hagen; and
+Gunther, with twelve of the Franks, went after them to take the
+Hunnish treasure: Hagen followed reluctantly. The pursuers came up
+with Walter as he was asleep in a hold among the hills, a narrow green
+place with overhanging cliffs all round, and a narrow path leading up
+to it. Hildegund awakened Walter, and he went and looked down at his
+adversaries. Walter offered terms, through the mediation of Hagen, but
+Gunther would have none of them, and the fight began. The Latin poem
+describes with great spirit how one after another the Franks went up
+against Walter: Camelo (ll. 664-685), Scaramundus (686-724),
+Werinhardus the bowman (725-755), Ekevrid the Saxon (756-780), who
+went out jeering at Walter; Hadavartus (781-845), Patavrid (846-913),
+Hagen's sister's son, whose story is embellished with a diatribe on
+avarice; Gerwicus (914-940), fighting to avenge his companions and
+restore their honour&#8212;</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+Is furit ut caesos mundet vindicta sodales;<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>but he, too, fell&#8212;</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+Exitiumque dolens, pulsabat calcibus arvum.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Then there was a breathing-space, before Randolf, the eighth of them,
+made trial of Walter's defence (962-981). After him came Eleuther,
+whose other name was Helmnod, with a harpoon and a line, and the line
+was held by Trogus, Tanastus, and the king; Hagen still keeping aloof,
+though he had seen his nephew killed. The harpoon failed; three
+Frankish warriors were added to the slain; the king and Hagen were
+left (l. 1060).</p>
+
+<p>Gunther tried to draw Hagen into the fight. Hagen refused at first,
+but gave way at last, on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> account of the slaying of his nephew. He
+advised a retreat for the night, and an attack on Walter when he
+should have left the fastness. And so the day ended.</p>
+
+<p>Walter and Hildegund took turns to watch, Hildegund singing to awaken
+Walter when his turn came. They left their hold in the morning; but
+they had not gone a mile when Hildegund, looking behind, saw two men
+coming down a hill after them. These were Gunther and Hagen, and they
+had come for Walter's life. Walter sent Hildegund with the horse and
+its burden into the wood for safety, while he took his stand on rising
+ground. Gunther jeered at him as he came up; Walter made no answer to
+him, but reproached Hagen, his old friend. Hagen defended himself by
+reason of the vengeance due for his nephew; and so they fought, with
+more words of scorn. Hagen lost his eye, and Gunther his leg, and
+Walter's right hand was cut off by Hagen; and &quot;this was their sharing
+of the rings of Attila!&quot;&#8212;</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+Sic, sic, armillas partiti sunt Avarenses (l. 1404).<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Walter and Hildegund were king and queen of Aquitaine, but of his
+later wars and victories the tale has no more to tell.</p>
+
+<p>Of the two old English fragments of this story the first contains part
+of a speech of Hildegund<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a> encouraging Walter.</p>
+
+<p>Its place appears to be in the pause of the fight, when the Frankish
+champions have been killed, and Gunther and Hagen are alone. The
+speech is rhetorical: &quot;Thou hast the sword Mimming, the work of
+Weland, that fails not them that wield it. Be of good courage, captain
+of Attila; never didst thou draw back to thy hold for all the strokes
+of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> foeman; nay, my heart was afraid because of thy rashness. Thou
+shalt break the boast of Gunther; he came on without a cause, he
+refused the offered gifts; he shall return home empty-handed, if he
+return at all.&quot; That is the purport of it.</p>
+
+<p>The second fragment is a debate between Gunther and Walter. It begins
+with the close of a speech of Gunther (Gu&#240;here) in which there are
+allusions to other parts of the heroic cycle, such as are common in
+<i>Beowulf</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The allusion here is to one of the adventures of Widia, Weland's son;
+how he delivered Theodoric from captivity, and of Theodoric's
+gratitude. The connexion is obscure, but the reference is of great
+value as proving the resemblance of narrative method in <i>Waldere</i> and
+<i>Beowulf</i>, not to speak of the likeness to the Homeric way of quoting
+old stories. Waldere answers, and this is the substance of his
+argument: &quot;Lo, now, Lord of the Burgundians, it was thy thought that
+Hagena's hand should end my fighting. Come then and win my corselet,
+my father's heirloom, from the shoulders weary of war.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></p>
+
+<p>The fragment closes with a pious utterance of submission to heaven, by
+which the poem is shown to be of the same order as <i>Beowulf</i> in this
+respect also, as well as others, that it is affected by a turn for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>
+edification, and cannot stand as anything like a pure example of the
+older kind of heroic poetry. The phrasing here is that of the
+Anglo-Saxon secondary poems; the common religious phrasing that came
+into vogue and supplemented the old heathen poetical catch-words.</p>
+
+<p>The style of <i>Waldere</i> makes it probable that the action of the story
+was not hurried unduly. If the author kept the same proportion
+throughout, his poem may have been almost as long as <i>Waltharius</i>. It
+is probable that the fight among the rocks was described in detail;
+the <i>Maldon</i> poem may show how such a subject could be managed in old
+English verse, and how the matter of <i>Waltharius</i> may have been
+expressed in <i>Waldere</i>. Roughly speaking, there is about as much
+fighting in the three hundred and twenty-five lines of <i>Maldon</i> as in
+double the number of hexameters in <i>Waltharius</i>; but the <i>Maldon</i> poem
+is more concise than the extant fragments of <i>Waldere</i>. <i>Waldere</i> may
+easily have taken up more than a thousand lines.</p>
+
+<p>The Latin and the English poems are not in absolute agreement. The
+English poet knew that Gu&#240;here, Guntharius, was Burgundian, not Frank;
+and an expression in the speech of Hildegyth suggests that the fight
+in the narrow pass was not so exact a succession of single combats as
+in <i>Waltharius</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The poem of <i>Maldon</i> is more nearly related in its style to <i>Waldere</i>
+and <i>Beowulf</i> than to the <i>Finnesburh</i> fragment. The story of the
+battle has considerable likeness to the story of the fight at
+Finnesburh. The details, however, are given in a fuller and more
+capable way, at greater length.</p>
+
+<p><i>Beowulf</i> has been commonly regarded as exceptional, on account of its
+length and complexity, among the remains of the old Teutonic poetry.
+This<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> view is hardly consistent with a right reading of <i>Waldere</i>, or
+of <i>Maldon</i> either, for that matter. It is not easy to make any great
+distinction between <i>Beowulf</i> and <i>Waldere</i> in respect of the
+proportions of the story. The main action of <i>Beowulf</i> is comparable
+in extent with the action of <i>Waltharius</i>. The later adventure of
+<i>Beowulf</i> has the character of a sequel, which extends the poem, to
+the detriment of its proportions, but without adding any new element
+of complexity to the epic form. Almost all the points in which the
+manner of <i>Beowulf</i> differs from that of <i>Finnesburh</i> may be found in
+<i>Waldere</i> also, and are common to <i>Waldere</i> and <i>Beowulf</i> in
+distinction from <i>Hildebrand</i> and <i>Finnesburh</i>. The two poems, the
+poem of <i>Beowulf</i> and the fragments of <i>Waldere</i>, seem to be alike in
+the proportion they allow to dramatic argument, and in their manner of
+alluding to heroic matters outside of their own proper stories, not to
+speak of their affinities of ethical tone and sentiment.</p>
+
+<p>The time of the whole action of <i>Beowulf</i> is long. The poem, however,
+falls naturally into two main divisions&#8212;<i>Beowulf in Denmark</i>, and the
+<i>Death of Beowulf</i>. If it is permissible to consider these for the
+present as two separate stories, then it may be affirmed that in none
+of the stories preserved in the old poetic form of England and the
+German Continent is there any great length or complexity.
+<i>Hildebrand</i>, a combat; <i>Finnesburh</i>, a defence of a house; <i>Waldere</i>,
+a champion beset by his enemies; <i>Beowulf in Denmark</i>, the hero as a
+deliverer from pests; <i>Beowulf's Death</i> in one action; <i>Maldon</i> the
+last battle of an English captain; these are the themes, and they are
+all simple. There is more complexity in the story of <i>Finnesburh</i>, as
+reported in <i>Beowulf</i>, than in all the rest; but even that story
+appears to have observed as much as possible the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> unity of action. The
+epic singer at the court of the Dane appears to have begun, not with
+the narrative of the first contest, but immediately after that,
+assuming that part of the story as known, in order to concentrate
+attention on the vengeance, on the penalty exacted from Finn the
+Frisian for his treachery to his guests.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the themes may have less in them than others, but there is no
+such variety of scale among them as will be found in the Northern
+poems. There seems to be a general agreement of taste among the
+Western German poets and audiences, English and Saxon, as to the right
+compass of an heroic lay. When the subject was a foreign one, as in
+the <i>H&#234;liand</i>, in the poems of <i>Genesis</i> and <i>Exodus</i>, in <i>Andreas</i>,
+or <i>Elene</i>, there might be room for the complexity and variety of the
+foreign model. The poem of <i>Judith</i> may be considered as a happy
+instance in which the foreign document has of itself, by a
+pre-established harmony, conformed to an old German fashion. In the
+original story of <i>Judith</i> the unities are observed in the very degree
+that was suited to the ways of the Anglo-Saxon poetry. It is hazardous
+to speak generally of a body of poetry so imperfectly represented in
+extant literature, but it is at any rate permissible to say that the
+extant heroic poems, saved out of the wreck of the Western Teutonic
+poetry, show a strong regard for unity of action, in every case except
+that of <i>Beowulf</i>; while in that case there are two stories&#8212;a story
+and a sequel&#8212;each observing a unity within its own limit.</p>
+
+<p>Considered apart from the Northern poems, the poems of England and
+Germany give indication of a progress in style from a more archaic and
+repressed, to a more developed and more prolix kind of narrative. The
+difference is considerable between<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> <i>Hildebrand</i> and <i>Waldere</i>,
+between <i>Finnesburh</i> and <i>Beowulf</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It is the change and development in style, rather than any increase in
+the complexity of the themes, that accounts for the difference in
+scale between the shorter and the longer poems.</p>
+
+<p>For the natural history of poetical forms this point is of the highest
+importance. The Teutonic poetry shows that epic may be developed out
+of short lays through a gradual increase of ambition and of eloquence
+in the poets who deal with common themes. There is no question here of
+the process of agglutination and contamination whereby a number of
+short lays are supposed to be compounded into an epic poem. Of that
+process it may be possible to find traces in <i>Beowulf</i> and elsewhere.
+But quite apart from that, there is the process by which an archaic
+stiff manner is replaced by greater freedom, without any loss of unity
+in the plot. The story of Walter of Aquitaine is as simple as the
+story of Hildebrand. The difference between <i>Hildebrand</i> and <i>Waldere</i>
+is the difference between an archaic and an accomplished mode of
+narrative, and this difference is made by a change in spirit and
+imagination, not by a process of agglutination. To make the epic of
+<i>Waldere</i> it was not necessary to cobble together a number of older
+lays on separate episodes. It was possible to keep the original plan
+of the old story in its simplest irreducible form, and still give it
+the force and magnificence of a lofty and eloquent style. It was for
+the attainment of this pitch of style that the heroic poetry laboured
+in <i>Waldere</i> and <i>Beowulf</i>, with at least enough success to make these
+poems distinct from the rest in this group.</p>
+
+<p>With all the differences among them, the continental and English
+poems, <i>Hildebrand</i>, <i>Waldere</i>,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> and the rest, form a group by
+themselves, with certain specific qualities of style distinguishing
+them from the Scandinavian heroic poetry. The history of the
+Scandinavian poetry is the converse of the English development. Epic
+poetry in the North becomes more and more hopeless as time goes on,
+and with some exceptions tends further and further away from the
+original type which was common to all the Germans, and from which
+those common forms and phrases have been derived that are found in the
+&quot;Poetic Edda&quot; as well as in <i>Beowulf</i> or the <i>H&#234;liand</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In England before the old poetry died out altogether there was
+attained a certain magnitude and fulness of narrative by which the
+English poems are distinguished, and in virtue of which they may claim
+the title <i>epic</i> in no transferred or distorted sense of the term. In
+the North a different course is taken. There seems indeed, in the
+<i>Atlam&#225;l</i> especially, a poem of exceptional compass and weight among
+those of the North, to have been something like the Western desire for
+a larger scale of narrative poem. But the rhetorical expansion of the
+older forms into an equable and deliberate narrative was counteracted
+by the still stronger affection for lyrical modes of speech, for
+impassioned, abrupt, and heightened utterance. No epic solidity or
+composure could be obtained in the fiery Northern verse; the poets
+could not bring themselves into the frame of mind required for long
+recitals; they had no patience for the intervals necessary, in epic as
+in dramatic poetry, between the critical moments. They would have
+everything equally full of energy, everything must be emphatic and
+telling. But with all this, the Northern heroic poems are in some of
+their elements strongly allied to the more equable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> and duller poems
+of the West; there is a strong element of epic in their lyrical
+dialogues and monologues, and in their composition and arrangement of
+plots.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">The Northern Group</span></h3>
+
+<p>In comparing the English and the Northern poems, it should be borne in
+mind that the documents of the Northern poetry are hardly sufficient
+evidence of the condition of Northern epic at its best. The English
+documents are fragmentary, indeed, but at least they belong to a time
+in which the heroic poetry was attractive and well appreciated; as is
+proved by the wonderful freshness of the <i>Maldon</i> poem, late though it
+is. The Northern poems seem to have lost their vogue and freshness
+before they came to be collected and written down. They were
+imperfectly remembered and reported; the text of them is broken and
+confused, and the gaps are made up with prose explanations. The
+fortunate preservation of a second copy of <i>Volosp&#225;</i>, in Hauk's book,
+has further multiplied labours and perplexities by a palpable
+demonstration of the vanity of copiers, and of the casual way in which
+the strophes of a poem might be shuffled at random in different texts;
+while the chief manuscript of the poems itself has in some cases
+double and incongruous versions of the same passage.<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a></p>
+
+<p>The <i>Codex Regius</i> contains a number of poems that can only be called
+<i>epic</i> in the widest and loosest sense of the term, and some that are
+not <i>epic</i> in any sense at all. The gnomic verses, the mythological<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
+summaries, may be passed over for the present; whatever illustrations
+they afford of early beliefs and ideas, they have no evidence to give
+concerning the proportions of stories. Other poems in the collection
+come under the denomination of epic only by a rather liberal extension
+of the term to include poems which are no more epic than dramatic, and
+just as much the one as the other, like the poems of <i>Frey's Wooing</i>
+and of the earlier exploits of Sigurd, which tell their story
+altogether by means of dialogue, without any narrative passages at
+all. The links and explanations are supplied, in prose, in the
+manuscript. Further, among the poems which come nearer to the English
+form of narrative poetry there is the very greatest variety of scale.
+The amount of story told in the Northern poems may vary indefinitely
+within the widest limits. Some poems contain little more than an idyll
+of a single scene; others may give an abstract of a whole history, as
+the whole Volsung story is summarised, for instance, in the <i>Prophecy
+of Gripir</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the poems are found in such a confused and fragmentary form,
+with interruptions and interpolations, that, although it is possible
+to make out the story, it is hardly possible to give any confident
+judgment about the original proportions of the poems. This is
+particularly the case with the poems in which the hero bears the name
+of Helgi. The difficulties of these were partly appreciated, but not
+solved, by the original editor.</p>
+
+<p>The differences of scale may be illustrated by the following summary
+description, which aims at little more than a rough measurement of the
+stories, for purposes of comparison with <i>Beowulf</i> and <i>Waldere</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Lay of Weland</i> gives a whole mythical history. How Weland and his
+brother met with the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> swan-maidens, how the swan-brides left them in
+the ninth year, how Weland Smith was taken prisoner by King Nidad, and
+hamstrung, and set to work for the king; and of the vengeance of
+Weland. There are one hundred and fifty-nine lines, but in the text
+there are many defective places. The <i>Lay</i> is a ballad history,
+beginning at the beginning, and ending, not with the end of the life
+of Weland, nor with the adventures of his son Widia, but with the
+escape of Weland from the king, his enemy, after he had killed the
+king's sons and put shame on the king's daughter Bodvild.</p>
+
+<p>In plan, the <i>Lay of Weland</i> is quite different from the lays of the
+adventures of Thor, the <i>&#222;rymskvi&#240;a</i> and the <i>Hymiskvi&#240;a</i>, the songs
+of the Hammer and the Cauldron. These are chapters, episodes, in the
+history of Thor, not summaries of the whole matter, such as is the
+poem of <i>Weland</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The stories of Helgi Hundingsbane, and of his namesakes, as has been
+already remarked, are given in a more than usually complicated and
+tangled form.</p>
+
+<p>At first everything is simple enough. A poem of the life of Helgi
+begins in a way that promises a mode of narrative fuller and less
+abrupt than the <i>Lay of Weland</i>. It tells of the birth of Helgi, son
+of Sigmund; of the coming of the Norns to make fast the threads of his
+destiny; of the gladness and the good hopes with which his birth was
+welcomed. Then the <i>Lay of Helgi</i> tells, very briefly, how he slew
+King Hunding, how the sons of Hunding made claims for recompense. &quot;But
+the prince would make no payment of amends; he bade them look for no
+payment, but for the strong storm, for the grey spears, and for the
+rage of Odin.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> And the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> sons of Hunding were slain as their father
+had been.</p>
+
+<p>Then the main interest begins, the story of Helgi and Sigrun.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;A light shone forth from the Mountains of Flame, and lightnings
+followed.&quot; There appeared to Helgi, in the air, a company of armed
+maidens riding across the field of heaven; &quot;their armour was stained
+with blood, and light went forth from their spears.&quot; Sigrun from among
+the other &quot;ladies of the South&quot; answered Helgi, and called on him for
+help; her father Hogni had betrothed her, against her will, to
+Hodbrodd, son of Granmar. Helgi summoned his men to save her from this
+loathed wedding. The battle in which Helgi slew his enemies and won
+the lady of the air is told very shortly, while disproportionate
+length is given to an interlude of vituperative dialogue between two
+heroes, Sinfiotli, Helgi's brother, and Gudmund, son of Granmar, the
+warden of the enemy's coast; this passage of <i>Vetus Comoedia</i> takes up
+fifty lines, while only six are given to the battle, and thirteen to
+the meeting of Helgi and Sigrun afterwards. Here ends the poem which
+is described in <i>Codex Regius</i> as the <i>Lay of Helgi</i> (<i>Helgakvi&#240;a</i>).
+The story is continued in the next section in a disorderly way, by
+means of ill-connected quotations. The original editor, whether
+rightly or wrongly, is quite certain that the <i>Lay of Helgi</i>, which
+ends with the victory of Helgi over the unamiable bridegroom, is a
+different poem from that which he proceeds to quote as the <i>Old Lay of
+the Volsungs</i>, in which the same story is told. In this second version
+there is at least one interpolation from a third; a stanza from a poem
+in the &quot;dialogue measure,&quot; which is not the measure in which the rest
+of the story is told. It is uncertain what application<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> was meant to
+be given to the title <i>Old Lay of the Volsungs</i>, and whether the
+editor included under that title the whole of his second version of
+Helgi and Sigrun. For instance, he gives another version of the
+railing verses of Sinfiotli, which he may or may not have regarded as
+forming an essential part of his <i>Old Volsung Lay</i>. He distinguishes
+it at any rate from the other &quot;Flyting,&quot; which he definitely and by
+name ascribes to <i>Helgakvi&#240;a</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It is in this second version of the story of Helgi that the tragedy is
+worked out. Helgi slays the father of Sigrun in his battle against the
+bridegroom's kindred: Sigrun's brother takes vengeance. The space is
+scant enough for all that is told in it; scant, that is to say, in
+comparison with the space of the story of Beowulf; though whether the
+poem loses, as poetry, by this compression is another matter.</p>
+
+<p>It is here, in connexion with the second version, that the tragedy is
+followed by the verses of the grief of Sigrun, and the return of Helgi
+from the dead; the passage of mystery, the musical close, in which the
+tragic idea is changed into something less distinct than tragedy, yet
+without detriment to the main action.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever may be the critical solution of the textual problems of these
+<i>Lays</i>, it is impossible to get out of the text any form of narrative
+that shall resemble the English mode. Even where the story of Helgi is
+slowest, it is quicker, more abrupt, and more lyrical even than the
+<i>Lay of Finnesburh</i>, which is the quickest in movement of the English
+poems.</p>
+
+<p>The story of Helgi and Sigrun is intelligible, and though incomplete,
+not yet so maimed as to have lost its proportions altogether. Along
+with it, however, in the manuscript there are other, even more
+difficult fragments of poems about another Helgi, son of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> Hiorvard,
+and his love for another Valkyria, Swava. And yet again there are
+traces of a third Helgi, with a history of his own. The editors of
+<i>Corpus Poeticum Boreale</i> have accepted the view of the three Helgis
+that is indicated by the prose passages of the manuscript here;
+namely, that the different stories are really of the same persons born
+anew, &quot;to go through the same life-story, though with varying
+incidents.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> &quot;Helgi and Swava, it is said, were born again,&quot; is the
+note in the manuscript. &quot;There was a king named Hogni, and his
+daughter was Sigrun. She was a Valkyria and rode over air and sea;
+<i>she was Swava born again</i>.&quot; And, after the close of the story of
+Sigrun, &quot;it was a belief in the old days that men were born again, but
+that is now reckoned old wives' fables. Helgi and Sigrun, it is
+reported, were born anew, and then he was Helgi Haddingjaskati, and
+she Kara, Halfdan's daughter, as is told in the songs of Kara, and she
+was a Valkyria.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It is still possible to regard the &quot;old wives' fable&quot; (which is a
+common element in Celtic legend and elsewhere) as something
+unessential in the poems of Helgi; as a popular explanation intended
+to reconcile different myths attaching to the name. However that may
+be, the poems of <i>Helgi and Swava</i> are so fragmentary and confused,
+and so much has to be eked out with prose, that it is impossible to
+say what the complete form and scale of the poetical story may have
+been, and even difficult to be certain that it was ever anything else
+than fragments. As they stand, the remains are like those of the story
+of Angantyr; prominent passages quoted by a chronicler, who gives the
+less important part of the story in prose, either because he has
+forgotten the rest of the poem, or because the poem was made in that
+way to begin with.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Of the poem of <i>Kara</i>, mentioned in the manuscript, there is nothing
+left except what can be restored by a conjectural transference of some
+verses, given under the name of Helgi and Sigrun, to this third
+mysterious plot. The conjectures are supported by the reference to the
+third story in the manuscript, and by the fact that certain passages
+which do not fit in well to the story of Helgi and Sigrun, where they
+are placed by the collector, correspond with prose passages in the
+late Icelandic romance of <i>Hromund Greipsson</i>,<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> in which Kara is
+introduced.</p>
+
+<p>The story of Helgi and Swava is one that covers a large period of
+time, though the actual remnants of the story are small. It is a
+tragedy of the early Elizabethan type described by Sir Philip Sidney,
+which begins with the wooing of the hero's father and mother. The hero
+is dumb and nameless from his birth, until the Valkyria, Swava, meets
+him and gives him his name, Helgi; and tells him of a magic sword in
+an island, that will bring him victory.</p>
+
+<p>The tragedy is brought about by a witch who drives Hedin, the brother
+of Helgi, to make a foolish boast, an oath on the Boar's head (like
+the vows of the Heron or the Peacock, and the <i>gabs</i> of the Paladins
+of France) that he will wed his brother's bride. Hedin confesses his
+vanity to Helgi, and is forgiven, Helgi saying, &quot;Who knows but the
+oath may be fulfilled? I am on my way to meet a challenge.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Helgi is wounded mortally, and sends a message to Swava to come to
+him, and prays her after his death to take Hedin for her lord. The
+poem ends with two short energetic speeches: of Swava refusing to have
+any love but Helgi's; and of Hedin bidding farewell to Swava as he
+goes to make amends, and avenge his brother.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>These fragments, though their evidence tells little regarding epic
+scale or proportions, are, at least, illustrations of the nature of
+the stories chosen for epic narrative. The character of Hedin, his
+folly and magnanimity, is in strong contrast to that of Dag, the
+brother of Sigrun, who makes mischief in the other poem. The character
+of Swava is a fainter repetition of Sigrun.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing very definite can be made out of any of the Helgi poems with
+regard to the conventions of scale in narrative; except that the
+collector of the poems was himself in difficulties in this part of his
+work, and that he knew he had no complete poem to offer his readers,
+except perhaps the <i>Helgakvi&#240;a</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The poem named by the Oxford editors &quot;The Long Lay of Brunhild&quot; (i. p.
+293) is headed in the manuscript &quot;Qvi&#240;a Sigur&#254;ar,&quot; <i>Lay of Sigurd</i>,
+and referred to, in the prose gloss of <i>Codex Regius</i>, as &quot;The Short
+Lay of Sigurd.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> This is one of the most important of the Northern
+heroic lays, in every respect; and, among other reasons, as an example
+of definite artistic calculation and study, a finished piece of work.
+It shows the difference between the Northern and the Western standards
+of epic measurement. The poem is one that gives the whole of the
+tragedy in no longer space than is used in the poem of <i>Maldon</i> for
+the adventures of a few hours of battle. There are 288 lines, not all
+complete.</p>
+
+<p>There are many various modes of representation in the poem. The
+beginning tells the earlier story of Sigurd and Brynhild in twenty
+lines:&#8212;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It was in the days of old that Sigurd, the young Volsung,
+the slayer of Fafni, came to the house of Giuki. He took the
+troth-plight of two brothers; the doughty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> heroes gave oaths
+one to another. They offered him the maid Gudrun, Giuki's
+daughter, and store of treasure; they drank and took counsel
+together many a day, Child Sigurd and the sons of Giuki;
+until they went to woo Brynhild, and Sigurd the Volsung rode
+in their company; he was to win her if he could get her. The
+Southern hero laid a naked sword, a falchion graven, between
+them twain; nor did the Hunnish king ever kiss her, neither
+take her into his arms; he handed the young maiden over to
+Giuki's son.</p>
+
+<p>She knew no guilt in her life, nor was any evil found in her
+when she died, no blame in deed or thought. The grim Fates
+came between.<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>&quot;It was the Fates that worked them ill.&quot; This sententious close of the
+prologue introduces the main story, chiefly dramatic in form, in which
+Brynhild persuades Gunnar to plan the death of Sigurd, and Gunnar
+persuades Hogni. It is love for Sigurd, and jealousy of Gudrun, that
+form the motive of Brynhild. Gunnar's conduct is barely intelligible;
+there is no explanation of his compliance with Brynhild, except the
+mere strength of her importunity. Hogni is reluctant, and remembers
+the oaths sworn to Sigurd. Gothorm, their younger brother, is made
+their instrument,&#8212;he was &quot;outside the oaths.&quot; The slaying of Sigurd
+by Gothorm, and Sigurd's dying stroke that cuts his slayer in two, are
+told in the brief manner of the prologue to the poem; likewise the
+grief of Gudrun. Then comes Sigurd's speech to Gudrun before his
+death.</p>
+
+<p>The principal part of the poem, from line 118 to the end, is filled by
+the storm in the mind of Brynhild: her laughter at the grief of
+Gudrun, her confession of her own sorrows, and her preparation for
+death; the expostulations of Gunnar, the bitter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> speech of
+Hogni,&#8212;&quot;Let no man stay her from her long journey&quot;; the stroke of the
+sword with which Brynhild gives herself the death-wound; her dying
+prophecy. In this last speech of Brynhild, with all its vehemence,
+there is manifest care on the part of the author to bring out clearly
+his knowledge of the later fortunes of Gudrun and Gunnar. The prophecy
+includes the birth of Swanhild, the marriage of Attila and Gudrun, the
+death of Gunnar at the hands of Attila, by reason of the love between
+Gudrun and Oddrun; the vengeance of Gudrun on Attila, the third
+marriage of Gudrun, the death of Swanhild among the Goths. With all
+this, and carrying all this burden of history, there is the passion of
+Brynhild, not wholly obscured or quenched by the rhetorical ingenuity
+of the poet. For it is plain that the poet was an artist capable of
+more than one thing at a time. He was stirred by the tragic personage
+of Brynhild; he was also pleased, intellectually and dispassionately,
+with his design of grouping together in one composition all the events
+of the tragic history.</p>
+
+<p>The poem is followed by the short separate Lay (forty-four lines) of
+the <i>Hell-ride of Brynhild</i>, which looks as if it might have been
+composed by the same or another poet, to supply some of the history
+wanting at the beginning of the <i>Lay of Brynhild</i>. Brynhild, riding
+Hell-ward with Sigurd, from the funeral pile where she and Sigurd had
+been laid by the Giuking lords, is encountered by a giantess who
+forbids her to pass through her &quot;rock-built courts,&quot; and cries shame
+upon her for her guilt. Brynhild answers with the story of her evil
+fate, how she was a Valkyria, punished by Odin for disobedience, set
+in the ring of flame, to be released by none but the slayer of Fafni;
+how she had been beguiled in Gunnar's wooing, and how Gudrun cast it
+in her teeth. This supplies the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> motive for the anger of Brynhild
+against Sigurd, not clearly expressed in the <i>Lay</i>, and also for
+Gunnar's compliance with her jealous appeal, and Hogni's consent to
+the death of Sigurd. While, in the same manner as in the <i>Lay</i>, the
+formalism and pedantry of the historical poet are burnt up in the
+passion of the heroine. &quot;Sorrow is the portion of the life of all men
+and women born: we two, I and Sigurd, shall be parted no more for
+ever.&quot; The latter part of the <i>Lay</i>, the long monologue of Brynhild,
+is in form like the <i>Lamentation of Oddrun</i> and the idyll of Gudrun
+and Theodoric; though, unlike those poems, it has a fuller narrative
+introduction: the monologue does not begin until the situation has
+been explained.</p>
+
+<p>On the same subject, but in strong contrast with the <i>Lay of
+Brynhild</i>, is the poem that has lost its beginning in the great gap in
+<i>Codex Regius</i>. It is commonly referred to in the editions as the
+<i>Fragmentary Lay of Sigurd</i> (&quot;Brot af Sigur&#240;arkvi&#240;u&quot;); in the Oxford
+edition it is styled the &quot;Fragment of a short Brunhild Lay.&quot; There are
+seventy-six lines (incomplete) beginning with the colloquy of Gunnar
+and Hogni. Here also the character of Brynhild is the inspiration of
+the poet. But there does not seem to have been in his mind anything
+like the historical anxiety of the other poet to account for every
+incident, or at least to show that, if he wished, he could account for
+every incident, in the whole story. It is much stronger in expression,
+and the conception of Brynhild is more dramatic and more imaginative,
+though less eloquent, than in the longer poem. The phrasing is short
+and emphatic:&#8212;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Gudrun, Giuki's daughter, stood without, and this was the
+first word she spoke: &quot;Where is Sigurd, the king of men,
+that my brothers are riding in the van?&quot; Hogni made answer
+to her words: &quot;We have hewn<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> Sigurd asunder with the sword;
+ever the grey horse droops his head over the dead king.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then spake Brynhild, Budli's daughter: &quot;Have great joy of
+your weapons and hands. Sigurd would have ruled everything
+as he chose, if he had kept his life a little longer. It was
+not meet that he should so rule over the host of the Goths
+and the heritage of Giuki, who begat five sons that
+delighted in war and in the havoc of battle.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Brynhild laughed, the whole house rang: &quot;Have long joy of
+your hands and weapons, since ye have slain the valiant
+king.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>The mood of Brynhild is altered later, and she &quot;weeps at that she had
+laughed at.&quot; She wakens before the day, chilled by evil dreams. &quot;It
+was cold in the hall, and cold in the bed,&quot; and she had seen in her
+sleep the end of the Niblungs, and woke, and reproached Gunnar with
+the treason to his friend.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to estimate the original full compass of this
+fragmentary poem, but the scale of its narrative and its drama can be
+pretty clearly understood from what remains. It is a poem with nothing
+superfluous in it. The death of Sigurd does not seem to have been
+given in any detail, except for the commentary spoken by the eagle and
+the raven, prophetic of the doom of the Niblungs. The mystery of
+Brynhild's character is curiously recognised by a sort of informal
+chorus. It is said that &quot;they were stricken silent as she spoke, and
+none could understand her bearing, that she should weep to speak of
+that for which she had besought them laughing.&quot; It is one of the
+simplest forms in narrative; but in this case the simplicity of the
+rhetoric goes along with some variety and subtlety of dramatic
+imagination. The character of the heroine is rightly imagined and
+strongly ren<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>dered, and her change of mind is impressive, as the
+author plainly meant it to be.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Lay of Attila</i> (<i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i>) and the Greenland poem of <i>Attila</i>
+(<i>Atlam&#225;l</i>) are two poems which have a common subject and the same
+amount of story: how Attila sent for Gunnar and Hogni, the brothers of
+Gudrun, and had them put to death, and how Gudrun took vengeance on
+Attila.</p>
+
+<p>In the <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i> there are 174 lines, and some broken places; in
+<i>Atlam&#225;l</i> there are 384 lines; its narrative is more copious than in
+most of the Norse Lays. There are some curious discrepancies in the
+matter of the two poems, but these hardly affect the scale of the
+story. The difference between them in this respect is fairly
+represented by the difference in the number of their lines. The scenes
+of the history are kept in similar proportions in both poems.</p>
+
+<p>The story of Gudrun's vengeance has been seen (p. 83) to correspond,
+as far as the amount of action is concerned, pretty closely with the
+story of Hengest and Finn. The epic unity is preserved; and, as in the
+<i>Finnesburh</i> story, there is a distribution of interest between the
+<i>wrong</i> and the <i>vengeance</i>,&#8212;(1) the death of Hn&#230;f, the death of
+Gunnar and Hogni; (2) the vengeance of Hengest, the vengeance of
+Gudrun, with an interval of dissimulation in each case.</p>
+
+<p>The plot of the death of Attila, under all its manifold variations, is
+never without a certain natural fitness for consistent and
+well-proportioned narrative.</p>
+
+<p>None of the Northern poems take any account of the theory that the
+murder of Sigfred was avenged by his wife upon her brothers. That
+theory belongs to the <i>Nibelungenlied</i>; in some form or other it was
+known to Saxo; it is found in the Danish ballad of <i>Grimild's
+Revenge</i>, a translation or adaptation from the German. That other
+conception of the story<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> may be more full of tragic meaning; the
+Northern versions, which agree in making Attila the slayer of the
+Niblung kings, have the advantage of greater concentration. The motive
+of Attila, which is different in each of the poems on this subject, is
+in no case equal to the tragic motive of Kriemhild in the
+<i>Nibelungen</i>. On the other hand, the present interest of the story is
+not distracted by reference to the long previous history of Sigfred; a
+new start is made when the Niblungs are invited to Attila's Court. The
+situation is intelligible at once, without any long preliminary
+explanation.</p>
+
+<p>In the <i>Lay of Attila</i> the hoard of the Niblungs comes into the story;
+its fatal significance is recognised; it is the &quot;metal of discord&quot;
+that is left in the Rhine for ever. But the situation can be
+understood without any long preliminary history of the Niblung
+treasure and its fate. Just as the story of <i>Waldere</i> explains itself
+at once,&#8212;a man defending his bride and his worldly wealth against a
+number of enemies, in a place where he is able to take them one by
+one, as they come on,&#8212;so the story of <i>Attila</i> can begin without long
+preliminaries; though the previous history is to be found, in
+tradition, in common stories, if any one cares to ask for it. The plot
+is intelligible in a moment: the brothers inveigled away and killed by
+their sister's husband (for reasons of his own, as to which the
+versions do not agree); their sister's vengeance by the sacrifice of
+her own children and the death of her husband.</p>
+
+<p>In the <i>Atlam&#225;l</i> there is very much less recognition of the previous
+history than in <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i>. The story begins at once with the
+invitation to the Niblung brothers and with their sister's warning.
+Attila's motive is not emphasised; he has a grudge against them on
+account of the death of Brynhild his sister,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> but his motive is not
+very necessary for the story, as the story is managed here. The
+present scene and the present passion are not complicated with too
+much reference to the former history of the personages. This mode of
+procedure will be found to have given some trouble to the author, but
+the result at any rate is a complete and rounded work.</p>
+
+<p>There is great difference of treatment between <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i> and the
+Greenland poem <i>Atlam&#225;l</i>, a difference which is worth some further
+consideration.<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> There is, however, no very great difference of
+scale; at any rate, the difference between them becomes unimportant
+when they are compared with <i>Beowulf</i>. Even the more prolix of the
+two, which in some respects is the fullest and most elaborate of the
+Northern heroic poems, yet comes short of the English scale. <i>Atlam&#225;l</i>
+takes up very little more than the space of the English poem of
+<i>Maldon</i>, which is a simple narrative of a battle, with nothing like
+the tragic complexity and variety of the story of the vengeance of
+Gudrun.</p>
+
+<p>There is yet another version of the death of Gunnar the Giuking to
+compare with the two poems of <i>Attila</i>&#8212;the <i>Lament of Oddrun</i>
+(<i>Oddr&#250;nargr&#225;tr</i>), which precedes the <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i> in the manuscript.
+The form of this, as well as the plot of it, is wonderfully different
+from either of the other two poems. This is one of the epic or tragic
+idylls in which a passage of heroic legend is told dramatically by one
+who had a share in it. Here the death of Gunnar is told by Oddrun his
+mistress, the sister of Attila.</p>
+
+<p>This form of indirect narration, by giving so great a dramatic value
+to the person of the narrator, before the beginning of her story, of
+course tends to depreciate or to exclude the vivid dramatic scenes
+that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> are common everywhere else in the Northern poems. The character
+of the speaker leaves too little independence to the other characters.
+But in none of the poems is the tragic plot more strongly drawn out
+than in the seventy lines of Oddrun's story to Borgny.</p>
+
+<p>The father of Oddrun, Brynhild, and Attila had destined Oddrun to be
+the bride of Gunnar, but it was Brynhild that he married. Then came
+the anger of Brynhild against Sigurd, the death of Sigurd, the death
+of Brynhild that is renowned over all the world. Gunnar sought the
+hand of Oddrun from her brother Attila, but Attila would not accept
+the price of the bride from the son of Giuki. The love of Oddrun was
+given to Gunnar. &quot;I gave my love to Gunnar as Brynhild should have
+loved him. We could not withstand our love: I kept troth with Gunnar.&quot;
+The lovers were betrayed to Attila, who would not believe the
+accusation against his sister; &quot;yet no man should pledge his honour
+for the innocence of another, when it is a matter of love.&quot; At last he
+was persuaded, and laid a plot to take vengeance on the Niblungs;
+Gudrun knew nothing of what was intended.</p>
+
+<p>The death of Gunnar and Hogni is told in five-and-twenty lines:&#8212;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>There was din of the hoofs of gold when the sons of Giuki
+rode into the Court. The heart was cut out of the body of
+Hogni; his brother they set in the pit of snakes. The wise
+king smote on his harp, for he thought that I should come to
+his help. Howbeit I was gone to the banquet at the house of
+Geirmund. From Hlessey I heard how the strings rang loud. I
+called to my handmaidens to rise and go; I sought to save
+the life of the prince; we sailed across the sound, till we
+saw the halls of Attila. But the accursed serpent crept to
+the heart of Gunnar, so that I might not save the life of
+the king.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Full oft I wonder how I keep my life after him, for I
+thought I loved him like myself.</p>
+
+<p>Thou hast sat and listened while I have told thee many evils
+of my lot and theirs. The life of a man is as his thoughts
+are.</p>
+
+<p>The Lamentation of Oddrun is finished.</p></div>
+
+<p>The <i>Ham&#240;ism&#225;l</i>, the poem of the death of Ermanaric, is one that, in
+its proportions, is not unlike the <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i>: the plot has been
+already described (pp. <a href="#Page_70">70</a>-71). The poem of 130 lines as it stands has
+suffered a good deal. This also is like the story of Hengest and the
+story of Gudrun in the way the action is proportioned. It began with
+the slaying of Swanhild, the wrong to Gudrun&#8212;this part is lost. It
+goes on to the speech of Gudrun to her sons, Sorli and Hamther, and
+their expedition to the hall of the Goth; it ends with their death. In
+this case, also, the action must have begun at once and intelligibly,
+as soon as the motive of the Gothic treachery and cruelty was
+explained, or even without that explanation, in the more immediate
+sense of the treachery and cruelty, in the story of Swanhild trampled
+to death, and of the news brought to Gudrun. Here, also, there is much
+less expansion of the story than in the English poems; everything is
+surcharged with meaning.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Old Lay of Gudrun</i> (<i>Gu&#240;r&#250;narkvi&#240;a in forna</i>), or the tale of
+Gudrun to Theodoric, an idyll like the story of Oddrun, goes quickly
+over the event of the killing of Sigurd, and the return of Grani,
+masterless. Unlike the <i>Lament of Oddrun</i>, this monologue of Gudrun
+introduces dramatic passages. The meeting of Gudrun and her brother is
+not merely told by Gudrun in indirect narration; the speeches of Hogni
+and Gudrun are reported directly, as they might have been in a poem of
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> form of <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i>, or the <i>Lay of Sigurd</i>, or any other in
+which the poet tells the story himself, without the introduction of an
+imaginary narrator. The main part of the poem is an account of the way
+in which Gudrun's mother, Grimhild, compelled her, by a potion of
+forgetfulness, to lose the thought of Sigurd and of all her woes, and
+consent to become the wife of Attila. This part is well prefaced by
+the quiet account of the life of Gudrun in her widowhood, before
+Grimhild began her schemes; how Gudrun lived in the house of Half,
+with Thora, daughter of Hakon, in Denmark, and how the ladies spent
+their time at the tapestry frame, working pictures of the heroes, the
+ships of Sigmund, the ranks of Hunnish warriors.</p>
+
+<p>In the manuscript there are found at the end of the <i>Old Lay of
+Gudrun</i>, as if they were part of it, some verses which have been
+separated from it by the editors (<i>C.P.B.</i>, i. 347) as a &quot;Fragment of
+an Atli Lay.&quot; They came from a poem of which the design, at any rate,
+was the same as that of the <i>Old Lay</i>, and Gudrun is the speaker. She
+tells how, after the death of Gunnar and Hogni, she was wakened by
+Atli, to listen to his evil dreams, foreboding his doom, and how she
+interpreted them in a way to comfort him and put him off his guard.</p>
+
+<p>In English poetry there are instances of stories introduced
+dramatically, long before the pilgrimage to Canterbury. In <i>Beowulf</i>
+there are various episodes where a story is told by one of the persons
+engaged. Besides the poem of Hengest chanted in Heorot, there is
+Beowulf's own narrative of his adventures, after his return to his own
+people in the kingdom of the Gauts, and passages still nearer in form
+to the <i>Lament of Oddrun</i> and the <i>Confession of Gudrun</i> are the last
+speech of Beowulf before his death (2426-2537), and the long speech of
+Wiglaf (2900-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>3027) telling of the enmity of the Gauts and the Swedes.
+But those are not filled with dramatic pathos to the same degree as
+these Northern <i>Heroides</i>, the monologues of Oddrun and Gudrun.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Lay of Gudrun</i> (<i>Gudr&#250;narkvi&#240;a</i>) which comes in the manuscript
+immediately before the <i>Lay of Sigurd</i>, is a pure heroic idyll. Unlike
+most of its companions, it leaves the details of the Volsung story
+very much in neglect, and brings all its force to bear on the
+representation of the grief of the queen, contrasted with the stormy
+passion of Brynhild. It is rightly honoured for its pathetic
+imagination of the dumb grief of Gudrun, broken up and dissolved when
+her sister draws away the covering from the face of Sigurd. &quot;But fire
+was kindled in the eyes of Brynhild, daughter of Budli, when she
+looked upon his wounds.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The refrain of the poem increases its resemblance to the form of a
+Greek idyll. The verse is that of narrative poetry; the refrain is not
+purely lyrical and does not come in at regular intervals.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Tregrof Gu&#240;r&#250;nar</i>, or <i>Chain of Woe</i>, restored by the Oxford
+editors out of the most confused part of the original text, is pure
+lamentation, spoken by Gudrun before her death, recounting all her
+sorrows: the bright hair of Swanhild trampled in the mire; Sigurd
+slain in his bed, despoiled of victory; Gunnar in the court of the
+serpents; the heart of Hogni cut out of his living body&#8212;&quot;Saddle thy
+white steed and come to me, Sigurd; remember what we promised to one
+another, that thou wouldst come from Hell to seek me, and I would come
+to thee from the living world.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The short poem entitled <i>Qvi&#240;a Gu&#240;r&#250;nar</i> in the manuscript, the
+<i>Ordeal of Gudrun</i> in the English edition, has a simple plot. The
+subject is the calumny which was brought against Gudrun by Herkja, the
+cast-off mistress of Attila (that &quot;she had seen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> Gudrun and Theodoric
+together&quot;) and the ordeal of water by which Gudrun proved her
+innocence, while the falsehood was brought home to Herkja, the
+bondwoman. The theme is slighter than all the rest, and this poem, at
+least, might be reckoned not unfit to be taken up as a single scene in
+a long epic.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the Northern poems in the epic measure are almost wholly made
+up of dialogue. The story of <i>Balder's Doom</i> is a dialogue between
+Odin and the witch whom he raises from the dead. The earlier part of
+the story of Sigurd in the &quot;Elder Edda&quot; is almost all dialogue, even
+where the narrative measure is employed.</p>
+
+<p>There is hardly any mere narrative in the poems remaining of the cycle
+of Angantyr. In several other cases, the writer has only given,
+perhaps has only remembered clearly, the dramatic part of the poems in
+which he was interested; the intervals of the story he fills up with
+prose. It is difficult to tell where this want of narrative connexion
+in the poetry is original, and where it is due to forgetfulness or
+ignorance; where the prose of the manuscripts is to be taken as
+standing in the place of lost narrative verses, and where it fills a
+gap that was never intended to be filled with verse, but was always
+left to the reciter, to be supplied in his own way by passages of
+story-telling, between his chantings of the poetic dialogue of Hervor
+and the Shepherd, for instance, or of Hervor and Angantyr.</p>
+
+<p>The poems just mentioned are composed in narrative measure. There are
+also other dialogue poems in a measure different from this, and
+peculiarly adapted to dialogues, the measure of the gnomic <i>H&#225;vam&#225;l</i>
+and of the didactic mythological poems, <i>Vaf&#254;r&#250;&#240;nism&#225;l</i>, <i>Alv&#237;ssm&#225;l</i>,
+<i>Gr&#237;mnism&#225;l</i>. These pieces are some distance removed from epic or
+ballad poetry.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> But there are others in this gnomic measure which it
+is not easy to keep far apart from such dialogue poems as <i>Balder's
+Doom</i>, though their verse is different. By their peculiar verse they
+are distinguished from the English and Saxon heroic poetry; but they
+retain, for all their peculiar metre and their want of direct
+narrative, some of the characteristics of Teutonic epic.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Lokasenna</i> has a plot, and represents dramatically an incident in
+the history of the gods. The chief business is Loki's shameless
+rehearsal of accusations against the gods, and their helpless
+rejoinders. It is a masque of the gods, and not a ballad like the
+<i>Winning of Thor's Hammer</i>. It is not, however, a mere string of
+&quot;flytings&quot; without a plot; there is some plot and action. It is the
+absence of Thor that gives Loki courage to browbeat the gods; the
+return of Thor at the end of the poem avenges the gods on their
+accuser.</p>
+
+<p>In the strange poem of the <i>Railing of Thor and Harbard</i>, and in a
+very rough and irregular kind of verse, there is a similar kind of
+plot.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Contention of Atli and Rimgerd the Giantess</i> is a short comic
+dialogue, interposed among the fragments of the poem of Helgi
+Hiorvard's son, and marked off from them by its use of the dialogue
+verse, as well as by its episodic plot.</p>
+
+<p>Helgi Hiorvard's son had killed the giant Hati, and the giant's
+daughter comes at night where Helgi's ships are moored in the firth,
+and stands on a rock over them, challenging Helgi and his men. Atli,
+keeping watch on deck, answers the giantess, and there is an exchange
+of gibes in the old style between them. Helgi is awakened and joins in
+the argument. It is good comedy of its kind, and there is poetry in
+the giantess's description of the company of armed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> maidens of the air
+whom she has seen keeping guard over Helgi's ships&#8212;&quot;three nines of
+maids, but one rode foremost, a white maid, enhelmed. Their rearing
+horses shook dew from their manes into the deep dales, and hail upon
+the lofty woods; thence come fair seasons among men. But the whole
+sight was hateful to me&quot; (<i>C.P.B.</i>, i. p. 154).</p>
+
+<p>The giantess is kept there by the gibes of Atli till the daybreak.
+&quot;Look eastward, now, Rimgerd!&quot; And the giantess is turned into stone,
+a great harbour mark, to be laughed at.</p>
+
+<p>In some other poems there is much more action, and much more need for
+an interpreter to act as chorus in the intervals between the
+dialogues. The story of the wooing of Gerd is in this form: how Frey
+sat in the seat of Odin and saw a fair maid in Jotunheim, and got
+great sickness of thought, till his swain Skirnir found the cause of
+his languishing, and went to woo Gerd for him in Gymi's Garth. Another
+love-story, and a story not unlike that of Frey and Gerd, is contained
+in two poems <i>Gr&#243;galdr</i> and <i>Fi&#246;lsvinnsm&#225;l</i>, that tell of the winning
+of Menglad by her destined lover.</p>
+
+<p>These two latter poems are not in <i>Codex Regius</i>, and it was only
+gradually that their relation to one another was worked out, chiefly
+by means of the Danish ballad which contains the story of both
+together in the right order.</p>
+
+<p>In the first, Svipdag the hero comes to his mother's grave to call on
+her for counsel. He has been laid under a mysterious charge, to go on
+a quest which he cannot understand, &quot;to find out Menglad,&quot; and Menglad
+he has never heard of, and does not know where she is to be found.</p>
+
+<p>The second poem, also in dialogue, and in the dialogue measure, gives
+the coming of Svipdag to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> mysterious castle, and his debate with
+the giant who keeps the gate. For Menglad is the princess whose story
+is told everywhere, and under a thousand names,&#8212;the lady of a strange
+country, kept under a spell in a witch's castle till the deliverer
+comes. The wooing of Gerd out of Jotunheim is another version of the
+same story, which in different forms is one of the oldest and most
+universal everywhere,&#8212;the fairy story of the princess beyond the sea.</p>
+
+<p>The second dialogue is very much encumbered by the pedantries of the
+giant who keeps the gate; it ends, however, in the recognition of
+Svipdag and Menglad. Menglad says: &quot;Long have I sat waiting for thee,
+many a day; but now is that befallen that I have sought for, and thou
+art come to my bower. Great was the sorrow of my waiting; great was
+thine, waiting for the gladness of love. Now it is very truth for us:
+the days of our life shall not be sundered.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The same form is used in the older poems of Sigurd, those that come
+before the hiatus of the great manuscript, and have been gathered
+together in the Oxford edition under the title of the <i>Old Play of the
+Wolsungs</i>. They touch briefly on all the chief points of the story of
+the Niblung hoard, from the capture and ransom of Andvari to the
+winning of the warrior maiden Sigrdrifa by Sigurd.</p>
+
+<p>All these last-mentioned dialogue poems, in spite of their lyric or
+elegiac measure, are like the narrative poems in their dependence upon
+traditional, mythic, or heroic stories, from which they choose their
+themes. They are not like the lyrical heroic poems of <i>Widsith</i> and
+<i>Deor</i> in Anglo-Saxon literature, which survey a large tract of heroic
+legend from a point of vantage. Something of this sort is done by some
+of the Norse dialogue poems, <i>Vaf&#254;r&#250;&#240;nism&#225;l</i>, etc., but in the poems
+of Frey and Gerd, of Svipdag and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> Menglad, and of the Niblung
+treasure, though this reflective and comparative method occasionally
+makes itself evident, the interest is that of the story. They have a
+story to represent, just as much as the narrative poems, though they
+are debarred from the use of narrative.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 35%;" />
+
+<p>It must be confessed that there is an easily detected ambiguity in the
+use of the term epic in application to the poems, whether German,
+English, or Northern, here reviewed. That they are heroic poems cannot
+be questioned, but that they are epic in any save the most general
+sense of the term is not quite clear. They may be epic in character,
+in a general way, but how many of them have a claim to the title in
+its eminent and special sense? Most of them are short poems; most of
+them seem to be wanting in the breadth of treatment, in the amplitude
+of substance, that are proper to epic poetry.</p>
+
+<p><i>Beowulf</i>, it may be admitted, is epic in the sense that distinguishes
+between the longer narrative poem and the shorter ballad. The
+fragments of <i>Waldere</i> are the fragments of a poem that is not cramped
+for room, and that moves easily and with sufficient eloquence in the
+representation of action. The narrative of the <i>Maldon</i> poem is not
+pinched nor meagre in its proportions. Hardly any of the other poems,
+however, can be compared with these in this respect. These are the
+most liberal in scale of all the old Teutonic poems; the largest epic
+works of which we know anything directly. These are the fullest in
+composition, the least abstract or elliptical; and they still want
+something of the scale of the <i>Iliad</i>. The poem of <i>Maldon</i>, for
+instance, corresponds not to the <i>Iliad</i>, but to the action of a
+single book, such as the twelfth, with which it has been already
+compared.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> If the story of the English <i>Waldere</i>, when complete, was
+not more elaborate than the extant Latin <i>Waltharius</i>, it must have
+come far short of the proportions of Homer. It is a story for a single
+recitation, like the story of Finnesburh in <i>Beowulf</i>. The poem of
+<i>Beowulf</i> may have more in it than the story of Walter and Hildegund,
+but this advantage would seem to be gained at the expense of the unity
+of the poem. It is lengthened out by a sequel, by the addition of a
+new adventure which requires the poet to make a new start. In the poem
+of <i>Hildebrand</i> there is a single tragedy contained in a single scene.
+It is briefly rendered, in a style evidently more primitive, less
+expansive and eloquent, than the style of <i>Beowulf</i> or <i>Waldere</i>. Even
+if it had been given in a fuller form, the story would still have been
+essentially a short one; it could not well have been longer than the
+poem of <i>Sohrab and Rustum</i>, where the theme is almost the same, while
+the scale is that of the classical epic.</p>
+
+<p>If the old English epic poetry falls short of the Homeric magnitude,
+it almost equally exceeds the scale of the Northern heroic poems. If
+<i>Beowulf</i> and <i>Waldere</i> seem inadequate in size, the defect will not
+be made good out of the Northern lays of <i>Helgi</i> or <i>Sigfred</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The Northern poems are exceedingly varied in their plan and
+disposition, but none of them is long, and many of them are in the
+form of <i>dramatic lyric</i>, with no place for pure narrative at all;
+such are the poems of <i>Frey's Wooing</i>, of <i>Svipdag and Menglad</i>, and
+others, in which there is a definite plot worked out by means of lyric
+dialogue. None of them is of anything like the same scale as
+<i>Beowulf</i>, which is a complex epic poem, or <i>Byrhtnoth</i>, which is an
+episodic poem liberally dealt with and of considerable length.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Teutonic poetry presents itself, at a first view, as the
+complement of Homer. Here are to be found many of the things that are
+wanting at the beginning of Greek literary history. Here are single
+epic lays, or clusters of them, in every form. Here, in place of the
+two great poems, rounded and complete, there is the nebulous expanse
+of heroic tradition, the outline of an heroic cycle, together with a
+number of episodic poems taking their origin from one point or another
+of the cycle, according as the different parts of the story happen to
+catch the imagination of a poet. Instead of the Homeric scale of epic
+there are a number of brief epic tragedies, the plots of which are
+chosen from the multitude of stories current in tradition.</p>
+
+<p>Among these shorter epic poems, if such they may be called, there are
+to be distinguished great varieties of procedure in regard to the
+amount of action represented in the poem.</p>
+
+<p>There is one class of poem that represents a single action with some
+detail; there is another that represents a long and complex story in a
+summary and allusive way. The first kind may be called <i>episodic</i> in
+the sense that it takes up about the same quantity of story as might
+make an act in a play; or perhaps, with a little straining of the
+term, as much as might serve for one play in a trilogy.</p>
+
+<p>The second kind is not episodic; it does not seem fitted for a place
+in a larger composition. It is a kind of short and summary epic,
+taking as large a province of history as the <i>Iliad</i> or the <i>Odyssey</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>Hildebrand</i>, the <i>Fight at Finnesburh</i>, <i>Waldere</i>, <i>Byrhtnoth</i>, the
+<i>Winning of the Hammer</i>, <i>Thor's Fishing</i>, the <i>Death of the Niblungs</i>
+(in any of the Northern versions), the <i>Death of Ermanaric</i>, might all
+be fairly regarded as belonging to the first kind of story; while the
+<i>Lay of Weland</i> and the <i>Lay of Brynhild</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> cover a much larger extent
+of story, though not of actual space, than any of those.</p>
+
+<p>It is not quite easy to find a common measure for these and for the
+Homeric poems. One can tell perhaps from Mr. Arnold's poem of <i>Sohrab
+and Rustum</i> how much is wanting to the <i>Lay of Hildebrand</i>, and on
+what scale the story of Hildebrand might have been told if it had been
+told in the Homeric instead of the archaic German manner. The story of
+Walter of Aquitaine in the Latin hexameters of <i>Waltharius</i> takes up
+1456 lines. Although the author of this Latin poem is something short
+of Homer, &quot;a little overparted&quot; by the comparison, still his work is
+designed on the scale of classical epic, and gives approximately the
+right extent of the story in classical form. But while those stories
+are comparatively short, even in their most expanded forms, the story
+of Weland and the story of Helgi each contains as much as would
+suffice for the plot of an <i>Odyssey</i>, or more. The <i>Lay of Brynhild</i>
+is not an episodic poem of the vengeance and the passion of Brynhild,
+though that is the principal theme. It begins in a summary manner with
+Sigurd's coming to the house of the Niblungs, the wedding of Sigurd
+and Gudrun, the wooing of Brynhild for Gunnar; all these earlier
+matters are taken up and touched on before the story comes to the
+searchings of heart when the kings are persuaded to kill Sigurd. Then
+the death of Sigurd is told of, and the rest of the poem is filled
+with the tragedy of Brynhild and Gudrun; the future history of Gudrun
+is spoken of prophetically by Brynhild before she throws herself on
+the funeral pile. Plainly this cannot be considered in the same sense
+&quot;episodic&quot; as the poem of Thor's fishing for the Midgarth snake. The
+poems of Thor's fishing and the recovery of the hammer are distinctly
+fragments<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> of a legendary cycle. The <i>Lay of Brynhild</i> makes an
+attempt to complete the whole Volsung story from beginning to end,
+while giving special importance to one particular incident of it,&#8212;the
+passion of Brynhild after the death of Sigurd. The poems of <i>Attila</i>
+and the <i>Lay of the Death of Ermanaric</i> are more restricted.</p>
+
+<p>It remains true that the great story of the Niblung tragedy was never
+told at length in the poetical measure used for episodes of it, and
+for the summary form of the <i>Lay of Brynhild</i>. It should be
+remembered, however, that a poem of the scale of the <i>Nibelungenlied</i>,
+taking up the whole matter, must go as far beyond the Homeric limit as
+the <i>Lay of Brynhild</i> falls short of it. From one point of view the
+shorter episodic poems are more Homeric in their plots than either the
+summary epics which cover the whole ground, as the <i>Lay of Brynhild</i>
+attempts to cover it, or the longer works in prose that begin at the
+beginning and go on to the end, like the <i>Volsunga Saga</i>. The <i>Iliad</i>
+and the <i>Odyssey</i> are themselves episodic poems; neither of them has
+the reach of the <i>Nibelungenlied</i>. It should not be forgotten, either,
+that Aristotle found the <i>Iliad</i> and the <i>Odyssey</i> rather long. The
+Teutonic poems are not to be despised because they have a narrower
+orbit than the <i>Iliad</i>. Those among them that contain matter enough
+for a single tragedy, and there are few that have not as much as this
+in them, may be considered not to fall far short of the standard fixed
+by Aristotle for the right amount of action to be contained in an
+heroic poem. They are too hurried, they are wanting in the classical
+breadth and ease of narrative; but at any rate they are
+comprehensible, they observe an epic unity. They do not, like certain
+of the endless French poetical histories, remind one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> of the picture
+of incomprehensible bulk in Aristotle's <i>Poetics</i>, the animal 10,000
+stadia long.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, though it is natural at first to imagine that in the old
+Teutonic poetry one is possessed of such separate lays or ballads as
+might be the original materials of a larger epic, an epic of the
+Homeric scale, this impression will hardly remain long after a closer
+criticism of the workmanship of the poems. Very few of them correspond
+in the amount of their story to the episodes of the Homeric poems.
+Many of them contain in a short space the matter of stories more
+complicated, more tragical, than the story of Achilles. Most of them
+by their unity and self-consistency make it difficult to think of them
+as absorbed in a longer epic. This is the case not only with those
+that take in a whole history, like the <i>Lay of Brynhild</i>, but also
+with those whose plot is comparatively simple, like <i>Hildebrand</i> or
+<i>Waldere</i>. It is possible to think of the story of Walter and
+Hildegund as forming part of a larger story of the fortunes of the
+Huns. It has this subordinate place in the <i>Thidreks Saga</i>. But it is
+not easy to believe that in such a case it preserves its value.
+<i>Thidreks Saga</i> is not an epic, though it is made by an agglutination
+of ballads. In like manner the tragedy of <i>Hildebrand</i> gains by its
+isolation from the stories of the other chiefs, Theodoric and Odoacer.
+The stories of Walter and of Hildebrand, like the story of Hamlet the
+Dane, are too strong in themselves to form part of a larger
+composition, without detriment to its unity and harmony. They might be
+brought in allusively and in a subordinate way, like the story of
+Thebes and other stories in the <i>Iliad</i>; but that is not the same
+thing as making an epic poem out of separate lays. So that on all
+grounds the first impression of the Teutonic epic poetry has to be
+modified. If ever epic poetry was made by a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> conglomeration of
+ballads, it must have had other kinds of material than this. Some of
+the poems are episodic; others are rather to be described as
+abridgments of epic than as separate epic scenes. But neither in the
+one case nor in the other is there to be found the kind of poetry that
+is required by the hypothesis of composite epic. There are short epics
+that might conceivably have served as the framework, or the
+ground-plan, of a more elaborate work, containing, like the <i>Lay of
+Helgi</i> or the <i>Lay of Brynhild</i>, incidents enough and hints of
+character enough for a history fully worked out, as large as the
+Homeric poems. If it should be asked why there is so little evidence
+of any Teutonic attempt to weave together separate lays into an epic
+work, the answer might be, first, that the separate lays we know are
+too much separate and individual, too strong in themselves, to be
+satisfactorily cobbled into a more expansive fabric; and, secondly,
+that it has not yet been proved that epic poems can be made by process
+of cobbling. The need of a comprehensive epic of the Niblungs was not
+imperative. Neither was there any demand in Athens, in the time of
+Sophocles and Euripides, for a comprehensive work&#8212;a <i>Thebaid</i>, a
+<i>Roman de Th&#232;bes</i>&#8212;to include the plots of all the tragedies of the
+house of Cadmus. It was not a poet, but a prose journeyman, who did
+this sort of work in the North, and it was not till the old school of
+poetry had passed away that the composite prose history of the
+Volsungs and Niblungs, of Sigmund and Sinfiotli, Sigurd, Brynhild,
+Gudrun, and Atli, was put together out of the old poems. The old lays,
+Northern and Western, whatever their value, have all strong individual
+characters of their own, and do not easily submit to be regarded as
+merely the unused materials, waiting for an epic composer who never
+was born.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="II.III"></a>III</h3>
+
+<h3>EPIC AND BALLAD POETRY</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> ballads of a later age have many points of likeness to such poems
+as <i>Hildebrand</i>, <i>Finnesburh</i>, <i>Maldon</i>, and the poems of the Northern
+collection. The two orders of poetry are, however, not to be
+confounded. Their affinity indeed is clear. But the older poems in
+alliterative verse have a character not possessed by the ballads which
+followed them, and which often repeated the same stories in the later
+Middle Ages. Even the simplest of the older poems, which is the <i>Lay
+of Hildebrand</i>, is distinguished by evident signs of dignity from even
+the most ambitious of the rhyming ballads in any of the tongues. Its
+rhetoric is of a different order.</p>
+
+<p>This is not a question of preferences, but of distinction of kinds.
+The claim of an epic or heroic rank for the older poems need not be
+forced into a denial of all the other excellences of the rhyming
+ballads.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ballad</i>, as the term is commonly used, implies a certain degree of
+simplicity, and an absence of high poetical ambition. Ballads are for
+the market-place and the &quot;blind crowder,&quot; or for the rustic chorus
+that sings the ballad burden. The wonderful poetical beauty of some of
+the popular ballads of Scotland and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> Denmark, not to speak of other
+lands, is a kind of beauty that is never attained by the great
+poetical artists; an unconscious grace. The ballads of the Scottish
+Border, from their first invention to the publication of the <i>Border
+Minstrelsy</i>, lie far away from the great streams of poetical
+inspiration. They have little or nothing to do with the triumphs of
+the poets; the &quot;progress of poesy&quot; leaves them untouched; they learn
+neither from Milton nor from Pope, but keep a life of their own that
+has its sources far remote in the past, in quite another tradition of
+art than that to which the great authors and their works belong.</p>
+
+<p>The Teutonic epic poems, the Northern poems at any rate, are ballads
+in respect of their management of the plots. The scale of them is not
+to be distinguished from the scale of a ballad: the ballads have the
+same way of indicating and alluding to things and events without
+direct narrative, without continuity, going rapidly from critical
+point to point, in their survey of the fable.</p>
+
+<p>But there is this great difference, that the style of the earlier
+epics is ambitious and self-conscious, an aristocratic and
+accomplished style. The ballads of <i>Clerk Saunders</i> or <i>Sir Patrick
+Spens</i> tell about things that have been generally forgotten, in the
+great houses of the country, by the great people who have other things
+to think about, and, if they take to literature, other models of
+style. The lay of the fight at Finnesburh, the lays of the death of
+Attila, were in their time the poems of the king's or the earl's hall;
+they were at the height of literary accomplishment in their
+generation, and their style displays the consciousness of rank. The
+ballads never had anything like the honour that was given to the older
+lays.</p>
+
+<p>The difference between epic and ballad style comes out most obviously
+when, as frequently has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> happened, in Denmark, Iceland, and the
+Faroes, the poems of the old school have been translated from their
+epic verse into the &quot;eights and sixes&quot; or some other favourite measure
+of the common ballads. This has been the case, for instance, with the
+poem of Thor's Hammer, and the poem of the journey of Svipdag in
+search of Menglad. In other cases, as in that of the return of Helgi
+from the dead, it is less certain, though it is probable, that there
+is a direct relation between the two kinds of poetry, between the old
+Northern poem of Helgi and the Danish ballad of Sir Aage which has the
+same story to tell; but a comparison of the two styles, in a case like
+this, is none the less possible and justifiable.</p>
+
+<p>The poems in the older form and diction, however remote they may be
+from modern fashions, assert themselves unmistakably to be of an
+aristocratic and not a popular tradition. The ballads have many things
+in common with the other poems, but they have lost the grand style,
+and the pride and solemnity of language. One thing they have retained
+almost invariably. Ballad poetry may be trusted to preserve the sense
+of the tragic situation. If some ballads are less strong than others
+in their rendering of a traditional story, their failure is not
+peculiar to that kind of composition. Not every ballad-singer, and not
+every tragic poet, has the same success in the development of his
+fable. As a rule, however, it holds good that the ballads are sound in
+their conception of a story; if some are constitutionally weak or
+unshapely, and others have suffered from the infirmity of reciters and
+transcribers, these accidents are not to be counted against the class
+of poetry to which they belong. Yet, however well the ballads may give
+the story, they cannot give it with the power of epic; and that this
+power belongs to the older kind of verse, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> verse of the <i>Lay of
+Brynhild</i>, may be proved with all the demonstration that this kind of
+argument allows. It is open to any one to say that the grand style is
+less attractive than the charm of the ballad burdens, that the airy
+music of the ballads is more appealing and more mysterious than all
+the eloquence of heroic poetry; but that does not touch the question.
+The rhetoric of the older poems merely claims to be acknowledged for
+what it is worth.</p>
+
+<p>The Danish ballad of <i>Ungen Sveidal</i>, &quot;Child Sveidal,&quot;<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a> does not
+spoil the ancient story which had been given in the older language and
+older verse of <i>Svipdag and Menglad</i>. But there are different ways of
+describing how the adventurer comes to the dark tower to rescue the
+unknown maiden. The ballad uses the common ballad forms, the common
+easy rhymes and assonances:&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Out they cast their anchor<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">All on the white sea sand,</span><br />
+And who was that but the Child Sveidal<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Was first upon the land?</span><br />
+<br />
+His heart is sore with deadly pain<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">For her that he never saw,</span><br />
+His name is the Child Sveidal;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">So the story goes.</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>This sort of story need not be despised, and it is peculiarly valuable
+when it appears in the middle of one of the least refreshing seasons
+of literature, like this ballad in the age of the Lutheran Reformation
+in Denmark. In such an age and among theological tracts and
+controversies, the simple ballad measures may bring relief from
+oppression and desolation; and call for thanks to the Danish ladies by
+whose care this ballad and so many others were written<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> down. But
+gratitude need not conceal the truth, that the style of the ballad is
+unlike the style of an heroic poem. The older poem from which <i>Child
+Sveidal</i> is derived may have left many poetical opportunities
+unemployed; it comes short in many things, and makes up for them by
+mythological irrelevances. But it is composed in a style of which it
+is impossible to mistake the gravity; it has all the advantage of
+established forms that have been tested and are able to bear the
+weight of the poetical matter. There is a vast difference between the
+simplicity of the ballad and the stately measure and rhetorical pomp
+of the original:&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Svipdag is my name; Sunbright was my Father's name;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The winds have driven me far, along cold ways;</span><br />
+No one can gainsay the word of Fate,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Though it be spoken to his own destruction.</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>The difference is as great as the difference between the ballad of the
+<i>Marriage of Gawayne</i> and the same story as told in the <i>Canterbury
+Tales</i>; or the difference between Homer's way of describing the
+recovery of lifted cattle and the ballad of <i>Jamie Telfer of the Fair
+Dodheid</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It happens fortunately that one of the Danish ballads, <i>Sivard og
+Brynild</i>, which tells of the death of Sigurd (<i>Danmarks gamle
+Folkeviser</i>, No. 3), is one of the best of the ballads, in all the
+virtues of that style, so that a comparison with the <i>Lay of
+Brynhild</i>, one of the best poems of the old collection, is not unfair
+to either of them.</p>
+
+<p>The ballad of <i>Sivard</i>, like the <i>Lay of Brynhild</i>, includes much more
+than an episode; it is a complete tragic poem, indicating all the
+chief points of the story. The tragic idea is different from that of
+any of the other versions of the Volsung story, but quite as distinct
+and strong as any.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><b>SIVARD</b></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">(<i>O the King's Sons of Denmark!</i>)</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Sivard has a horse that is fleet, and he has stolen Brynild
+from the Mountain of Glass, all by the light of day. From
+the Mountain of Glass he has stolen proud Brynild, and given
+her to Hagen, his brother-in-arms. Brynild and Signild went
+to the river shore to wash their silken gowns. &quot;Signild, my
+sister, where got you the golden rings on your hand?&quot;&#8212;&quot;The
+gold rings on my hand I got from Sivard, my own true love;
+they are his pledge of troth: and you are given to Hagen.&quot;
+When Brynild heard this she went into the upper room and lay
+there sick: there she lay sick and Hagen came to her. &quot;Tell
+me, maiden Brynild, my own true love, what is there in the
+world to heal you; tell me, and I will bring it, though it
+cost all the world's red gold.&quot;&#8212;&quot;Nothing in the world you
+can bring me, unless you bring me, into my hands, the head
+of Sivard.&quot;&#8212;&quot;And how shall I bring to your hands the head
+of Sivard? There is not the sword in all the world that will
+bite upon him: no sword but his own, and that I cannot
+get.&quot;&#8212;&quot;Go to his room, and bid him lend you his sword, for
+his honour, and say, 'I have vowed an adventure for the sake
+of my true love.' When first he hands you over his sword, I
+pray you remember me, in the Lord God's name.&quot; It is Hagen
+that has swept his mantle round him, and goes into the upper
+room to Sivard. &quot;Here you sit, Sivard, my foster-brother;
+will you lend me your good sword for your honour? for I have
+vowed a vow for the sake of my love.&quot;&#8212;&quot;And if I lend you my
+good sword Adelbring, you will never come in battle where it
+will fail you. My good sword Adelbring you may have, indeed,
+but keep you well from the tears of blood that are under the
+hilt, keep you from the tears of blood that are so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> red.<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a>
+If they run down upon your fingers, it will be your death.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Hagen got the sword, and it was his own sworn brother he
+slew there in the room. He took up the bloody head under his
+cloak of furs and brought it to proud Brynild. &quot;Here you
+have the head for which you sought; for the sake of you I
+have slain my brother to my undoing.&quot;&#8212;&quot;Take away the head
+and let me not see it; nor will I pledge you my troth to
+make you glad.&quot;&#8212;&quot;Never will I pledge troth to you, and
+nought is the gladness; for the sake of you I have slain my
+brother; sorrow is on me, sore and great.&quot; It was Hagen drew
+his sword and took the proud Brynild and hewed her asunder.
+He set the sword against a stone, and the point was deadly
+in the King's son's heart. He set the sword in the black
+earth, and the point was death in the King's son's heart.
+Ill was the day that maiden was born. For her were spilt the
+lives of two King's sons. (<i>O the King's Sons of Denmark!</i>)</p></div>
+
+<p>This is a consistent tragic story, and it is well told. It has the
+peculiar virtue of the ballad, to make things impressive by the sudden
+manner in which they are spoken of and passed by; in this abrupt mode
+of narrative the ballads, as has been noted already, are not much
+different from the earlier poems. The <i>Lay of Brynhild</i> is not much
+more diffuse than the ballad of <i>Sivard</i> in what relates to the
+slaying of the hero. Both are alike distinct from the method of Homer;
+compared with Homer both the lays and the ballads are hurried in their
+action, over-emphatic, cramped in a narrow space. But when the style
+and temper are considered, apart from the incidents of the story, then
+it will appear that the lay belongs to a totally different order of
+literature<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> from the ballad. The ballad tells of things dimly
+discerned by the poet; king's sons and daughters are no more to him
+than they are to the story-tellers of the market-place&#8212;forms of a
+shadowy grandeur, different from ordinary people, swayed by strange
+motives, not irrationally, nor altogether in a way beyond the
+calculation of simple audiences, yet in ways for which there is no
+adequate mode of explanation known to the reciter. The ballad keeps
+instinctively a right outline for its tragic story, but to develop the
+characters is beyond its power. In the epic <i>Lay of Brynhild</i>, on the
+other hand, the poet is concerned with passions which he feels himself
+able to comprehend and to set forth dramatically; so that, while the
+story of the poem is not very much larger in scale than that of the
+ballad, the dramatic speeches are greatly elaborated. Brynhild in the
+lay is not a mere tragic symbol, as in the ballad, but a tragic
+character. The ballad has the seed of tragedy in it, but in the lay
+the seed has sprung up in the dramatic eloquence of Brynhild's
+utterances before her death. The ballad is tragical, but in an
+abstract manner. The plot of the slighted woman and her vengeance,
+with the remorse of Hagen, is all true, and not exaggerated in motive.
+But while the motives are appreciated, it is not in the power of the
+poet to develop the exposition of them, to make them dramatically
+characteristic, as well as right in their general nature. It is just
+this dramatic ideal which is the ambition and inspiration of the other
+poet; the character of Brynhild has taken possession of his
+imagination, and requires to be expressed in characteristic speech. A
+whole poetical world is open to the poet of Brynhild, and to the other
+poets of the Northern heroic cycle. They have taken the first day's
+journey into the empire of Homer and Shake<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>speare; the forms of poetry
+that they employ are varied and developed by them so as to express as
+fully as possible the poetical conception of different individual
+characters. It is not easy to leave them without the impression that
+their poetry was capable of infinitely greater progress in this
+direction; that some at least of the poets of the North were &quot;bearers
+of the torch&quot; in their generation, not less than the poets of Provence
+or France who came after them and led the imagination of Christendom
+into another way. That is, it is possible to think of the poets of
+Sigurd and Brynhild as holding among the Northern nations of the tenth
+or eleventh century the place that is held in every generation by some
+set of authors who, for the time, are at the head of intellectual and
+literary adventure, who hold authority, from Odin or the Muses, to
+teach their contemporaries one particular kind of song, till the time
+comes when their vogue is exhausted, and they are succeeded by other
+masters and other schools. This commission has been held by various
+kinds of author since the beginning of history, and manifold are the
+lessons that have been recommended to the world by their authority;
+now epic, now courtly and idealist lyric, romantic drama, pedantic
+tragedy, funeral orations, analytical novels. They are not all
+amusing, and not all their prices are more than the rate of an old
+song. But they all have a value as trophies, as monuments of what was
+most important in their time, of the things in which the generations,
+wise and foolish, have put their trust and their whole soul. The
+ballads have not this kind of importance; the ballad poets are remote
+from the lists where the great champions overthrow one another, where
+poet takes the crown from poet. The ballads, by their very nature, are
+secluded and apart from the great literary enterprises; it is the
+beauty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> of them that they are exempt from the proclamations and the
+arguments, the shouting and the tumult, the dust and heat, that
+accompany the great literary triumphs and make epochs for the
+historians, as in the day of <i>Cl&#233;opatre</i>, or the day of <i>Hernani</i>. The
+ballad has no weight of responsibility upon it; it does not carry the
+intellectual light of its century; its authors are easily satisfied.
+In the various examples of the Teutonic alliterative poetry there is
+recognisable the effort and anxiety of poets who are not content with
+old forms, who have a poetical vocation to go on and find out new
+forms, who are on the search for the &quot;one grace above the rest,&quot; by
+which all the chief poets are led. The remains of this poetry are so
+many experiments, which, in whatever respects they may have failed,
+yet show the work and energy of authors who are proud of their art, as
+well as the dignity of men who are familiar with greatness and great
+actions: in both which respects they differ from the ballad poets. The
+spell of the popular story, the popular ballad, is not quite the same
+as theirs. Theirs is more commanding; they are nearer to the strenuous
+life of the world than are the simple people who remember, over their
+fires of peat, the ancient stories of the wanderings of kings' sons.
+They have outgrown the stage of life for which the fables and old
+wives' tales are all-sufficient; they have begun to make a difference
+between fable and characters; they have entered on a way by which the
+highest poetical victories are attainable. The poetry of the old lays
+of the Volsungs, as compared with popular ballads and tales, is
+&quot;weighty and philosophical&quot;&#8212;full of the results of reflection on
+character. Nor have they with all this lost the inexplicable magic of
+popular poetry, as the poems of Helgi and Sigrun, and of the daughter
+of Angantyr, and others, may easily prove.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="II.IV"></a>IV</h3>
+
+<h3>THE STYLE OF THE POEMS</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> style of the poems, in what concerns their verse and diction, is
+not less distinctly noble than their spirit and temper. The
+alliterative verse, wherever it is found, declares itself as belonging
+to an elaborate poetical tradition. The alliterative line is
+rhetorically capable of a great amount of emphasis; it lends itself as
+readily as the &quot;drumming decasyllabon&quot; of the Elizabethan style to
+pompous declamation. Parallelism of phrases, the favourite rhetorical
+device, especially with the old English poets, is incompatible with
+tenuity of style; while the weight of the verse, as a rule, prevents
+the richness of phrasing from becoming too extravagant and
+frivolous.<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a></p>
+
+<p>The style of alliterative verse is not monotonous. Without reckoning
+the forms that deviate from the common epic measure, such as the
+Northern lyrical staves, there may be found in it as many varieties of
+style as in English blank verse from the days of <i>Gorboduc</i> onward.</p>
+
+<p>In its oldest common form it may be supposed that the verse was not
+distinctly epic or lyric; lyric rather than epic, lyric with such
+amount of epic as is proper for psalms of triumph, or for the praise
+of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> a king, the kind of verse that might be used for any sort of
+<i>carmina</i>, such as for marking authorship and ownership on a sword or
+a horn, for epitaphs or spells, or for vituperative epigrams.</p>
+
+<p>In England and the Continent the verse was early adapted for
+continuous history. The lyrical and gnomic usages were not abandoned.
+The poems of <i>Widsith</i> and <i>Deor's Lament</i> show how the allusive and
+lyrical manner of referring to heroic legend was kept up in England.
+The general tendency, however, seems to have favoured a different kind
+of poetry. The common form of old English verse is fitted for
+narrative. The ideal of the poets is one that would have the sense
+&quot;variously drawn out from one verse to another.&quot; When the verse is
+lyrical in tone, as in the <i>Dream of the Rood</i>, or the <i>Wanderer</i>, the
+lyrical passion is commonly that of mourning or regret, and the
+expression is elegiac and diffuse, not abrupt or varied. The verse,
+whether narrative or elegiac, runs in rhythmical periods; the sense is
+not &quot;concluded in the couplet.&quot; The lines are mortised into one
+another; by preference, the sentences begin in the middle of a line.
+The parallelism of the old poetry, and its wealth of paraphrase,
+encourage deliberation in the sentences, though they are often
+interrupted by a short sentence, generally introduced to point a
+moral.</p>
+
+<p>The old Norse poetry, with many likenesses to the old English, had a
+different taste in rhetorical syntax. Instead of the long-drawn
+phrases of the English poetry, and an arrangement of sentences by
+which the metrical limits of the line were generally disguised, the
+Norse alliterative poetry adopted a mode of speech that allowed the
+line to ring out clearly, and gave full force to the natural emphasis
+of the rhythm.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>These two opposite rhetorical tendencies are illustrated also by the
+several variations upon the common rhythm that found favour in one
+region and the other. Where an English or a German alliterative poet
+wishes to vary from the common metre, he uses the lengthened line, an
+expansion of the simple line, which, from its volume, is less suitable
+for pointed expression, and more capable of pathos or solemnity, than
+the ordinary form of verse. The long line of the Saxon and English
+poets is not used in the Norse poetry; there the favourite verse,
+where the ordinary narrative line is discarded, is in the form of
+gnomic couplets, in which, as in the classical elegiac measure, a full
+line is succeeded by a truncated or broken rhythm, and with the same
+effect of clinching the meaning of the first line as is commonly given
+by the Greek or Latin pentameter. Of this favourite Northern measure
+there are only one or two casual and sporadic instances in English
+poetry; in the short dramatic lyric of the <i>Exeter Book</i>, interpreted
+so ingeniously by Mr. Bradley and Mr. Gollancz, and in the gnomic
+verses of the same collection.</p>
+
+<p>This difference of taste goes very far to explain the difference
+between English and Norse epic; to appreciate the difference of style
+is to understand the history of the early poetry. It was natural that
+the more equable form of the English and the Continental German
+narrative poetry should prove itself fit for extended and continuous
+epic narrative; it was inevitable that the Norse intolerance of tame
+expression, and of everything unimpassioned or unemphatic, should
+prevent the growth of any of the larger and slower kinds of poetry.</p>
+
+<p>The triumphs of alliterative poetry in the first or English kind are
+the long swelling passages of tragic monologue, of which the greatest
+is in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> Saxon <i>Genesis</i>,&#8212;the speech of Satan after the fall from
+heaven. The best of the Northern poetry is all but lyrical; the poem
+of the Sibyl, the poems of Sigrun, Gudrun, Hervor.</p>
+
+<p>The nature of the two forms of poetry is revealed in their respective
+manners of going wrong. The decline of the old English poetry is shown
+by an increase of diffuseness and insipidity. The old Norse poetry was
+attacked by an evil of a different sort, the malady of false wit and
+over-decoration. The English poetry, when it loses strength and
+self-control, is prone to monotonous lamentation; the Norse poetry is
+tempted to overload itself with conceits.</p>
+
+<p>In the one there is excess of sentiment, in the other the contrary
+vice of frigidity, and a premeditated and ostentatious use of
+figurative expressions.</p>
+
+<p>The poem of <i>Beowulf</i> has known the insidious approach and temptation
+of diffuse poetic melancholy. The Northern poems are corrupted by the
+vanity of metaphor. To evade the right term for everything has been
+the aim of many poetic schools; it has seldom been attained more
+effectually than in the poetry of the Norwegian tongue.</p>
+
+<p>Periphrastic epithets are part of the original and common stock of the
+Teutonic poetry. They form a large part of the vocabulary of common
+phrases which bear witness to the affinity existing among the remains
+of this poetry in all the dialects.<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a></p>
+
+<p>But this common device was differently applied in the end, by the two
+literatures, English and Icelandic, in which the old forms of verse
+held their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> ground longest against the rhyming forms. The tendency in
+England was to make use of the well-worn epithets, to ply the
+<i>Gradus</i>: the duller kind of Anglo-Saxon poetry is put together as
+Latin verses are made in school,&#8212;an old-fashioned metaphor is all the
+more esteemed for its age. The poets, and presumably their hearers,
+are best content with familiar phrases. In Iceland, on the other hand,
+there was an impatience of the old vocabulary, and a curiosity and
+search for new figures, that in the complexity and absurdity of its
+results is not approached by any school of &quot;false wit&quot; in the whole
+range of literature.</p>
+
+<p>Already in the older forms of Northern poetry it is plain that there
+is a tendency to lyrical emphasis which is unfavourable to the chances
+of long narrative in verse. Very early, also, there are symptoms of
+the familiar literary plague, the corruption of metaphor. Both these
+tendencies have for their result the new school of poetry peculiar to
+the North and the courts of the Northern kings and earls,&#8212;the Court
+poetry, or poetry of the Scalds, which in its rise and progress
+involved the failure of true epic. The German and English epic failed
+by exhaustion in the competition with Latin and Romance literature,
+though not without something to boast of before it went under. The
+Northern epic failed, because of the premature development of lyrical
+forms, first of all within itself, and then in the independent and
+rival modes of the Scaldic poetry.</p>
+
+<p>The Scaldic poetry, though later in kind than the poems of <i>Codex
+Regius</i>, is at least as old as the tenth century;<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> the latest of
+the epic poems, <i>Atlam&#225;l</i> (the Greenland poem of Attila), and others,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>
+show marks of the influence of Court poetry, and are considerably
+later in date than the earliest of the Scalds.</p>
+
+<p>The Court poetry is lyric, not epic. The aim of the Court poets was
+not the narrative or the dramatic presentation of the greater heroic
+legends; it was the elaborate decoration of commonplace themes, such
+as the praise of a king, by every possible artifice of rhyme and
+alliteration, of hard and exact construction of verse, and, above all,
+of far-sought metaphorical allusions. In this kind of work, in the
+praise of kings alive or dead, the poet was compelled to betake
+himself to mythology and mythical history, like the learned poets of
+other nations with their mythology of Olympus. In the mythology of
+Asgard were contained the stores of precious names and epithets by
+means of which the poems might be made to glitter and blaze.<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a> It
+was for the sake of poets like these that Snorri wrote his <i>Edda</i>, and
+explained the mythical references available for the modern poetry of
+his time, though fortunately his spirit and talent were not limited to
+this didactic end, nor to the pedantries and deadly brilliance of
+fashionable verse. By the time of Snorri the older kind of poetry had
+become very much what Chaucer was to the Elizabethan sonneteers, or
+Spenser to the contemporaries of Pope. It was regarded with some
+amount of honour, and some condescension, but it had ceased to be the
+right kind of poetry for a &quot;courtly maker.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The Northern poetry appears to have run through some of the same
+stages as the poetry of Greece, though with insufficient results in
+most of them. The epic poetry is incomplete, with all its nobility.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>
+The best things of the old poetry are dramatic&#8212;lyrical monologues,
+like the song of the Sibyl, and Gudrun's story to Theodoric, or
+dialogues like those of Helgi and Sigrun, Hervor and Angantyr. Before
+any adequate large rendering had been accorded to those tragic
+histories, the Northern poetry, in its impatience of length, had
+discovered the idyllic mode of expression and the dramatic monologue,
+in which there was no excuse for weakness and tameness, and, on the
+contrary, great temptation to excess in emphatic and figurative
+language. Instead of taking a larger scene and a more complex and
+longer story, the poets seem to have been drawn more and more to cut
+short the story and to intensify the lyrical passion of their dialogue
+or monologue. Almost as if they had known the horror of infinite
+flatness that is all about the literature of the Middle Ages, as if
+there had fallen upon them, in that Ale&#239;an plain, the shadow of the
+enormous beast out of Aristotle's <i>Poetics</i>, they chose to renounce
+all superfluity, and throw away the makeshift wedges and supports by
+which an epic is held up. In this way they did great things, and
+<i>Volosp&#225;</i> (the <i>Sibyl's Prophecy</i>) is their reward. To write out in
+full the story of the Volsungs and Niblungs was left to the prose
+compilers of the <i>Volsunga Saga</i>, and to the Austrian poet of the
+<i>Nibelungenlied</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Volosp&#225;</i> is as far removed from the courtly odes and their manner
+and ingenuity as the <i>Marriage Hymn</i> of Catullus from the <i>Coma
+Berenices</i>. The <i>Volosp&#225;</i>, however, has this in common with the
+mechanical odes, that equally with these it stands apart from epic,
+that equally with these it fuses epic material into an alien form. The
+sublimity of this great poem of the <i>Doom</i> is not like the majesty or
+strength of epic. The voice is not the voice of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> teller of stories.
+And it is here, not in true epic verse, that the Northern poetry
+attains its height.</p>
+
+<p>It is no ignoble form of poetry that is represented by the <i>Sibyl's
+Song</i> and the <i>Lament of Gudrun</i>. But it was not enough for the
+ambition of the poets. They preferred the composition of correct and
+elaborate poems in honour of great men, with much expenditure of
+mythology and without passion;<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> one of the forms of poetry which
+may be truly said to leave nothing to be desired, the most artificial
+and mechanical poetry in the world, except possibly the
+closely-related kinds in the traditional elaborate verse of Ireland or
+of Wales.</p>
+
+<p>It was still possible to use this modern and difficult rhetoric,
+occasionally, for subjects like those of the freer epic; to choose a
+subject from heroic tradition and render it in the fashionable style.
+The <i>Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrok</i><a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> is the chief of those secondary
+dramatic idylls. It is marked off by difference of verse, for one
+thing, from the <i>Ham&#240;ism&#225;l</i> and the <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i>; and, besides this, it
+has the characteristic of imitative and conventional heroic
+literature&#8212;the unpersuasive and unconvincing force of the heroic
+romance, the rhetoric of Almanzor. The end of the poem is fine, but it
+does not ring quite true:&#8212;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The gods will welcome me; there is nothing to bewail in
+death. I am ready to go; they are calling me home, the
+maidens whom Odin has sent to call me. With gladness will I
+drink the ale, set high among the gods. The hours of life
+are gone over; laughing will I die.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is not like the end of the sons of Gudrun; it is not of the same
+kind as the last words of Sorli,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> which are simpler, and infinitely
+more imaginative and true:&#8212;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>We have fought; if we die to-day, if we die to-morrow, there
+is little to choose. No man may speak when once the Fates
+have spoken (<i>Ham&#240;ism&#225;l</i>, s.f.).</p></div>
+
+<p>It is natural that the <i>Song of Ragnar Lodbrok</i> should be appreciated
+by modern authors. It is one of the documents responsible for the
+conventional Valkyria and Valhalla of the Romantic School, and for
+other stage properties, no longer new. The poem itself is in spirit
+rather more nearly related to the work of Tegn&#233;r or Oehlenschl&#228;ger
+than to the <i>Volosp&#225;</i>. It is a secondary and literary version, a
+&quot;romantic&quot; version of ideas and images belonging to a past time, and
+studied by an antiquarian poet with an eye for historical
+subjects.<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a></p>
+
+<p>The progress of epic was not at an end in the rise of the new Court
+poetry that sounded sweeter in the ears of mortals than the old poems
+of <i>Sigurd</i> and <i>Brynhild</i>. The conceits and the hard correctness of
+the Scalds did not satisfy all the curiosity or the imaginative
+appetite of their patrons. There still remained a desire for epic, or
+at least for a larger and freer kind of historical discourse. This was
+satisfied by the prose histories of the great men of Iceland, of the
+kings of Norway and the lords of the Isles; histories the nearest to
+true epic of all that have ever been spoken without verse. That the
+chief of all the masters of this art should have been Snorri
+Sturluson, the exponent and practitioner of the mystery of the Court
+poets, is among the pleasantest of historical paradoxes.</p>
+
+<p>The development of the Court poetry to all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> extremes of &quot;false wit,&quot;
+and of glaring pretence and artificiality of style, makes the contrast
+all the more vivid between its brocaded stiffness and the ease and
+freedom of the Sagas. But even apart from the Court poetry, it is
+clear that there was little chance for any development of the Northern
+heroic poetry into an Homeric fulness of detail. In the Norse poetry,
+as in Greek, the primitive forms of heroic dirges or hymns give place
+to narrative poetry; and that again is succeeded by a new kind of
+lyric, in which the ancient themes of the <i>Lament</i> and the <i>Song of
+Praise</i> are adorned with the new ideas and the new diction of poets
+who have come to study novelty, and have entered, though with far
+other arms and accoutrements, on the same course as the Greek lyric
+authors of dithyrambs and panegyrical odes. In this progress of poetry
+from the unknown older songs, like those of which Tacitus speaks, to
+the epic form as it is preserved in the &quot;Elder Edda,&quot; and from the
+epic form to the lyrical form of the Scalds, the second stage is
+incomplete; the epic form is uncertain and half-developed. The rise of
+the Court poetry is the most obvious explanation of this failure. The
+Court poetry, with all its faults, is a completed form which had its
+day of glory, and even rather more than its share of good fortune. It
+is the characteristic and successful kind of poetry in Iceland and
+Norway, just as other kinds of elaborate lyric were cultivated, to the
+depreciation of epic, in Provence and in Italy. It was to the Court
+poet that the prizes were given; the epic form was put out of favour,
+generations before the fragments of it were gathered together and
+preserved by the collector from whose books they have descended to the
+extant manuscripts and the editions of the &quot;Elder Edda.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But at the same time it may be represented that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> the Court poetry was
+as much effect as cause of the depreciation of epic. The lyrical
+strain declared itself in the Northern epic poetry too strongly for
+any such epic work as either <i>Beowulf</i> or the <i>H&#234;liand</i>. The bent was
+given too early, and there was no recovery possible. The Court poetry,
+in its rhetorical brilliance and its allusive phrases, as well as in
+the hardness and correctness of its verse, is carrying out to
+completion certain tastes and principles whose influence is manifest
+throughout the other orders of old Northern poetry; and there is no
+need to go to the Court poetry to explain the difference between the
+history of Northern and of English alliterative verse, though it is by
+means of the Court poetry that this difference may be brought into the
+strongest light. The contrast between the English liking for
+continuous discourse and the Norse liking for abrupt emphasis is
+already to be discerned in the oldest literary documents of the two
+nations.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="II.V"></a>V</h3>
+
+<h3>THE PROGRESS OF EPIC</h3>
+
+<h4>VARIOUS RENDERINGS OF THE SAME STORY</h4>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr><td>Due (1) to accidents of tradition and impersonal causes:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.8em">(2) to calculation and selection of motives by the poets,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em">and intentional modification of traditional matter.</span></td></tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p><span class="smcap"><i>Beowulf</i></span>, as the poem stands, is quite a different sort of thing from
+the poems in the Copenhagen manuscript. It is given out by its scribes
+in all the glory of a large poem, handsomely furnished with a prelude,
+a conclusion, and divisions into several books. It has the look of a
+substantial epic poem. It was evidently regarded as something
+considerable, as a work of eminent virtue and respectability. The
+Northern poems, treasured and highly valued as they evidently were,
+belong to a different fashion. In the <i>Beowulf</i> of the existing
+manuscript the fluctuation and variation of the older epic tradition
+has been controlled by editors who have done their best to establish a
+text of the poem. The book has an appearance of authority. There is
+little of this in the Icelandic manuscript. The Northern poems have
+evidently been taken as they were found. Imperfections of tradition,
+which in <i>Beowulf</i> would have been glossed over by an editorial
+process, are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> here left staring at the reader. The English poem
+pretends to be a literary work of importance&#8212;a book, in short; while
+the Icelandic verses are plainly gathered from all quarters, and in
+such a condition as to defy the best intentions of the editor, who did
+his best to understand what he heard, but had no consistent policy of
+improvement or alteration, to correct the accidental errors and
+discrepancies of the oral communications.</p>
+
+<p>Further, and apart from the accidents of this particular book, there
+is in the poems, even when they are best preserved, a character of
+fluctuation and uncertainty, belonging to an older and less literary
+fashion of poetry than that of <i>Beowulf</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>Beowulf</i> has been regarded by some as a composite epic poem made out
+of older and shorter poems. <i>Codex Regius</i> shows that this hypothesis
+is dealing with an undoubted <i>vera causa</i> when it talks of short lays
+on heroic subjects, and of the variations of treatment to be found in
+different lays on one and the same theme, and of the possibilities of
+contamination.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, in considering the story of Beowulf's descent under water, and
+the difficulties and contradictions of that story as it stands, Ten
+Brink has been led to suppose that the present text is made up of two
+independent versions, run together by an editor in a hazardous way
+without regard to the differences in points of detail, which still
+remain to the annoyance of the careful reader.</p>
+
+<p>There is no great risk in the assumption that there were different
+versions of the fight with Grendel's mother, which may have been
+carelessly put together into one version in spite of their
+contradictions. In the <i>Codex Regius</i> there are three different
+versions of the death of the Niblungs, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i>, <i>Atlam&#225;l</i>,
+and the <i>Lament of Oddrun</i>. The <i>Lament of Oddrun</i> is vitally
+different from the other two poems, and these differ from one another,
+with regard to the motive of Atli's feud with Gunnar. It is possible
+for the human mind to imagine an editor, a literary man, capable of
+blending the poems in order to make a larger book. This would be
+something like the process which Ten Brink has suspected in the
+composition of this part of <i>Beowulf</i>. It is one thing, however, to
+detect the possibility of such misdemeanours; and quite another thing
+to suppose that it is by methods such as these that the bulk of the
+larger epic is swollen beyond the size of common lays or ballads. It
+is impossible, at any rate, by any reduction or analysis of <i>Beowulf</i>,
+to get rid of its stateliness of narrative; it would be impossible by
+any fusion or aggregation of the Eddic lays to get rid of their
+essential brevity. No accumulation of lays can alter the style from
+its trick of detached and abrupt suggestions to the slower and more
+equable mode.</p>
+
+<p>That there was a growth of epic among the Teutonic nations is what is
+proved by all the documents. This growth was of the same general kind
+as the progress of any of the great forms of literature&#8212;the Drama,
+the Novel. Successive generations of men, speaking the same or similar
+forms of language, made poetical experiments in a common
+subject-manner, trying different ways of putting things, and changing
+their forms of poetry according to local and personal variations of
+taste; so that the same story might be told over and over again, in
+different times, with different circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>In one region the taste might be all for compression, for increase of
+the tension, for suppression of the tamer intervals in the story. In
+another it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> might run to greater length and ease, and favour a gradual
+explication of the plot.</p>
+
+<p>The &quot;Elder Edda&quot; shows that contamination was possible. It shows that
+there might be frequent independent variations on the same theme, and
+that, apart from any editorial work, these versions might occasionally
+be shuffled and jumbled by mere accidents of recollection.</p>
+
+<p>Thus there is nothing contrary to the evidence in the theory that a
+redactor of <i>Beowulf</i> may have had before him different versions of
+different parts of the poem, corresponding to one another, more or
+less, as <i>Atlam&#225;l</i> corresponds to the <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i>. This hypothesis,
+however, does not account for the difference in form between the
+English and the Northern poems. No handling of the <i>Atlam&#225;l</i> or the
+<i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i> could produce anything like the appearance of <i>Beowulf</i>.
+The contaminating editor may be useful as an hypothesis in certain
+particular cases. But the heroic poetry got on very well without him,
+generally speaking. It grew by a free and natural growth into a
+variety of forms, through the ambitions and experiments of poets.</p>
+
+<p>Variety is evident in the poems that lie outside the Northern group;
+<i>Finnesburh</i> is of a different order from <i>Waldere</i>. It is in the
+Northern collection, however, that the variety is most evident. There
+the independent versions of the same story are brought together, side
+by side. The experiments of the old school are ranged there; and the
+fact that experiments were made, that the old school was not satisfied
+with its conventions, is perhaps the most legitimate inference, and
+one of the most significant, to be made by a reader of the poems.</p>
+
+<p>Variations on similar themes are found in all popular poetry; here
+again the poems of the <i>Edda</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> present themselves as akin to ballads.
+Here again they are distinguished from ballads by their greater degree
+of ambition and self-consciousness. For it will not do to dismiss the
+Northern poems on the Volsung story as a mere set of popular
+variations on common themes. The more carefully they are examined, the
+less will be the part assigned to chance and imperfect recollection in
+producing the variety of the poems. The variation, where there are
+different presentations of the same subject, is not produced by
+accident or the casual and faulty repetition of a conventional type of
+poem, but by a poetical ambition for new forms. <i>Codex Regius</i> is an
+imperfect monument of a time of poetical energy in which old forms
+were displaced by new, and old subjects refashioned by successive
+poets. As in the Athenian or the English drama the story of Oedipus or
+of Lear might be taken up by one playwright after another, so in the
+North the Northern stories were made to pass through changes in the
+minds of different poets.</p>
+
+<p>The analogy to the Greek and the English drama need not be forced.
+Without any straining of comparisons, it may be argued that the
+relation of the <i>Atlam&#225;l</i> and <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i> is like the relation of
+Euripides to Aeschylus, and not so much like the variations of ballad
+tradition, in this respect, that the <i>Atlam&#225;l</i> is a careful,
+deliberate, and somewhat conceited attempt to do better in a new way
+what has been done before by an older poet. The idylls of the
+heroines, Brynhild, Gudrun, Oddrun, are not random and unskilled
+variations; they are considerate and studied poems, expressing new
+conceptions and imaginations.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that this poetry is still, in many respects, in the
+condition of popular poetry and popular<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> traditional stories. The
+difference of plot in some versions of the same subject appears to be
+due to the ordinary causes that produce the variants of popular
+tales,&#8212;defective memory, accidental loss of one point in the story,
+and change of emphasis in another. To causes such as these, to the
+common impersonal accidents of tradition, may perhaps be referred one
+of the strangest of all the alterations in the bearing of a story&#8212;the
+variation of plot in the tradition of the Niblungs.</p>
+
+<p>In the &quot;Elder Edda&quot; the death of the Niblungs is laid to the charge of
+Attila; their sister Gudrun does her best to save them; when she fails
+in this, she takes vengeance for them on her husband.</p>
+
+<p>In the German tradition, as in the version known to Saxo in the
+<i>Nibelungenlied</i>, in the Danish ballad of <i>Grimild's Revenge</i> (which
+is borrowed from the German), the lines are laid quite differently.
+There it is their sister who brings about the death of the kings; it
+is the wife of Sigfred, of Sigfred whom they have killed, that exacts
+vengeance from her brothers Gunther and Hagene. Attila is here put
+aside. Gudrun's slaughter of her children is unrecorded; there is no
+motive for it when all her anger is turned against her brothers. This
+shifting of the centre of a story is not easy to explain. But,
+whatever the explanation may be, it seems probable that it lies
+somewhere within the range of popular tradition, that the change is
+due to some of the common causes of the transformation of stories, and
+not to a definite and calculated poetical modification. The tragical
+complications are so many in the story of the Niblungs that there
+could not fail to be variations in the traditional interpretation of
+motives, even without the assistance of the poets and their new
+readings of character.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In some of the literary documents there may be found two kinds of
+variation from an original form of story,&#8212;variation due to those
+popular and indefinite causes, the variation of failing memory, on the
+one hand; and on the other, variation due to the ambition or conceit
+of an author with ideas of his own.</p>
+
+<p>A comparison of the <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i>, the <i>Atlam&#225;l</i>, and the <i>Lamentation
+of Oddrun</i> may at first suggest that we have here to deal with just
+such variants as are common wherever stories are handed on by oral
+tradition. Further consideration will more and more reduce the part
+allotted to oral maltreatment, and increase the part of intentional
+and artistic modification, in the variations of story to be found in
+these poems.</p>
+
+<p>All three poems are agreed in their ignorance of the variation which
+makes the wife of Sigfred into the avenger of his death. In all three
+it is Attila who brings about the death of the brothers of Gudrun.</p>
+
+<p>It seems to have been a constant part of the traditional story, as
+known to the authors of these three poems, that Attila, when he had
+the brothers of Gudrun in his power, gave order to cut out the heart
+of Hogni, and thereafter to throw Gunnar into the serpents' den.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i> presents an intelligible explanation of this; the
+other two poems leave this part of the action rather vague.</p>
+
+<p>In the <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i> the motive of Attila's original hatred is left at
+first unexplained, but comes out in the circumstances of the death of
+the Niblungs. When the Burgundian kings are seized and bound, they are
+called upon to buy themselves off with gold. It is understood in
+Gunnar's reply, that the gold of the Niblung treasure is what is
+sought for.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> He asks that the heart of Hogni may be brought to him.
+They bring him, instead, the heart of Hialli, which Gunnar detects at
+once as the heart of a coward. Then at last the heart of Hogni is cut
+out and brought to Gunnar; and then he defies the Huns, and keeps his
+secret.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Now is the hoard of the Niblungs all in my keeping alone,
+for Hogni is dead: there was doubt while we two lived, but
+now there is doubt no more. Rhine shall bear rule over the
+gold of jealousy, the eager river over the Niblung's
+heritage; the goodly rings shall gleam in the whirling
+water, they shall not pass to the children of the Huns.</p></div>
+
+<p>Gunnar was thrown among the snakes, and there he harped upon his harp
+before his death came on him. The end of Gunnar is not told
+explicitly; the story goes on to the vengeance of Gudrun.</p>
+
+<p>In the <i>Oddr&#250;nargr&#225;tr</i> there is another motive for Attila's enmity to
+Gunnar: not the gold of the Niblungs, but the love that was between
+Gunnar and Oddrun (Oddrun was the sister of Attila and Brynhild). The
+death of Brynhild is alluded to, but that is not the chief motive. The
+gold of the Niblungs is not mentioned. Still, however, the death of
+Hogni precedes the death of Gunnar,&#8212;&quot;They cut out the heart of Hogni,
+and his brother they set in the serpents' close.&quot; Gunnar played upon
+his harp among the serpents, and for a long time escaped them; but the
+old serpent came out at last and crawled to his heart. It is implied
+that the sound of his music is a charm for the serpents; but another
+motive is given by Oddrun, as she tells the story: Gunnar played on
+his harp for Oddrun, to be heard by her, so that she could come to
+help him. But she came too late.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It might be inferred from this poem that the original story of the
+death of Hogni has been imperfectly recollected by the poet who
+touches lightly on it and gives no explanation here. It is fairer to
+suppose that it was passed over because it was irrelevant. The poet
+had chosen for his idyll the love of Gunnar and Oddrun, a part of the
+story which is elsewhere referred to among these poems, namely in the
+<i>Long Lay of Brynhild</i> (l. 58). By his choice of this, and his
+rendering of it in dramatic monologue, he debarred himself from any
+emphatic use of the motive for Hogni's death. It cannot be inferred
+from his explanation of Gunnar's harp-playing that the common
+explanation was unknown to him. On the contrary, it is implied here,
+just as much as in <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i>, that the serpents are kept from him by
+the music, until the old sleepless one gives him his death. But the
+poet, while he keeps this incident of the traditional version, is not
+particularly interested in it, except as it affords him a new occasion
+to return to his main theme of the love story. Gunnar's music is a
+message to Oddrun. This is an imaginative and dramatic adaptation of
+old material, not a mere lapse of memory, not a mere loss of the
+traditional bearings of the story.</p>
+
+<p>The third of these poems, the <i>Atlam&#225;l</i>, is in some respects the most
+remarkable of them all. In its plot it has more than the others, at
+the first reading, the appearance of a faulty recollection; for, while
+it makes a good deal of play with the circumstances of the death of
+Hogni, it misses, or appears to miss, the point of the story; the
+motive of Gunnar, which is evident and satisfactory in the
+<i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i>, is here suppressed or dropped. The gold of the Niblungs
+is not in the story at all; the motive of Attila appears to be anger
+at the death of his sister Brynhild,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> Gunnar's wife, but his motive is
+not much dwelt on. It is as if the author had forgotten the run of
+events, like a blundering minstrel.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, the poem in its style is further from all the
+manners of popular poetry, more affected and rhetorical, than any of
+the other pieces in the book. It is written in the <i>m&#225;lah&#225;ttr</i>, a
+variety of the common epic measure, with a monotonous cadence; the
+sort of measure that commends itself to an ambitious and rhetorical
+poet with a fancy for correctness and regularity. The poem has its
+origin in an admiration for the character of Gudrun, and a desire to
+bring out more fully than in the older poems the tragic thoughts and
+passion of the heroine. Gudrun's anxiety for her brothers' safety, and
+her warning message to them not to come to the Court of the Huns, had
+been part of the old story. In the <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i> she sends them a token,
+a ring with a wolf's hair twisted round it, which is noticed by Hogni
+but not accepted by Gunnar. In the <i>Atlam&#225;l</i> something more is made of
+this; her message here is written in runes, and these are falsified on
+the way by Attila's messenger, so that the warning is at first unread.
+But the confusion of the runes is detected by the wife of Hogni, and
+so the story opens with suspense and forebodings of the doom. The
+death of Hogni and Gunnar is explained in a new way, and always with
+the passion of Gudrun as the chief theme. In this story the fight of
+the Niblungs and the Huns is begun outside the doors of the hall.
+Gudrun hears the alarm and rushes out with a welcome to her
+brothers,&#8212;&quot;that was their last greeting,&quot;&#8212;and a cry of lamentation
+over their neglect of her runes. Then she tries to make peace, and
+when she fails in that, takes up a sword and fights for her brothers.
+It is out of rage and spite against Gudrun, and in order<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> to tame her
+spirit, that Attila has the heart of Hogni cut out of him, and sends
+Gunnar to the serpents.</p>
+
+<p>All this change in the story is the result of meditation and not of
+forgetfulness. Right or wrong, the poet has devised his story in his
+own way, and his motives are easily discovered. He felt that the
+vengeance of Gudrun required to be more carefully and fully explained.
+Her traditional character was not quite consistent with the horrors of
+her revenge. In the <i>Atlam&#225;l</i> the character of Gudrun is so conceived
+as to explain her revenge,&#8212;the killing of her children follows close
+upon her fury in the battle, and the cruelty of Attila is here a
+direct challenge to Gudrun, not, as in the <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i>, a mere
+incident in Attila's search for the Niblung treasure. The cruelty of
+the death of Hogni in the <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i> is purely a matter of business;
+it is not of Attila's choosing, and apparently he favours the attempt
+to save Hogni by the sacrifice of Hialli the feeble man. In the
+<i>Atlam&#225;l</i> it is to save Hogni from Attila that Hialli the cook is
+chased into a corner and held under the knife. This comic interlude is
+one of the liveliest passages of the poem. It serves to increase the
+strength of Hogni. Hogni begs them to let the creature go,&#8212;&quot;Why
+should we have to put up with his squalling?&quot; It may be observed that
+in this way the poet gets out of a difficulty. It is not in his design
+to have the coward's heart offered to Gunnar; he has dropped that part
+of the story entirely. Gunnar is not asked to give up the treasure,
+and has no reason to protect his secret by asking for the death of his
+brother; and there would be no point in keeping the incident for the
+benefit of Attila. That Gunnar should first detect the imposture, and
+should then recognise the heart of his brother, is a fine piece of
+heroic imagination of a primitive kind.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> It would have been wholly
+inept and spiritless to transfer this from Gunnar to Attila. The poet
+of <i>Atlam&#225;l</i> shows that he understands what he is about. The more his
+work is scrutinised, the more evident becomes the sobriety of his
+judgment. His dexterity in the disposing of his incidents is proved in
+every particular. While a first reading of the poem and a first
+comparison with the story of <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i> may suggest the blundering
+and irresponsible ways of popular reciters, a very little attention
+will serve to bring out the difference and to justify this poet. He is
+not an improviser; his temptations are of another sort. He is the poet
+of a second generation, one of those who make up by energy of
+intelligence for their want of original and spontaneous imagination.
+It is not that he is cold or dull; but there is something wanting in
+the translation of his thoughts into speech. His metres are hammered
+out; the precision of his verse is out of keeping with the fury of his
+tragic purport. The faults are the faults of overstudy, the faults of
+correctness and maturity.</p>
+
+<p>The significance of the <i>Atlam&#225;l</i> is considerable in the history of
+the Northern poetry. It may stand for the furthest mark in one
+particular direction; the epic poetry of the North never got further
+than this. If <i>Beowulf</i> or <i>Waldere</i> may perhaps represent the highest
+accomplishment of epic in old English verse, the <i>Atlam&#225;l</i> has, at
+least, as good a claim in the other language. The <i>Atlam&#225;l</i> is not the
+finest of the old poems. That place belongs, without any question, to
+the <i>Volosp&#225;</i>, the Sibyl's Song of the judgment; and among the others
+there are many that surpass the <i>Atlam&#225;l</i> in beauty. But the <i>Atlam&#225;l</i>
+is complete; it is a work of some compass, diligently planned and
+elaborated. Further, although it has many of the marks of the new
+rhetoric, these do not change<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> its character as a narrative poem. It
+is a narrative poem, not a poem of lyrical allusions, not an heroic
+ode. It is at once the largest and the most harmonious in construction
+of all the poems. It proves that the change of the Northern poetry,
+from narrative to the courtly lyric, was a change not made without
+fair opportunity to the older school to show what it was worth. The
+variety of the three poems of Attila, ending in the careful rhetoric
+of the <i>Atlam&#225;l</i>, is proof sufficient of the labour bestowed by
+different poets in their use of the epic inheritance. Great part of
+the history of the North is misread, unless account is taken of the
+artistic study, the invention, the ingenuity, that went to the making
+of those poems. This variety is not the confusion of barbarous
+tradition, or the shifts and experiments of improvisers. The prosody
+and the rhetorical furniture of the poems might prevent that
+misinterpretation. It might be prevented also by an observation of the
+way the matter is dealt with, even apart from the details of the
+language and the style. The proof from these two quarters, from the
+matter and from the style, is not easily impugned.</p>
+
+<p>So the first impression is discredited, and so it appears that the
+&quot;Elder Edda,&quot; for all its appearance of disorder, haste, and hazard,
+really contains a number of specimens of art, not merely a heap of
+casual and rudimentary variants. The poems of the Icelandic manuscript
+assert themselves as individual and separate works. They are not the
+mere makings of an epic, the mere materials ready to the hand of an
+editor. It still remains true that they are defective, but it is true
+also that they are the work of artists, and of a number of artists
+with different aims and ideals. The earliest of them is long past the
+stage of popular improvisation, and the latest has the qualities<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> of a
+school that has learned more art than is good for it.</p>
+
+<p>The defect of the Northern epic is that it allowed itself to be too
+soon restricted in its scope. It became too minute, too emphatic, too
+intolerant of the comfortable dilutions, the level intervals, between
+the critical moments.<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> It was too much affected by the vanities of
+the rival Scaldic poetry; it was overcome by rhetoric. But it cannot
+be said that it went out tamely.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="II.VI"></a>VI</h3>
+
+<h3><i>BEOWULF</i></h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> poem of <i>Beowulf</i> has been sorely tried; critics have long been at
+work on the body of it, to discover how it is made. It gives many
+openings for theories of agglutination and adulteration. Many things
+in it are plainly incongruous. The pedigree of Grendel is not
+authentic; the Christian sentiments and morals are not in keeping with
+the heroic or the mythical substance of the poem; the conduct of the
+narrative is not always clear or easy to follow. These difficulties
+and contradictions have to be explained; the composition of the poem
+has to be analysed; what is old has to be separated from what is new
+and adventitious; and the various senses and degrees of &quot;old&quot; and
+&quot;new&quot; have to be determined, in the criticism of the poem. With all
+this, however, the poem continues to possess at least an apparent and
+external unity. It is an extant book, whatever the history of its
+composition may have been; the book of the adventures of Beowulf,
+written out fair by two scribes in the tenth century; an epic poem,
+with a prologue at the beginning, and a judgment pronounced on the
+life of the hero at the end; a single book, considered as such by its
+transcribers, and making a claim to be so considered.</p>
+
+<p>Before any process of disintegration is begun, this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> claim should be
+taken into account; the poem deserves to be appreciated as it stands.
+Whatever may be the secrets of its authorship, it exists as a single
+continuous narrative poem; and whatever its faults may be, it holds a
+position by itself, and a place of some honour, as the one extant poem
+of considerable length in the group to which it belongs. It has a
+meaning and value apart from the questions of its origin and its mode
+of production. Its present value as a poem is not affected by proofs
+or arguments regarding the way in which it may have been patched or
+edited. The patchwork theory has no power to make new faults in the
+poem; it can only point out what faults exist, and draw inferences
+from them. It does not take away from any dignity the book may possess
+in its present form, that it has been subjected to the same kind of
+examination as the <i>Iliad</i>. The poem may be reviewed as it stands, in
+order to find out what sort of thing passed for heroic poetry with the
+English at the time the present copy of the poem was written. However
+the result was obtained, <i>Beowulf</i> is, at any rate, the specimen by
+which the Teutonic epic poetry must be judged. It is the largest
+monument extant. There is nothing beyond it, in that kind, in respect
+of size and completeness. If the old Teutonic epic is judged to have
+failed, it must be because <i>Beowulf</i> is a failure.</p>
+
+<p>Taking the most cursory view of the story of <i>Beowulf</i>, it is easy to
+recognise that the unity of the plot is not like the unity of the
+<i>Iliad</i> or the <i>Odyssey</i>. One is inclined at first to reckon <i>Beowulf</i>
+along with those epics of which Aristotle speaks, the <i>Heracleids</i> and
+<i>Theseids</i>, the authors of which &quot;imagined that because Heracles was
+one person the story of his life could not fail to have unity.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a></p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span></p>
+<p>It is impossible to reduce the poem of <i>Beowulf</i> to the scale of
+Aristotle's <i>Odyssey</i> without revealing the faults of structure in the
+English poem:&#8212;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A man in want of work goes abroad to the house of a certain
+king troubled by Harpies, and having accomplished the
+purification of the house returns home with honour. Long
+afterwards, having become king in his own country, he kills
+a dragon, but is at the same time choked by the venom of it.
+His people lament for him and build his tomb.</p></div>
+
+<p>Aristotle made a summary of the Homeric poem, because he wished to
+show how simple its construction really was, apart from the episodes.
+It is impossible, by any process of reduction and simplification, to
+get rid of the duality in <i>Beowulf</i>. It has many episodes, quite
+consistent with a general unity of action, but there is something more
+than episodes, there is a sequel. It is as if to the <i>Odyssey</i> there
+had been added some later books telling in full of the old age of
+Odysseus, far from the sea, and his death at the hands of his son
+Telegonus. The adventure with the dragon is separate from the earlier
+adventures. It is only connected with them because the same person is
+involved in both.</p>
+
+<p>It is plain from Aristotle's words that the <i>Iliad</i> and the <i>Odyssey</i>
+were in this, as in all respects, above and beyond the other Greek
+epics known to Aristotle. Homer had not to wait for <i>Beowulf</i> to serve
+as a foil to his excellence. That was provided in the other epic poems
+of Greece, in the cycle of Troy, in the epic stories of Theseus and
+Heracles. It seems probable that the poem of <i>Beowulf</i> may be at least
+as well knit as the <i>Little Iliad</i>, the Greek cyclic poem of which
+Aristotle names the principal incidents, con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>trasting its variety with
+the simplicity of the <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i>.<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a></p>
+
+<p>Indeed it is clear that the plan of <i>Beowulf</i> might easily have been
+much worse, that is, more lax and diffuse, than it is. This meagre
+amount of praise will be allowed by the most grudging critics, if they
+will only think of the masses of French epic, and imagine the extent
+to which a French company of poets might have prolonged the narrative
+of the hero's life&#8212;the <i>Enfances</i>, the <i>Chevalerie</i>&#8212;before reaching
+the <i>Death of Beowulf</i>.</p>
+
+<p>At line 2200 in <i>Beowulf</i> comes the long interval of time, the fifty
+years between the adventure at Heorot and the fight between Beowulf
+and the dragon. Two thousand lines are given to the first story, a
+thousand to the <i>Death of Beowulf</i>. Two thousand lines are occupied
+with the narrative of Beowulf's expedition, his voyage to Denmark, his
+fight with Grendel and Grendel's mother, his return to the land of the
+Gauts and his report of the whole matter to King Hygelac. In this part
+of the poem, taken by itself, there is no defect of unity. The action
+is one, with different parts all easily and naturally included between
+the first voyage and the return. It is amplified and complicated with
+details, but none of these introduce any new main interests. <i>Beowulf</i>
+is not like the <i>Heracleids</i> and <i>Theseids</i>. It transgresses the
+limits of the Homeric unity, by adding a sequel; but for all that it
+is not a mere string of adventures, like the bad epic in Horace's <i>Art
+of Poetry</i>, or the innocent plays described by Sir Philip Sidney and
+Cervantes. A third of the whole poem is detached, a separate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+adventure. The first two-thirds taken by themselves form a complete
+poem, with a single action; while, in the orthodox epic manner,
+various allusions and explanations are introduced regarding the past
+history of the personages involved, and the history of other people
+famous in tradition. The adventure at Heorot, taken by itself, would
+pass the scrutiny of Aristotle or Horace, as far as concerns the lines
+of its composition.</p>
+
+<p>There is variety in it, but the variety is kept in order and not
+allowed to interfere or compete with the main story. The past history
+is disclosed, and the subordinate novels are interpolated, as in the
+<i>Odyssey</i>, in the course of an evening's conversation in hall, or in
+some other interval in the action. In the introduction of accessory
+matter, standing in different degrees of relevance to the main plot,
+the practice of <i>Beowulf</i> is not essentially different from that of
+classical epic.</p>
+
+<p>In the <i>Iliad</i> we are allowed to catch something of the story of the
+old time before Agamemnon,&#8212;the war of Thebes, Lycurgus, Jason,
+Heracles,&#8212;and even of things less widely notable, less of a concern
+to the world than the voyage of Argo, such as, for instance, the
+business of Nestor in his youth. In <i>Beowulf</i>, in a similar way, the
+inexhaustible world outside the story is partly represented by means
+of allusions and digressions. The tragedy of Finnesburh is sung by the
+harper, and his song is reported at some length, not merely referred
+to in passing. The stories of Thrytho, of Heremod, of Sigemund the
+W&#230;lsing and Fitela his son (Sigmund and Sinfiotli), are introduced
+like the stories of Lycurgus or of Jason in Homer. They are
+illustrations of the action, taken from other cycles. The fortunes of
+the Danish and Gautish kings, the fall of Hygelac, the feuds with
+Sweden,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> these matters come into closer relation with the story. They
+are not so much illustrations taken in from without, as points of
+attachment between the history of <i>Beowulf</i> and the untold history all
+round it, the history of the persons concerned, along with Beowulf
+himself, in the vicissitudes of the Danish and Gautish kingdoms.</p>
+
+<p>In the fragments of <i>Waldere</i>, also, there are allusions to other
+stories. In <i>Waldere</i> there has been lost a poem much longer and
+fuller than the <i>Lay of Hildebrand</i>, or any of the poems of the &quot;Elder
+Edda&quot;&#8212;a poem more like <i>Beowulf</i> than any of those now extant. The
+references to Weland, to Widia Weland's son, to Hama and Theodoric,
+are of the same sort as the references in <i>Beowulf</i> to the story of
+Froda and Ingeld, or the references in the <i>Iliad</i> to the adventures
+of Tydeus.</p>
+
+<p>In the episodic passages of <i>Beowulf</i> there are, curiously, the same
+degrees of relevance as in the <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Some of them are necessary to the proper fulness of the story, though
+not essential parts of the plot. Such are the references to Beowulf's
+swimming-match; and such, in the <i>Odyssey</i>, is the tale told to
+Alcinous.</p>
+
+<p>The allusions to the wars of Hygelac have the same value as the
+references in the <i>Iliad</i> and the <i>Odyssey</i> to such portions of the
+tale of Troy, and of the return of the Greek lords, as are not
+immediately connected with the anger of Achilles, or the return of
+Odysseus. The tale of <i>Finnesburh</i> in <i>Beowulf</i> is purely an
+interlude, as much as the ballad of <i>Ares and Aphrodite</i> in the
+<i>Odyssey</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the references to other legends in the <i>Iliad</i> are
+illustrative and comparative, like the passages about Heremod or
+Thrytho in <i>Beowulf</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> &quot;Ares suffered when Otus and Ephialtes kept him
+in a brazen vat, Hera suffered and Hades suffered, and were shot with
+the arrows of the son of Amphitryon&quot; (<i>Il.</i> v. 385). The long
+parenthetical story of Heracles in a speech of Agamemnon (<i>Il.</i> xx.
+98) has the same irrelevance of association, and has incurred the same
+critical suspicions, as the contrast of Hygd and Thrytho, a fairly
+long passage out of a wholly different story, introduced in <i>Beowulf</i>
+on the very slightest of suggestions.</p>
+
+<p>Thus in <i>Beowulf</i> and in the Homeric poems there are episodes that are
+strictly relevant and consistent, filling up the epic plan, opening
+out the perspective of the story; also episodes that without being
+strictly relevant are rightly proportioned and subordinated, like the
+interlude of Finnesburh, decoration added to the structure, but not
+overloading it, nor interfering with the design; and, thirdly,
+episodes that seem to be irrelevant, and may possibly be
+interpolations. All these kinds have the effect of increasing the mass
+as well as the variety of the work, and they give to <i>Beowulf</i> the
+character of a poem which, in dealing with one action out of an heroic
+cycle, is able, by the way, to hint at and partially represent a great
+number of other stories.</p>
+
+<p>It is not in the episodes alone that <i>Beowulf</i> has an advantage over
+the shorter and more summary poems. The frequent episodes are only
+part of the general liberality of the narrative.</p>
+
+<p>The narrative is far more cramped than in <i>Homer</i>; but when compared
+with the short method of the Northern poems, not to speak of the
+ballads, it comes out as itself Homeric by contrast. It succeeds in
+representing pretty fully and continuously, not by mere allusions and
+implications, certain portions of heroic life and action.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The principal actions in <i>Beowulf</i> are curiously trivial, taken by
+themselves. All around them are the rumours of great heroic and tragic
+events, and the scene and the personages are heroic and magnificent.
+But the plot in itself has no very great poetical value; as compared
+with the tragic themes of the Niblung legend, with the tale of
+Finnesburh, or even with the historical seriousness of the <i>Maldon</i>
+poem, it lacks weight. The largest of the extant poems of this school
+has the least important subject-matter; while things essentially and
+in the abstract more important, like the tragedy of Froda and Ingeld,
+are thrust away into the corners of the poem.</p>
+
+<p>In the killing of a monster like Grendel, or in the killing of a
+dragon, there is nothing particularly interesting; no complication to
+make a fit subject for epic. <i>Beowulf</i> is defective from the first in
+respect of plot.</p>
+
+<p>The story of Grendel and his mother is one that has been told in
+myriads of ways; there is nothing commoner, except dragons. The
+killing of dragons and other monsters is the regular occupation of the
+heroes of old wives' tales; and it is difficult to give individuality
+or epic dignity to commonplaces of this sort. This, however, is
+accomplished in the poem of <i>Beowulf</i>. Nothing can make the story of
+Grendel dramatic like the story of Waldere or of Finnesburh. But the
+poet has, at any rate, in connexion with this simple theme, given a
+rendering, consistent, adequate, and well-proportioned, of certain
+aspects of life and certain representative characters in an heroic
+age.</p>
+
+<p>The characters in <i>Beowulf</i> are not much more than types; not much
+more clearly individual than the persons of a comedy of Terence. In
+the shorter Northern poems there are the characters of Brynhild and
+Gudrun; there is nothing in <i>Beowulf</i> to compare<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> with them, although
+in <i>Beowulf</i> the personages are consistent with themselves, and
+intelligible.</p>
+
+<p>Hrothgar is the generous king whose qualities were in Northern history
+transferred to his nephew Hrothulf (Hrolf Kraki), the type of peaceful
+strength, a man of war living quietly in the intervals of war.</p>
+
+<p>Beowulf is like him in magnanimity, but his character is less uniform.
+He is not one of the more cruel adventurers, like Starkad in the myth,
+or some of the men of the Icelandic Sagas. But he is an adventurer
+with something strange and not altogether safe in his disposition. His
+youth was like that of the lubberly younger sons in the fairy stories.
+&quot;They said that he was slack.&quot; Though he does not swagger like a
+Berserk, nor &quot;gab&quot; like the Paladins of Charlemagne, he is ready on
+provocation to boast of what he has done. The pathetic sentiment of
+his farewell to Hrothgar is possibly to be ascribed, in the details of
+its rhetoric, to the common affection of Anglo-Saxon poetry for the
+elegiac mood; but the softer passages are not out of keeping with the
+wilder moments of <i>Beowulf</i>, and they add greatly to the interest of
+his character. He is more variable, more dramatic, than the king and
+queen of the Danes, or any of the secondary personages.</p>
+
+<p>Wealhtheo, the queen, represents the poetical idea of a noble lady.
+There is nothing complex or strongly dramatic in her character.</p>
+
+<p>Hunferth, the envious man, brought in as a foil to Beowulf, is not
+caricatured or exaggerated. His sourness is that of a critic and a
+politician, disinclined to accept newcomers on their own valuation. He
+is not a figure of envy in a moral allegory.</p>
+
+<p>In the latter part of the poem it is impossible to find in the
+character of Wiglaf more than the general and abstract qualities of
+the &quot;loyal servitor.&quot;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Yet all those abstract and typical characters are introduced in such a
+way as to complete and fill up the picture. The general impression is
+one of variety and complexity, though the elements of it are simple
+enough.</p>
+
+<p>With a plot like that of <i>Beowulf</i> it might seem that there was danger
+of a lapse from the more serious kind of heroic composition into a
+more trivial kind. Certainly there is nothing in the plain story to
+give much help to the author; nothing in Grendel to fascinate or tempt
+a poet with a story made to his hand.</p>
+
+<p>The plot of <i>Beowulf</i> is not more serious than that of a thousand
+easy-going romances of chivalry, and of fairy tales beyond all number.</p>
+
+<p>The strength of what may be called an epic tradition is shown in the
+superiority of <i>Beowulf</i> to the temptations of cheap romantic
+commonplace. Beowulf, the hero, is, after all, something different
+from the giant-killer of popular stories, the dragon-slayer of the
+romantic schools. It is the virtue and the triumph of the poet of
+<i>Beowulf</i> that when all is done the characters of the poem remain
+distinct in the memory, that the thoughts and sentiments of the poem
+are remembered as significant, in a way that is not the way of the
+common romance. Although the incidents that take up the principal part
+of the scene of <i>Beowulf</i> are among the commonest in popular stories,
+it is impossible to mistake the poem for one of the ordinary tales of
+terror and wonder. The essential part of the poem is the drama of
+characters; though the plot happens to be such that the characters are
+never made to undergo a tragic ordeal like that of so many of the
+other Teutonic stories. It is not incorrect to say of the poem of
+<i>Beowulf</i> that the main story is really less important to the
+imagination<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> than the accessories by which the characters are defined
+and distinguished. It is the defect of the poem this should be so.
+There is a constitutional weakness in it.</p>
+
+<p>Although the two stories of <i>Beowulf</i> are both commonplace, there is a
+difference between the story of Grendel and the story of the dragon.</p>
+
+<p>The story of the dragon is more of a commonplace than the other.
+Almost every one of any distinction, and many quite ordinary people in
+certain periods of history have killed dragons; from Hercules and
+Bellerophon to Gawain, who, on different occasions, narrowly escaped
+the fate of Beowulf; from Harald Hardrada (who killed two at least) to
+More of More Hall who killed the dragon of Wantley.</p>
+
+<p>The latter part of <i>Beowulf</i> is a tissue of commonplaces of every
+kind: the dragon and its treasure; the devastation of the land; the
+hero against the dragon; the defection of his companions; the loyalty
+of one of them; the fight with the dragon; the dragon killed, and the
+hero dying from the flame and the venom of it; these are commonplaces
+of the story, and in addition to these there are commonplaces of
+sentiment, the old theme of this transitory life that &quot;fareth as a
+fantasy,&quot; the lament for the glory passed away; and the equally common
+theme of loyalty and treason in contrast. Everything is commonplace,
+while everything is also magnificent in its way, and set forth in the
+right epic style, with elegiac passages here and there. Everything is
+commonplace except the allusions to matters of historical tradition,
+such as the death of Ongentheow, the death of Hygelac. With these
+exceptions, there is nothing in the latter part of <i>Beowulf</i> that
+might not have been taken at almost any time from the common stock of
+fables and appropriate sentiments, familiar to every maker or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> hearer
+of poetry from the days of the English conquest of Britain, and long
+before that. It is not to be denied that the commonplaces here are
+handled with some discretion; though commonplace, they are not mean or
+dull.<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a></p>
+
+<p>The story of Grendel and his mother is also common, but not as common
+as the dragon. The function of this story is considerably different
+from the other, and the class to which it belongs is differently
+distributed in literature. Both are stories of the killing of
+monsters, both belong naturally to legends of heroes like Theseus or
+Hercules. But for literature there is this difference between them,
+that dragons belong more appropriately to the more fantastic kinds of
+narrative, while stories of the deliverance of a house from a
+pestilent goblin are much more capable of sober treatment and
+verisimilitude. Dragons are more easily distinguished and set aside as
+fabulous monsters than is the family of Grendel. Thus the story of
+Grendel is much better fitted than the dragon story for a composition
+like <i>Beowulf</i>, which includes a considerable amount of the detail of
+common experience and ordinary life. Dragons are easily scared from
+the neighbourhood of sober experience; they have to be looked for in
+the mountains and caverns of romance or fable. Whereas Grendel remains
+a possibility in the middle of common life, long after the last dragon
+has been disposed of.</p>
+
+<p>The people who tell fairy stories like the <i>Well of the World's End</i>,
+the <i>Knight of the Red Shield</i>, the <i>Castle East o' the Sun and West
+o' the Moon</i>, have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> no belief, have neither belief nor disbelief, in
+the adventures of them. But the same people have other stories of
+which they take a different view, stories of wonderful things more
+near to their own experience. Many a man to whom the <i>Well of the
+World's End</i> is an idea, a fancy, has in his mind a story like that of
+Grendel which he believes, which makes him afraid. The bogle that
+comes to a house at night and throttles the goodman is a creature more
+hardy than the dragon, and more persevering. Stories like that of
+Beowulf and Grendel are to be found along with other popular stories
+in collections; but they are to be distinguished from them. There are
+popular heroes of tradition to this day who are called to do for
+lonely houses the service done by Beowulf for the house of Hrothgar.</p>
+
+<p>Peer Gynt (not Ibsen's Peer Gynt, who is sophisticated, but the
+original Peter) is a lonely deer-stalker on the fells, who is asked by
+his neighbour to come and keep his house for him, which is infested
+with trolls. Peer Gynt clears them out,<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a> and goes back to his
+deer-stalking. The story is plainly one that touches the facts of life
+more nearly than stories of <i>Shortshanks</i> or the <i>Blue Belt</i>. The
+trolls are a possibility.</p>
+
+<p>The story of Uistean Mor mac Ghille Phadrig is another of the same
+sort.<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a> It is not, like the <i>Battle of the Birds</i> or <i>Conal Gulban</i>,
+a thing of pure fantasy. It is a story that may pass for true when the
+others have lost everything but their pure imaginative value as
+stories. Here, again, in the West Highlands, the champion is called
+upon like Beowulf and Peer Gynt to save his neighbours from a warlock.
+And it is matter of history that Bishop Gudmund Arason of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> H&#243;lar in
+Iceland had to suppress a creature with a seal's head, Selkolla, that
+played the game of Grendel.<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a></p>
+
+<p>There are people, no doubt, for whom Peer Gynt and the trolls, Uistean
+Mor and the warlock, even Selkolla that Bishop Gudmund killed, are as
+impossible as the dragon in the end of the poem of <i>Beowulf</i>. But it
+is certain that stories like those of Grendel are commonly believed in
+many places where dragons are extinct. The story of Beowulf and
+Grendel is not wildly fantastic or improbable; it agrees with the
+conditions of real life, as they have been commonly understood at all
+times except those of peculiar enlightenment and rationalism. It is
+not to be compared with the Phaeacian stories of the adventures of
+Odysseus. Those stories in the <i>Odyssey</i> are plainly and intentionally
+in a different order of imagination from the story of the killing of
+the suitors. They are pure romance, and if any hearer of the <i>Odyssey</i>
+in ancient times was led to go in search of the island of Calypso, he
+might come back with the same confession as the seeker for the wonders
+of Broceliande,&#8212;<i>fol i alai</i>. But there are other wonderful things in
+the <i>Iliad</i> and the <i>Odyssey</i> which are equally improbable to the
+modern rationalist and sceptic; yet by no means of the same kind of
+wonder as Calypso or the Sirens. Probably few of the earliest hearers
+of the <i>Odyssey</i> thought of the Sirens or of Calypso as anywhere near
+them, while many of them must have had their grandmothers' testimony
+for things like the portents before the death of the suitors. Grendel
+in the poem of <i>Beowulf</i> is in the same order of existence as these
+portents. If they are superstitions, they are among the most
+persistent; and they are superstitions, rather than creatures of
+romance. The fight with Grendel is not of the same kind of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> adventure
+as Sigurd at the hedge of flame, or Svipdag at the enchanted castle.
+And the episode of Grendel's mother is further from matter of fact
+than the story of Grendel himself. The description of the desolate
+water is justly recognised as one of the masterpieces of the old
+English poetry; it deserves all that has been said of it as a passage
+of romance in the middle of epic. Beowulf's descent under the water,
+his fight with the warlock's mother, the darkness of that &quot;sea
+dingle,&quot; the light of the mysterious sword, all this, if less
+admirably worked out than the first description of the dolorous mere,
+is quite as far from Heorot and the report of the table-talk of
+Hrothgar, Beowulf, and Hunferth. It is also a different sort of thing
+from the fight with Grendel. There is more of supernatural incident,
+more romantic ornament, less of that concentration in the struggle
+which makes the fight with Grendel almost as good in its way as its
+Icelandic counterpart, the wrestling of Grettir and Glam.</p>
+
+<p>The story of <i>Beowulf</i>, which in the fight with Grendel has analogies
+with the plainer kind of goblin story, rather alters its tone in the
+fight with Grendel's mother. There are parallels in <i>Grettis Saga</i>,
+and elsewhere, to encounters like this, with a hag or ogress under
+water; stories of this sort have been found no less credible than
+stories of haunting warlocks like Grendel. But this second story is
+not told in the same way as the first. It has more of the fashion and
+temper of mythical fable or romance, and less of matter of fact. More
+particularly, the old sword, the sword of light, in the possession of
+Grendel's dam in her house under the water, makes one think of other
+legends of mysterious swords, like that of Helgi, and the &quot;glaives of
+light&quot; that are in the keeping of divers &quot;gyre carlines&quot; in the <i>West
+Highland Tales</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> Further, the whole scheme is a common one in popular
+stories, especially in Celtic stories of giants; after the giant is
+killed his mother comes to avenge him.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, the controlling power in the story of <i>Beowulf</i> is not
+that of any kind of romance or fantastic invention; neither the
+original fantasy of popular stories nor the literary embellishments of
+romantic schools of poetry. There are things in <i>Beowulf</i> that may be
+compared to things in the fairy tales; and, again, there are passages
+of high value for their use of the motive of pure awe and mystery. But
+the poem is made what it is by the power with which the characters are
+kept in right relation to their circumstances. The hero is not lost or
+carried away in his adventures. The introduction, the arrival in
+Heorot, and the conclusion, the return of Beowulf to his own country,
+are quite unlike the manner of pure romance; and these are the parts
+of the work by which it is most accurately to be judged.</p>
+
+<p>The adventure of Grendel is put in its right proportion when it is
+related by Beowulf to Hygelac. The repetition of the story, in a
+shorter form, and in the mouth of the hero himself, gives strength and
+body to a theme that was in danger of appearing trivial and fantastic.
+The popular story-teller has done his work when he has told the
+adventures of the giant-killer; the epic poet has failed, if he has
+done no more than this.</p>
+
+<p>The character and personage of Beowulf must be brought out and
+impressed on the audience; it is the poet's hero that they are bound
+to admire. He appeals to them, not directly, but with unmistakable
+force and emphasis, to say that they have beheld (&quot;as may unworthiness
+define&quot;) the nature of the hero, and to give him their praises.</p>
+
+<p>The beauty and the strength of the poem of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> <i>Beowulf</i>, as of all true
+epic, depend mainly upon its comprehensive power, its inclusion of
+various aspects, its faculty of changing the mood of the story. The
+fight with Grendel is an adventure of one sort, grim, unrelieved,
+touching close upon the springs of mortal terror, the recollection or
+the apprehension of real adversaries possibly to be met with in the
+darkness. The fight with Grendel's mother touches on other motives;
+the terror is further away from human habitations, and it is
+accompanied with a charm and a beauty, the beauty of the Gorgon, such
+as is absent from the first adventure. It would have loosened the
+tension and broken the unity of the scene, if any such irrelevances
+had been admitted into the story of the fight with Grendel. The fight
+with Grendel's mother is fought under other conditions; the stress is
+not the same; the hero goes out to conquer, he is beset by no such
+apprehension as in the case of the night attack. The poet is at this
+point free to make use of a new set of motives, and here it is rather
+the scene than the action that is made vivid to the mind. But after
+this excursion the story comes back to its heroic beginning; and the
+conversation of Beowulf with his hosts in Denmark, and the report that
+he gives to his kin in Gautland, are enough to reduce to its right
+episodic dimensions the fantasy of the adventure under the sea. In the
+latter part of the poem there is still another distribution of
+interest. The conversation of the personages is still to be found
+occasionally carried on in the steady tones of people who have lives
+of their own, and belong to a world where the tunes are not all in one
+key. At the same time, it cannot be denied that the story of the
+<i>Death of Beowulf</i> is inclined to monotony. The epic variety and
+independence are obliterated by the too obviously pathetic intention.
+The character of this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> part of the poem is that of a late school of
+heroic poetry attempting, and with some success, to extract the spirit
+of an older kind of poetry, and to represent in one scene an heroic
+ideal or example, with emphasis and with concentration of all the
+available matter. But while the end of the poem may lose in some
+things by comparison with the stronger earlier parts, it is not so
+wholly lost in the charms of pathetic meditation as to forget the
+martial tone and the more resolute air altogether. There was a danger
+that Beowulf should be transformed into a sort of Amadis, a mirror of
+the earlier chivalry; with a loyal servitor attending upon his death,
+and uttering the rhetorical panegyric of an abstract ideal. But this
+danger is avoided, at least in part. Beowulf is still, in his death, a
+sharer in the fortunes of the Northern houses; he keeps his history.
+The fight with the dragon is shot through with reminiscences of the
+Gautish wars: Wiglaf speaks his sorrow for the champion of the Gauts;
+the virtues of Beowulf are not those of a fictitious paragon king, but
+of a man who would be missed in the day when the enemies of the Gauts
+should come upon them.</p>
+
+<p>The epic keeps its hold upon what went before, and on what is to come.
+Its construction is solid, not flat. It is exposed to the attractions
+of all kinds of subordinate and partial literature,&#8212;the fairy story,
+the conventional romance, the pathetic legend,&#8212;and it escapes them
+all by taking them all up as moments, as episodes and points of view,
+governed by the conception, or the comprehension, of some of the
+possibilities of human character in a certain form of society. It does
+not impose any one view on the reader; it gives what it is the proper
+task of the higher kind of fiction to give&#8212;the play of life in
+different moods and under different aspects.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h1>THE ICELANDIC SAGAS</h1>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="III.I"></a>I</h3>
+
+<h3>ICELAND AND THE HEROIC AGE</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> epic poetry of the Germans came to an end in different ways and at
+different seasons among the several nations of that stock. In England
+and the Continent it had to compete with the new romantic subjects and
+new forms of verse. In Germany the rhyming measures prevailed very
+early, but the themes of German tradition were not surrendered at the
+same time. The rhyming verse of Germany, foreign in its origin,
+continued to be applied for centuries in the rendering of German myths
+and heroic stories, sometimes in a style with more or less pretence to
+courtliness, as in the <i>Nibelungenlied</i> and <i>Kudrun</i>; sometimes in
+open parade of the travelling minstrel's &quot;public manners&quot; and simple
+appetites. England had exactly the opposite fortune in regard to verse
+and subject-matter. In England the alliterative verse survived the
+changes of inflexion and pronunciation for more than five hundred
+years after <i>Maldon</i>, and uttered its last words in a poem written
+like the <i>Song of Byrhtnoth</i> on a contemporary battle,&#8212;the poem of
+<i>Scottish Field</i>.<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+There was girding forth of guns, with many great stones;<br />
+Archers uttered out their arrows and eagerly they shotten;<br />
+They proched us with spears and put many over;<br />
+That the blood outbrast at their broken harness.<br />
+There was swinging out of swords, and swapping of heads,<br />
+We blanked them with bills through all their bright armour,<br />
+That all the dale dinned of the derf strokes.<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>But while this poem of Flodden corresponds in its subject to the poem
+of <i>Maldon</i>, there is no such likeness between any other late
+alliterative poem and the older poems of the older language. The
+alliterative verse is applied in the fourteenth and fifteenth
+centuries to every kind of subject except those of Germanic tradition.
+England, however, has the advantage over Germany, that while Germany
+lost the old verse, England did not lose the English heroic subjects,
+though, as it happens, the story of King Horn and the story of
+Havelock the Dane are not told in the verse that was used for King
+Arthur and Gawain, for the tale of Troy and the wars of Alexander. The
+recent discovery of a fragment of the <i>Song of Wade</i> is an admonition
+to be cautious in making the extant works of Middle English literature
+into a standard for all that has ceased to exist. But no new
+discovery, even of a Middle English alliterative poem of Beowulf or of
+Walter of Aquitaine, would alter the fact that the alliterative
+measure of English poetry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
+like the ancient themes of the German rhyming poems, is a survival in
+an age when the chief honours go to other kinds of poetry. The author
+of <i>Piers Plowman</i> is a notable writer, and so are the poets of
+<i>Gawain</i>, and of the <i>Mort Arthure</i>, and of the <i>Destruction of Troy</i>;
+but Chaucer and not Langland is the poetical master of that age. The
+poems of the <i>Nibelungen</i> and of <i>Kudrun</i> are rightly honoured, but it
+was to the author of <i>Parzival</i>, and to the courtly lyrics of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> Walther
+von der Vogelweide, that the higher rank was given in the age of the
+Hohenstaufen, and the common fame is justified by history, so often as
+history chooses to have any concern with such things.</p>
+
+<p>In the lands of the old Northern speech the old heroic poetry was
+displaced by the new Court poetry of the Scalds. The heroic subjects
+were not, however, allowed to pass out of memory. The new poetry could
+not do without them, and required, and obtained, its heroic dictionary
+in the <i>Edda</i>. The old subjects hold their own, or something of their
+own, with every change of fashion. They were made into prose stories,
+when prose was in favour; they were the subjects of <i>R&#237;mur</i>, rhyming
+Icelandic romances, when that form came later into vogue.<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> In
+Denmark they were paraphrased, many of them, by Saxo in his <i>History</i>;
+many of them became the subjects of ballads, in Denmark, Norway,
+Sweden, and the Faroes.</p>
+
+<p>In this way some of the inheritance of the old German world was saved
+in different countries and languages, for the most part in ballads and
+chapbooks, apart from the main roads of literature. But these
+heirlooms were not the whole stock of the heroic age. After the
+failure and decline of the old poetry there remained an unexhausted
+piece of ground; and the great imaginative triumph of the Teutonic
+heroic age was won in Iceland with the creation of a new epic
+tradition, a new form applied to new subjects.</p>
+
+<p>Iceland did something more than merely preserve the forms of an
+antiquated life whose day was over. It was something more than an
+island of refuge for muddled and blundering souls that had found the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>
+career of the great world too much for them. The ideas of an
+old-fashioned society migrated to Iceland, but they did not remain
+there unmodified. The paradox of the history of Iceland is that the
+unsuccessful old ideas were there maintained by a community of people
+who were intensely self-conscious and exceptionally clear in mind.
+Their political ideas were too primitive for the common life of
+medieval Christendom. The material life of Iceland in the Middle Ages
+was barbarous when compared with the life of London or Paris, not to
+speak of Provence or Italy, in the same centuries. At the same time,
+the modes of thought in Iceland, as is proved by its historical
+literature, were distinguished by their freedom from
+extravagances,&#8212;from the extravagance of medieval enthusiasm as well
+as from the superstitions of barbarism. The life of an heroic
+age&#8212;that is, of an older stage of civilisation than the common
+European medieval form&#8212;was interpreted and represented by the men of
+that age themselves with a clearness of understanding that appears to
+be quite unaffected by the common medieval fallacies and &quot;idolisms.&quot;
+This clear self-consciousness is the distinction of Icelandic
+civilisation and literature. It is not vanity or conceit. It does not
+make the Icelandic writers anxious about their own fame or merits. It
+is simply clear intelligence, applied under a dry light to subjects
+that in themselves are primitive, such as never before or since have
+been represented in the same way. The life is their own life; the
+record is that of a dispassionate observer.</p>
+
+<p>While the life represented in the Sagas is more primitive, less
+civilised, than the life of the great Southern nations in the Middle
+Ages, the record of that life is by a still greater interval in
+advance of all the common modes of narrative then known to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> more
+fortunate or more luxurious parts of Europe. The conventional form of
+the Saga has none of the common medieval restrictions of view. It is
+accepted at once by modern readers without deduction or apology on the
+score of antique fashion, because it is in essentials the form with
+which modern readers are acquainted in modern story-telling; and more
+especially because the language is unaffected and idiomatic, not
+&quot;quaint&quot; in any way, and because the conversations are like the talk
+of living people. The Sagas are stories of characters who speak for
+themselves, and who are interesting on their own merits. There are
+good and bad Sagas, and the good ones are not all equally good
+throughout. The mistakes and misuses of the inferior parts of the
+literature do not, however, detract from the sufficiency of the common
+form, as represented at its best. The invention of the common form of
+the Saga is an achievement which deserves to be judged by the best in
+its kind. That kind was not exempt, any more than the Elizabethan
+drama or the modern novel, from the impertinences and superfluities of
+trivial authors. Further, there were certain conditions and
+circumstances about its origin that sometimes hindered in one way,
+while they gave help in another. The Saga is a compromise between
+opposite temptations, and the compromise is not always equitable.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="III.II"></a>II</h3>
+
+<h3>MATTER AND FORM</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is no small part of the force of the Sagas, and at the same time a
+difficulty and an embarrassment, that they have so much of reality
+behind them. The element of history in them, and their close relation
+to the lives of those for whom they were made, have given them a
+substance and solidity beyond anything else in the imaginative stories
+of the Middle Ages. It may be that this advantage is gained rather
+unfairly. The art of the Sagas, which is so modern in many things, and
+so different from the medieval conventions in its selection of matter
+and its development of the plot, is largely indebted to circumstances
+outside of art. In its rudiments it was always held close to the real
+and material interests of the people; it was not like some other arts
+which in their beginning are fanciful, or dependent on myth or legend
+for their subject-matter, as in the medieval schools of painting or
+sculpture generally, or in the medieval drama. Its imaginative methods
+were formed through essays in the representation of actual life; its
+first artists were impelled by historical motives, and by personal and
+local interests. The art of the Sagas was from the first &quot;immersed in
+matter&quot;; it had from the first all the advantage that is given by
+interests stronger and more substantial than those of mere
+literature;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> and, conversely, all the hindrance that such irrelevant
+interests provide, when &quot;mere literature&quot; attempts to disengage itself
+and govern its own course.</p>
+
+<p>The local history, the pedigrees of notable families, are felt as a
+hindrance, in a greater or less degree, by all readers of the Sagas;
+as a preliminary obstacle to clear comprehension. The Sagas differ in
+value, according to their use and arrangement of these matters, in
+relation to a central or imaginative conception of the main story and
+the characters engaged in it. The best Sagas are not always those that
+give the least of their space to historical matters, to the
+genealogies and family memoirs. From these the original life of the
+Sagas is drawn, and when it is cut off from these the Saga withers
+into a conventional and insipid romance. Some of the best Sagas are
+among those which make most of the history and, like <i>Nj&#225;la</i> and
+<i>Laxd&#230;la</i>, act out their tragedies in a commanding way that carries
+along with it the whole crowd of minor personages, yet so that their
+minor and particular existences do not interfere with the story, but
+help it and give it substantiality. The tragedy of <i>Njal</i>, or of the
+<i>Lovers of Gudrun</i>, may be read and judged, if one chooses, in
+abstraction from the common background of Icelandic history, and in
+forgetfulness of its bearing upon the common fortunes of the people of
+the land; but these Sagas are not rightly understood if they are taken
+only and exclusively in isolation. The tragedies gain a very distinct
+additional quality from the recurrence of personages familiar to the
+reader from other Sagas. The relation of the Sagas to actual past
+events, and to the whole range of Icelandic family tradition, was the
+initial difficulty in forming an adequate method of story-telling; the
+particulars were too many, and also too real. But the reality of them
+was, at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> same time, the initial impulse of the Sagas; and the best
+of the Sagas have found a way of saving the particulars of the family
+and local histories, without injury to the imaginative and poetical
+order of their narratives.</p>
+
+<p>The Sagas, with all the differences between them, have common
+features, but among these is not to be reckoned an equal consideration
+for the unity of action. The original matter of the oral traditions of
+Iceland, out of which the written Sagas were formed, was naturally
+very much made up of separate anecdotes, loosely strung together by
+associations with a district or a family. Some of the stories, no
+doubt, must have had by nature a greater unity and completeness than
+the rest:&#8212;history in the rough has very often the outlines of tragedy
+in it; it presents its authors with dramatic contrasts ready made
+(Richard II. and Bolingbroke, Lewis XI. and Charles the Bold,
+Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots); it provides real heroes. But there
+are many interesting things which are not well proportioned, and which
+have no respect for the unities; the hero is worth talking about
+whether his story is symmetrical or not. The simplest form of heroic
+narrative is that which puts together a number of adventures, such as
+may easily be detached and repeated separately, adventures like that
+of David and Goliath, Wallace with his fishing-rod, or Bruce in the
+robbers' house. Many of the Sagas are mere loose strings of
+adventures, of short stories, or idylls, which may easily be detached
+and remembered out of connexion with the rest of the series. In the
+case of many of these it is almost indifferent at what point they may
+be introduced in the Saga; they merely add some particulars without
+advancing the plot, if there be any plot. There are all varieties of
+texture in the Sagas, from the extreme<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> laxity of those that look like
+mere collections of the anecdotes of a countryside (<i>Eyrbyggja</i>), to
+the definite structure of those in which all the particulars
+contribute to the main action (<i>Hrafnkels Saga</i>, <i>Bandamanna</i>, <i>G&#237;sla
+Saga</i>).</p>
+
+<p>The loose assemblage of stories current in Iceland before the Sagas
+were composed in writing must, of course, have been capable of all
+kinds of variation. The written Sagas gave a check to oral variations
+and rearrangements; but many of them in extant alternative versions
+keep the traces of the original story-teller's freedom of selection,
+while all the Sagas together in a body acknowledge themselves
+practically as a selection from traditional report. Each one, the most
+complete as well as the most disorderly, is taken out of a mass of
+traditional knowledge relating to certain recognisable persons, of
+whom any one may be chosen for a time as the centre of interest, and
+any one may become a subordinate character in some one else's
+adventures. One Saga plays into the others, and introduces people
+incidentally who may be the heroes of other stories. As a result of
+this selective practice of the Sagas, it sometimes happens that an
+important or an interesting part of the record may be dropped by one
+Saga and picked up casually by another. Thus in the written Sagas, one
+of the best stories of the two Foster-brothers (or rather &quot;Brothers by
+oath,&quot; <i>fratres jurati</i>) Thorgeir and Thormod the poet, is preserved
+not by their own proper history, <i>F&#243;stbr&#230;&#240;ra Saga</i>, but in the story
+of Grettir the Strong; how they and Grettir lived a winter through in
+the same house without quarrelling, and how their courage was
+estimated by their host.<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a></p>
+
+<p>This solidarity and interconnexion of the Sagas<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> needs no explanation.
+It could not be otherwise in a country like Iceland; a community of
+neighbours (in spite of distances and difficulties of travelling)
+where there was nothing much to think about or to know except other
+people's affairs. The effect in the written Sagas is to give them
+something like the system of the <i>Com&#233;die Humaine</i>. There are new
+characters in each, but the old characters reappear. Sometimes there
+are discrepancies; the characters are not always treated from the same
+point of view. On the whole, however, there is agreement. The
+character of Gudmund the Great, for example, is well drawn, with zest,
+and some irony, in his own Saga (<i>Lj&#243;svetninga</i>); he is the prosperous
+man, the &quot;rich glutton,&quot; fond of praise and of influence, but not as
+sound as he looks, and not invulnerable. His many appearances in other
+Sagas all go to strengthen this impression of the full-blown great man
+and his ambiguous greatness. So also Snorri the Priest, whose rise and
+progress are related in <i>Eyrbyggja</i>, appears in many other Sagas, and
+is recognised whenever he appears with the same certainty and the same
+sort of interest as attaches to the name of Rastignac, when that
+politician is introduced in stories not properly his own. Each
+separate mention of Snorri the Priest finds its place along with all
+the rest; he is never unequal to himself.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is in the short story, the episodic chapter, that the art of
+Icelandic narrative first defines itself. This is the original unity;
+it is here, in a limited, easily comprehensible subject-matter, that
+the lines are first clearly drawn. The Sagas that are least regular
+and connected are made up of definite and well-shaped single blocks.
+Many of the Sagas are much improved by being taken to pieces and
+regarded, not as continuous histories, but as collections of separate
+short stories. <i>Eyrbyggja</i>, <i>Vatnsd&#230;la</i>, and <i>Lj&#243;svetninga</i> are
+collections of this sort&#8212;&quot;Tales of the Hall.&quot; There is a sort of
+unity in each of them, but the place of Snorri in <i>Eyrbyggja</i>, of
+Ingimund in <i>Vatnsd&#230;la</i>, and of Gudmund the Great in the history of
+the House of Lj&#243;savatn, is not that of a tragic or epic hero who
+compels the episodes to take their right subordinate rank in a larger
+story. These Sagas break up into separate chapters, losing thereby
+none of the minor interests of story-telling, but doing without the
+greater tragic or heroic interest of the fables that have one
+predominant motive.</p>
+
+<p>Of more coherent forms of construction there are several different
+examples among the Sagas. In each of these cases it is the tragic
+conception, the tragic idea, of the kind long familiar to the Teutonic
+nations, that governs the separate passages of the traditional
+history.</p>
+
+<p>Tragic situations are to be found all through the Icelandic
+literature, only they are not always enough to make a tragedy. There
+is Nemesis in the end of Gudmund the Great, when his murdered enemy
+haunts him; but this is not enough to make his Saga an organic thing.
+The tragic problem of Alboin recurs, as was pointed out by the editors
+of <i>Corpus Poeticum Boreale</i>, in the prelude to <i>Vatnsd&#230;la Saga</i>; but
+it stands by itself as one of the separate chapters<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> in that history,
+which contains the plots of other tragedies also, without adopting any
+one of them as its single and overruling motive. These are instances
+of the way in which tragic imagination, or at any rate the knowledge
+and partial appreciation of tragic plots, may come short of
+fulfilment, and may be employed in a comparatively futile and wasteful
+form of literature. In the greater works, where the idea is fully
+realised, there is no one formal type. The Icelandic Sagas have
+different forms of success in the greater works, as well as different
+degrees of approximation to success in the more desultory and
+miscellaneous histories.</p>
+
+<p><i>Nj&#225;la</i>, which is the greatest of all the Sagas, does not make its
+effect by any reduction of the weight or number of its details. It
+carries an even greater burden of particulars than <i>Eyrbyggja</i>; it has
+taken up into itself the whole history of the south country of Iceland
+in the heroic age.</p>
+
+<p>The unity of <i>Nj&#225;la</i> is certainly not the unity of a restricted or
+emaciated heroic play. Yet with all its complexity it belongs to quite
+a different order of work from <i>Eyrbyggja</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It falls into three divisions, each of these a story by itself, with
+all three combining to form one story, apart from which they are
+incomplete. The first, the story of Gunnar, which is a tragedy by
+itself, is a necessary part of the whole composition; for it is also
+the story of the wisdom of Njal and the dignity of Bergthora, without
+which the second part would be insipid, and the great act of the
+burning of Njal's house would lose its depth and significance. The
+third part is the payment of a debt to Njal, Bergthora, and
+Skarphedinn, for whom vengeance is required; but it is also due even
+more to Flosi their adversary. The essence of the tragic situation
+lies in this, that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> the good man is in the wrong, and his adversary in
+the right. The third part is required to restore the balance, in order
+that the original wrong, Skarphedinn's slaughter of the priest of
+Whiteness, should not be thought to be avoided in the death of its
+author. <i>Nj&#225;la</i> is a work of large scale and liberal design; the
+beauty of all which, in the story, is that it allows time for the
+characters to assert themselves and claim their own, as they could not
+do in a shorter story, where they would be whirled along by the plot.
+The vengeance and reconciliation in the third part of <i>Nj&#225;la</i> are
+brought about by something more than a summary poetical justice of
+fines and punishments for misdeeds. It is a more leisurely, as well as
+a more poetical justice, that allows the characters to assert
+themselves for what they really are; the son of Lambi &quot;filthy still,&quot;
+and Flosi the Burner not less true in temper than Njal himself.</p>
+
+<p><i>Nj&#225;la</i> and <i>Laxd&#230;la</i> are examples of two different ways in which
+inconvenient or distracting particulars of history or tradition might
+be reduced to serve the ends of imagination and the heroic design.
+<i>Nj&#225;la</i> keeps up, more or less, throughout, a continuous history of a
+number of people of importance, but always with a regard for the
+principal plot of the story. In <i>Laxd&#230;la</i> there is, on the other hand,
+a gradual approach to the tragedy of Kjartan, Bolli, and Gudrun; an
+historical prologue of the founding of Laxdale, and the lives of
+Kjartan's father and grandfather, before the chief part of the story
+begins. In <i>Nj&#225;la</i> the main story opens as soon as Njal appears; of
+prologue there is little more than is needed to prepare for the
+mischief of Hallgerda, who is the cause of the strain between the two
+houses of Lithend and Bergthorsknoll, and thereby the touchstone of
+the generosity of Njal. In <i>Laxd&#230;la</i>, although the prologue is not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>
+irrelevant, there is a long delay before the principal personages are
+brought together. There is no mistake about the story when once it
+begins, and no question about the unity of the interest; Gudrun and
+Fate may divide it between them, if it be divisible. It is purely the
+stronger quality of this part of the book, in comparison with the
+earlier, that saves <i>Laxd&#230;la</i> from the defects of its construction; by
+the energy of the story of Kjartan, the early story of Laxdale is
+thrown back and left behind as a mere prelude, in spite of its length.</p>
+
+<p>The story of Egil Skallagrimsson, the longest of the biographical
+Sagas, shows exactly the opposite proportions to those of <i>Laxd&#230;la</i>.
+The life of Egil is prefaced by the history of his grandfather,
+father, and uncle, Kveldulf, Skallagrim (Grim the Bald), and Thorolf.
+Unhappily for the general effect of the book, the life of Egil is told
+with less strength and coherence than the fate of his uncle. The most
+commanding and most tragic part of <i>Egla</i> is that which represents
+Skallagrim and Thorolf in their relations to the tyranny of Harald the
+king; how Thorolf's loyalty was ill paid, and how Skallagrim his
+brother went in defiance to speak to King Harald. This, though it is
+only a prelude to the story of Egil, is one of the finest imaginative
+passages in the whole literature. The Saga has here been able to
+express, in a dramatic and imaginative form, that conflict of
+principles between the new monarchy and the old liberty which led to
+the Icelandic migration. The whole political situation, it might be
+said the whole early history of Iceland and Norway, is here summed up
+and personified in the conflict of will between the three characters.
+Thorolf, Harald the king, and Skallagrim play the drama of the
+Norwegian monarchy, and the founding of the Icelandic Commonwealth.
+After this compact and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> splendid piece of work the adventures of Egil
+Skallagrimsson appear rather ineffectual and erratic, in spite of some
+brilliant episodes.</p>
+
+<p>What was an author to do when his hero died in his bed, or survived
+all his feuds and enmities? or when a feud could not be wound up in
+one generation?</p>
+
+<p><i>V&#225;pnfir&#240;inga Saga</i> gives the history of two generations of feud, with
+a reconciliation at the end, thus obtaining a rounded unity, though at
+some cost of the personal interest in its transference from fathers to
+sons.</p>
+
+<p><i>V&#237;ga-Gl&#250;ms Saga</i> is a story which, with the best intentions in the
+world, could not attain to tragedy like that of Gisli or of Grettir,
+because every one knew that Glum was a threatened man who lived long,
+and got through without any deadly injury. Glum is well enough fitted
+for the part of a tragic hero. He has the slow growth, the unpromising
+youth, the silence and the dangerous laughter, such as are recorded in
+the lives of other notable personages in heroic literature:&#8212;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Glum turned homeward; and a fit of laughing came on him. It
+took him in this way, that his face grew pale, and there ran
+tears from his eyes like hailstones: it was often so with
+him afterwards, when bloodshed was in his mind.</p></div>
+
+<p>But although there are several feuds in the story of Glum or several
+incidents in a feud, somehow there is no tragedy. Glum dies quietly,
+aged and sightless. There is a thread of romantic destiny in his
+story; he keeps his good luck till he parts with the gifts of his
+grandfather Vigfus&#8212;the cloak, the spear, and the sword that Vigfus
+had given him in Norway. The prayer for Glum's discomfiture, which one
+of his early adversaries had offered to Frey, then takes effect, when
+the protecting luck has been given<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> away. The fall of Glum is,
+however, nothing incurable; the change in his fortune is merely that
+he has to give up the land which he had extorted from his adversary
+long before, and that he ceases to be the greatest man in Eyjafirth,
+though continuing to be a man of importance still. His honour and his
+family are not hard hit, after all.</p>
+
+<p>The history of Glum, with its biographical unity, its interest of
+character, and its want of tragedy, is a form of story midway between
+the closer knit texture of <i>G&#237;sla Saga</i> and the laxity of construction
+in the stories without a hero, or with more than one, such as
+<i>Lj&#243;svetninga</i> or <i>Vatnsd&#230;la</i>. It is a biography with no strong crisis
+in it; it might have been extended indefinitely. And, in fact, the
+existing form of the story looks as if it were rather carelessly put
+together, or perhaps abridged from a fuller version. The story in
+<i>Reykd&#230;la</i> of Viga Skuta, Glum's son-in-law and enemy, contains a
+better and fuller account of their dealings than <i>Gl&#250;ma</i>, without any
+discrepancy, though the <i>Reykd&#230;la</i> version alludes to divergencies of
+tradition in certain points. The curious thing is that the <i>Reykd&#230;la</i>
+version supplies information about Glum's character which supplements
+what is told more baldly in his own Saga. Both accounts agree about
+Glum's good nature, which is practised on by Skuta. Glum is constant
+and trustworthy whenever he is appealed to for help. The <i>Reykd&#230;la</i>
+version gives a pretty confirmation of this view of Glum's character
+(c. 24), where Glum protects the old Gaberlunzie man, with the result
+that the old man goes and praises his kindness, and so lets his
+enemies know of his movements, and spoils his game for that time. This
+episode is related to <i>Gl&#250;ma</i>, as the foster-brother episode of
+Grettir (c. 51), quoted above, is related to <i>F&#243;stbr&#230;&#240;ra Saga</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If <i>Gl&#250;ma</i> is interesting and even fairly compact, in spite of its
+want of any great dramatic moment, on the other hand the tragic ending
+is not always enough to save a story from dissipation of interest. In
+the story of Glum's antagonist, Viga Skuta, in the second part of
+<i>Reykd&#230;la Saga</i>, there is no proportion or composition; his adventures
+follow one upon the other, without development, a series of hazards
+and escapes, till he is brought down at last. In the earlier part of
+the same Saga (the story of Vemund, Skuta's cousin, and Askel, Skuta's
+father) there is more continuity in the chronicle of wrongs and
+revenges, and, if this story be taken by itself, more form and
+definite design. The two rivals are well marked out and opposed to one
+another, while the mischief-making Vemund is well contrasted with his
+uncle Askel, the just man and the peacemaker, who at the end is killed
+in one of his nephew's feuds, in the fight by the frozen river from
+which Vemund escapes, while his enemy is drowned and his best friend
+gets a death wound.</p>
+
+<p>There are two Sagas in which a biographical theme is treated in such a
+way that the story produces one single impressive and tragical effect,
+leaving the mind with a sense of definite and necessary movement
+towards a tragic conclusion,&#8212;the story of Grettir the Strong, and the
+story of Gisli the Outlaw. These stories have analogies to one
+another, though they are not cast in quite the same manner.</p>
+
+<p>In the life of Grettir there are many detached episodes, giving room
+for theories of adulteration such as are only too inevitable and
+certain in regard to the imbecile continuation of the story after
+Grettir's death and his brother's vengeance. The episodes in the main
+story are, however, not to be dismissed quite so easily as the
+unnecessary romance of the Lady Spes (<i>Grettis Saga</i>, cc. 90-95).
+While many of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> episodes do little to advance the story, and some
+of them seem to have been borrowed from other Sagas without sufficient
+reason (cc. 25-27, from the <i>Foster-brothers</i>), most of them serve to
+accentuate the character of Grettir, or to deepen the sense of the
+mystery surrounding his life.</p>
+
+<p>The tragedy of Grettir is one of those which depend on Accident,
+interpreted by the author as Fate. The hero is a doomed man, like
+Gisli, who sees things clearly coming on, but is unable to get out of
+their way. In both <i>Gisli</i> and <i>Grettir</i> there is an accompaniment of
+mystery and fantasy&#8212;for Gisli in the songs of the dream woman, for
+Grettir in various touches unlike the common prose of the Sagas. The
+hopelessness of his ill fortune is brought out in a sober way in his
+dealings with the chiefs who are unable to protect him, and in the
+cheerless courage of his relations with the foster-brothers, when the
+three are all together in the house of Thorgils Arason. It is
+illustrated in a quite different and more fantastic way in the scenes
+of his wanderings among the mountains, in the mysterious quiet of
+Thorisdal, in his alliance with strange deliverers, outside of the
+common world and its society, in the curse of Glam under the
+moonlight. This last is one of the few scenes in the Sagas, though not
+the only one, when the effect depends on something more than the
+persons engaged in it. The moon with the clouds driving over counts
+for more than a mere indication of time or weather; it is essential to
+the story, and lends itself to the malignity of the adversary in
+casting the spell of fear upon Grettir's mind. The solitude of
+Drangey, in the concluding chapters of <i>Grettis Saga</i>, the cliffs, the
+sea and the storms are all much less exceptional; they are necessary
+parts of the action, more closely and organically<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> related to the
+destiny of the hero. There, in the final scenes, although there is
+witchcraft practised against Grettir, it is not that, but the common
+and natural qualities of the foolishness of the thrall and the heroism
+of Grettir and his young brother on which the story turns. These are
+the humanities of Drangey, a strong contrast, in the art of narrative,
+to the moonlight spell of Glam. The notable thing is that the romantic
+and fantastic passages in Grettir are not obscurations of the tragedy,
+not irrelevant, but rather an expression by the way, and in an
+exceptional mood, of the author's own view of the story and his
+conviction that it is all one coherent piece. This certainly is the
+effect of the romantic interludes in <i>Gisli</i>, which is perhaps the
+most tragic of all the Sagas, or at any rate the most self-conscious
+of its tragic aim. In the story of Gisli there is an introduction and
+preparation, but there is no very great expense of historical
+preliminaries. The discrepancies here between the two extant
+redactions of the Saga seem to show that introductory chapters of this
+sort were regarded as fair openings for invention and decoration by
+editors, who had wits enough to leave the essential part of the story
+very much to itself. Here, when once the action has begun, it goes on
+to the end without a fault. The chief characters are presented at the
+beginning; Gisli and Thorkell his brother; Thorgrim the Priest and
+Vestein, their two brothers-in-law. A speech foretelling their
+disunion is reported to Gisli, and leads him to propose the oath of
+fellowship between the four; which proposal, meant to avert the omen,
+brings about its fulfilment. And so the story goes on logically and
+inevitably to the death of Gisli, who slew Thorgrim, and the
+passionate agony of Thordis, Thorgrim's wife and Gisli's sister.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>Hrafnkels Saga</i> is a tragic idyll, complete and rounded. It is
+different in its design from <i>Nj&#225;la</i> or <i>Laxd&#230;la</i>, from the stories of
+Grettir and Gisli. It is a short story, well concentrated. For mere
+symmetry of design it might compete with any of the greater Icelandic
+works, not to speak of any modern fiction.</p>
+
+<p>Hrafnkel, the proud man, did a cruel thing &quot;for his oath's sake&quot;;
+killed his shepherd Einar for riding on Freyfaxi, the horse that
+belonged to Frey the god, and to Hrafnkel his priest. To the father of
+Einar he made offers of compensation which were not accepted. Then the
+story, with much admirable detail (especially in the scenes at the
+Althing), goes on to show how Hrafnkel's pride was humbled by Einar's
+cousin. All through, however, Hrafnkel is represented as guilty of
+tragic terror, not of wickedness; he is punished more than is due, and
+in the end the balance is redressed, and his arrogant conqueror is
+made to accept Hrafnkel's terms. It is a story clearly and
+symmetrically composed; it would be too neat, indeed, if it were not
+that it still leaves some accounts outstanding at the end: the
+original error is wasteful, and the life of an innocent man is
+sacrificed in the clearing of scores between Hrafnkel and his
+adversary.</p>
+
+<p>The theory of a conglomerate epic may be applied to the Icelandic
+Sagas with some effect. It is plain on the face of them that they
+contain short stories from tradition which may correspond to the short
+lays of the epic theory, which do in fact resemble in many things
+certain of the lays of the &quot;Elder Edda.&quot; Many of the Sagas, like
+<i>Eyrbyggja</i>, <i>Vatnsd&#230;la</i>, <i>Svarfd&#230;la</i>, are ill compacted, and easily
+broken up into separate short passages. On the other hand, these
+broken and variegated Sagas are wanting in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> dignity and impressiveness
+compared with some others, while those others have attained their
+dignity, not by choosing their episodic chapters merely, but by
+forcing their own original and commanding thought upon all their
+matter. This is the case, whether the form be that of the
+comprehensive, large, secure, and elaborate <i>Nj&#225;la</i>; of <i>Laxd&#230;la</i>,
+with its dilatory introduction changing to the eagerness and quickness
+of the story of Gudrun; of <i>Grettir</i> and <i>Gisli</i>, giving shape in
+their several ways to the traditional accumulation of a hero's
+adventures; or, not less remarkable, the precision of <i>Hrafnkels Saga</i>
+and <i>Bandamanna</i>,<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a> which appear to have discovered and fixed for
+themselves the canons of good imaginative narrative in short compass,
+and to have freed themselves, in a more summary way than <i>Nj&#225;la</i>, from
+the encumbrances of traditional history, and the distracting interests
+of the antiquarian and the genealogist. These two stories, with that
+of Howard of Icefirth<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a> and some others, might perhaps be taken as
+corresponding in Icelandic prose to the short epic in verse, such as
+the <i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i>. They show, at any rate, that the difficulties of
+reluctant subject-matter and of the manifold deliverances of tradition
+were not able, in all cases, to get the better of that sense of form
+which was revealed in the older poetic designs.</p>
+
+<p>In their temper also, and in the quality of their heroic ideal, the
+Sagas are the inheritors of the older heroic poetry.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="III.III"></a>III</h3>
+
+<h3>THE HEROIC IDEAL</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the material conditions of Icelandic life in the &quot;Saga Age&quot; there
+was all the stuff that was required for heroic narrative. This was
+recognised by the story-tellers, and they made the most of it. It must
+be admitted that there is some monotony in the circumstances, but it
+may be contended that this is of no account in comparison with the
+results that are produced in the best Sagas out of trivial occasions.
+&quot;Greatly to find quarrel in a straw&quot; is the rule of their conduct. The
+tempers of the men are easily stirred; they have a general name<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a>
+for the trial of a man's patience, applied to anything that puts a
+strain on him, or encroaches on his honour. The trial may come from
+anything&#8212;horses, sheep, hay, women, merchandise. From these follow
+any number of secondary or retaliatory insults, trespasses, and
+manslaughters. Anything almost is enough to set the play going. What
+the matter in dispute may be, is almost indifferent to the author of
+the story. Its value depends on the persons; it is what they choose to
+make it.</p>
+
+<p>The Sagas differ from all other &quot;heroic&quot; literatures in the larger
+proportion that they give to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> meannesses of reality. Their
+historical character, and their attempts to preserve an accurate
+memory of the past, though often freely modified by imagination, yet
+oblige them to include a number of things, gross, common, and
+barbarous, because they are part of the story. The Sagas differ one
+from another in this respect. The characters are not all raised to the
+height of Gunnar, Njal, Skarphedinn, Flosi, Bolli, Kjartan, Gisli. In
+many of the Sagas, and in many scenes, the characters are dull and
+ungainly. At the same time their perversity, the naughtiness, for
+example, of Vemund in <i>Reykd&#230;la</i>, or of Thorolf the crank old man in
+<i>Eyrbyggja</i>, belongs to the same world as the lives of the more heroic
+personages. The Sagas take an interest in misconduct, when there is
+nothing better to be had, and the heroic age is frequently represented
+by them rather according to the rules of modern unheroic story-telling
+than of Bossu <i>on the Epic Poem</i>. The inequitable persons
+(<i>&#250;jafna&#240;armenn</i>) in the Sagas are not all of them as lordly as
+Agamemnon. For many readers this is an advantage; if the Sagas are
+thereby made inferior to Homer, they are all the closer to modern
+stories of &quot;common life.&quot; The people of Iceland seem always to have
+been &quot;at the auld work of the marches again,&quot; like Dandie Dinmont and
+Jock o' Dawstoncleugh, and many of their grievances and wrongs might
+with little change have been turned into subjects for Crabbe or Mr.
+Hardy. It requires no great stretch of fancy to see Crabbe at work on
+the story of Thorolf B&#230;gifot and his neighbour in <i>Eyrbyggja</i>; the old
+Thorolf, &quot;curst with age,&quot; driven frantic by his homely neighbour's
+greater skill in the weather, and taking it out in a vicious trespass
+on his neighbour's hay; the neighbour's recourse to Thorolf's more
+considerate son Arnkell; Arnkell's payment of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> the damage, and summary
+method of putting accounts square again by seizure of his father's
+oxen; with the consequences of all this, which perhaps are somewhat
+too violent to be translated literally into the modern language of
+Suffolk or Wessex. Episodes of this type are common in the Sagas, and
+it is to them in a great measure that the Sagas owe their distinction
+from the common run of medieval narrative. But no appreciation of this
+&quot;common life&quot; in the Sagas can be just, if it ignores the essentially
+&quot;heroic&quot; nature of the moral laws under which the Icelandic narratives
+are conducted. Whether with good results or bad, is another question;
+but there can be no doubt that the Sagas were composed under the
+direction of an heroic ideal, identical in most respects with that of
+the older heroic poetry. This ideal view is revealed in different
+ways, as the Sagas have different ways of bringing their characters
+before the audience. In the best passages, of course, which are the
+most dramatic, the presuppositions and private opinions of the author
+are not immediately disclosed in the speeches of the characters. But
+the Sagas are not without their chorus; the general judgment of people
+about their leaders is often expressed; and although the action of the
+Sagas is generally sufficient to make its own impression and explain
+itself, the author's reading of his characters is frequently added.
+From the action and the commentary together, the heroic ideal comes
+out clearly, and it is plain that its effect on the Sagas was not
+merely an implicit and unconscious influence. It had risen into the
+consciousness of the authors of the Sagas; it was not far from
+definite expression in abstract terms. In this lay the danger. An
+ideal, defined or described in set terms, is an ideal without any
+responsibility and without any privilege. It may be picked up and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>
+traded on by any fool or hypocrite. Undefined and undivulged, it
+belongs only to those who have some original strength of imagination
+or will, and with them it cannot go wrong. But a definite ideal, and
+the terms of its definition, may belong to any one and be turned to
+any use. So the ideal of Petrarch was formulated and abused by the
+Petrarchists. The formula of Amadis of Gaul is derived from
+generations of older unformulated heroes, and implies the exhaustion
+of the heroic strain, in that line of descent. The Sagas have not come
+as far as that, but the latter days, that have seen Amadis, and the
+mechanical repetitions of Amadis, may find in the Sagas some
+resemblances and anticipations of the formal hero, though not yet
+enough to be dangerous.</p>
+
+<p>In all sound heroic literature there are passages that bring up the
+shadow of the sceptic,&#8212;passages of noble sentiment, whose phrases are
+capable of being imitated, whose ideas may make the fortune of
+imitators and pretenders. In the Teutonic epic poetry, as in Homer,
+there are many noble speeches of this sort, speeches of lofty
+rhetoric, about which the spirit of depreciation prompts a suspicion
+that perhaps they may be less weighty and more conventional than we
+think. False heroics are easy, and unhappily they have borrowed so
+much of the true, that the truth itself is sometimes put out of
+countenance by the likeness.</p>
+
+<p>In the English and the Icelandic heroic poetry there is some ground
+for thinking that the process of decline and the evolution of the
+false heroic went to some length before it was stopped. The older
+poems laid emphasis on certain qualities, and made them an example and
+an edification. &quot;So ought a man to do,&quot; is a phrase common to the
+English and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> Northern schools of epic. The point of honour comes
+to be only too well understood&#8212;too well, that is, for the work of the
+imagination. Possibly the latter part of <i>Beowulf</i> is more abstract
+than it ought to be; at any rate, there are many of the secondary
+Anglo-Saxon poems which, like the old Saxon <i>H&#234;liand</i>, show an
+excessive use of the poetic formulas of courage and loyalty. The
+Icelandic poetry had also its spurious heroic phrases, by which
+something is taken away from the force of their more authentic
+originals.</p>
+
+<p>In the Sagas, as in the <i>Iliad</i>, in the <i>Song of Maldon</i>, in the
+<i>Death of Ermanaric</i>, there is a rhetorical element by which the ideas
+of absolute courage are expressed. Unhappily it is not always easy to
+be sure whether the phrases are of the first or the second growth; in
+most cases, the better opinion perhaps will be that they belong to a
+time not wholly unsophisticated, yet not in the stage of secondary and
+abstract heroic romance. The rhetoric of the Sagas, like the rhetoric
+of the &quot;Poetic Edda,&quot; was taken too seriously and too greedily by the
+first modern discoverers of the old Northern literature. It is not,
+any more than the rhetoric of Homer, the immediate expression of the
+real life of an heroic age; for the good reason that it is literature,
+and literature just on the autumnal verge, and plainly capable of
+decay. The best of the Sagas were just in time to escape that touch of
+over-reflexion and self-consciousness which checks the dramatic life
+and turns it into matter of edification or sentiment. The best of them
+also give many indications to show how near they were to
+over-elaboration and refinement.</p>
+
+<p>Kjartan, for example, in <i>Laxd&#230;la</i> is represented in a way that
+sometimes brings him dangerously near the ideal hero. The story (like
+many of the other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> Sagas) plays about between the two extremes, of
+strong imagination applied dramatically to the subject-matter, on the
+one hand, and abstract ethical reflexion on the other. In the scene of
+Kjartan's encounter with Olaf Tryggvason in Norway<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a> there is a
+typical example of the two kinds of operation. The scene and the
+dialogue are fully adequate to the author's intention, about which
+there can be no mistake. What he wishes to express is there expressed,
+in the most lively way, with the least possible encumbrance of
+explanation or chorus: the pride of Kjartan, his respect for his
+unknown antagonist in the swimming-match, his anxiety to keep clear of
+any submission to the king, with the king's reciprocal sense of the
+Icelander's magnanimity; no stroke in all this is other than right.
+While also it may be perceived that the author has brought into his
+story an ingredient of rhetoric. In this place it has its use and its
+effect; and, nevertheless, it is recognisable as the dangerous essence
+of all that is most different from sound narrative or drama.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Then said the king, &quot;It is well seen that Kjartan is used to
+put more trust in his own might than in the help of Thor and
+Odin.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<p>This rings as true as the noble echo of it in the modern version of
+the <i>Lovers of Gudrun</i>:&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+If neither Christ nor Odin help, why then<br />
+Still at the worst we are the sons of men.<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>No amount of hacking work can take away the eloquence of this
+phrasing. Yet it is beyond question, that these phrases, like that
+speech of Sarpedon which has been borrowed by many a hero since, are
+of a different stuff from pure drama, or any pure<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> imaginative work.
+By taking thought, they may be more nearly imitated than is possible
+in the case of any strong dramatic scene. The words of the king about
+Kjartan are like the words that are used to Earl Hakon, by Sigmund of
+the Faroes;<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a> they are on their way to become, or they have already
+become, an ethical commonplace. In the place where they are used, in
+the debate between Kjartan and King Olaf, they have received the
+strong life of the individual persons between whom they pass, just as
+an actor may give life and character to any words that are put in his
+mouth. Yet elsewhere the phrase may occur as a commonplace
+formula&#8212;<i>hann tr&#250;&#240;i &#225; m&#225;tt sinn ok megin</i> (he trusted in his own
+might and main)&#8212;applied generally to those Northern pagans who were
+known to be <i>securi adversus Deos</i> at the time of the first preaching
+of Christendom in the North.</p>
+
+<p>All is well, however, so long as this heroic ideal is kept in its
+right relation, as one element in a complex work, not permitted to
+walk about by itself as a personage. This right subordination is
+observed in the Sagas, whereby both the heroic characters are kept out
+of extravagance (for neither Gunnar, Kari, nor Kjartan is an abstract
+creature), and the less noble or the more complex characters are
+rightly estimated. The Sagas, which in many things are ironical or
+reticent, do not conceal their standard of measurement or value, in
+relation to which characters and actions are to be appraised. They do
+not, on the other hand, allow this ideal to usurp upon the rights of
+individual characters. They are imaginative, dealing in actions and
+characters; they are not ethical or sentimental treatises, or mirrors
+of chivalry.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="III.IV"></a>IV</h3>
+
+<h3>TRAGIC IMAGINATION</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> their definite tragical situations and problems, the Sagas are akin
+to the older poetry of the Teutonic race. The tragical cases of the
+earlier heroic age are found repeated, with variations, in the Sagas.
+Some of the chief of these resemblances have been found and discussed
+by the editors of <i>Corpus Poeticum Boreale</i>. Also in many places where
+there is no need to look for any close resemblance in detail, there is
+to be seen the same mode of comprehending the tragical stress and
+contradiction as is manifested in the remains of the poetry. As in the
+older Germanic stories, so in the Sagas, the plot is often more than
+mere contest or adventure. As in <i>Finnesburh</i> and <i>Waldere</i>, so in
+<i>G&#237;sla Saga</i> and <i>Nj&#225;la</i> and many other Icelandic stories, the action
+turns upon a debate between opposite motives of loyalty, friendship,
+kindred. Gisli kills his sister's husband; it is his sister who begins
+the pursuit of Gisli, his sister who, after Gisli's death, tries to
+avenge him. Njal has to stand by his sons, who have killed his friend.
+Gunnlaug and Hrafn, Kjartan and Bolli, are friends estranged by &quot;Fate
+and their own transgression,&quot; like Walter and Hagena.</p>
+
+<p>The Sagas, being prose and having an historical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> tradition to take
+care of, are unable to reach the same intensity of passion as some of
+the heroic poems, the poems of <i>Helgi</i> and of <i>Sigurd</i>. They are all
+the more epic, perhaps, on that account; more equable in their course,
+with this compensation for their quieter manner, that they have more
+room and more variety than the passionate heroic poems. These
+histories have also, as a rule, to do without the fantasies of such
+poetry as <i>Hervor and Angantyr</i>, or <i>Helgi and Sigrun</i>. The vision of
+the Queens of the Air, the return of Helgi from the dead, the
+chantings of Hervor &quot;between the worlds,&quot; are too much for the plain
+texture of the Sagas. Though, as has already been seen in <i>Grettir</i>
+and <i>Gisli</i>, this element of fantastic beauty is not wholly absent;
+the less substantial graces of mythical romance, &quot;fainter and
+flightier&quot; than those of epic, are sometimes to be found even in the
+historical prose; the historical tragedies have their accompaniment of
+mystery. More particularly, the story of the <i>Death of Thidrandi whom
+the Goddesses slew</i>, is a prose counterpart to the poetry of Sigrun
+and Hervor.<a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a></p>
+
+<p>There are many other incidents in the Sagas which have the look of
+romance about them. But of a number of these the distinction holds
+good that has been already put forward in the case of <i>Beowulf</i>: they
+are not such wonders as lie outside the bounds of common experience,
+according to the estimate of those for whom the stories were told.
+Besides some wonderful passages that still retain the visionary and
+fantastic charm of myth and mythical romance, there are others in
+which the wonders are more gross and nearer to common life. Such is
+the story of the hauntings at Froda, in <i>Eyrbyggja</i>; the drowned man<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>
+and his companions coming home night after night and sitting in their
+wet clothes till daybreak; such is the ghastly story of the funeral of
+V&#237;ga-Styrr in <i>Hei&#240;arv&#237;ga Saga</i>. Things of that sort are no exceptions
+to common experience, according to the Icelandic judgment, and do not
+stand out from the history as something different in kind; they do not
+belong to the same order as the dream-poetry of Gisli or the vision of
+Thidrandi.</p>
+
+<p>The self-denial of the Icelandic authors in regard to myth and pure
+romance has secured for them, in exchange, everything that is
+essential to strong dramatic stories, independent of mythological or
+romantic attractions.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the Sagas are a reduction of heroic fable to the temper and
+conditions of modern prose. <i>Laxd&#230;la</i> is an heroic epic, rewritten as
+a prose history under the conditions of actual life, and without the
+help of any supernatural &quot;machinery.&quot; It is a modern prose version of
+the Niblung tragedy, with the personages chosen from the life of
+Iceland in the heroic age, and from the Icelandic family traditions.
+It is not the only work that has reduced the Niblung story to terms of
+matter of fact. The story of Sigurd and Brynhild has been presented as
+a drama by Ibsen in his <i>Warriors in Helgeland</i>, with the names
+changed, with new circumstances, and with nothing remaining of the
+mythical and legendary lights that play about the fortunes of Sigurd
+in the Northern poems. The play relies on the characters, without the
+mysteries of Odin and the Valkyria. An experiment of the same sort had
+been made long before. In <i>Laxd&#230;la</i>, Kjartan stands for Sigurd: Gudrun
+daughter of Osvifr, wife of Bolli, is in the place of Brynhild wife of
+Gunnar, driving her husband to avenge her on her old lover. That the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>
+authors of the Sagas were conscious at least in some cases of their
+relation to the poems is proved by affinities in the details of their
+language. In <i>G&#237;sla Saga</i>, Thordis, sister of Gisli, has to endure the
+same sorrow as the wife of Sigurd in the poems; her husband, like
+Sigurd, is killed by her brother. One of the verses put in the mouth
+of Gisli in the story contrasts her with Gudrun, daughter of Giuki,
+who killed her husband (Attila) to avenge her brothers; whereas
+Thordis was waking up the pursuers of her brother Gisli to avenge her
+husband. With this verse in his head, it is impossible that the writer
+of the Saga can have overlooked the resemblance which is no less
+striking than the contrast between the two cases.</p>
+
+<p>The relation of the Sagas to the older poetry may be expressed in this
+way, perhaps, that they are the last stage in a progress from the
+earliest mythical imagination, and the earliest dirges and encomiums
+of the great men of a tribe, to a consistent and orderly form of
+narrative literature, attained by the direction of a critical faculty
+which kept out absurdities, without impairing the dramatic energy of
+the story. The Sagas are the great victory of the Humanities in the
+North, at the end of a long process of education. The Northern
+nations, like others, had to come to an understanding with themselves
+about their inherited myths, their traditional literary forms. One age
+after another helped in different ways to modify their beliefs, to
+change their literary taste. Practically, they had to find out what
+they were to think of the gods; poetically, what they were to put into
+their songs and stories. With problems of this sort, when a beginning
+has once been made, anything is possible, and there is no one kind of
+success. Every nation that has ever come to anything has had to go to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>
+school in this way. None has ever been successful right through;
+while, on the other hand, success does not mean the attainment of any
+definite end. There is a success for every stage in the progress, and
+one nation or literature differs from another, not by reason of an
+ultimate victory or defeat, but in the number of prizes taken by the
+way.</p>
+
+<p>As far as can be made out, the people of the Northern tongue got the
+better of the Western Teutons, in making far more than they out of the
+store of primeval fancies about the gods and the worlds, and in giving
+to their heroic poems both an intenser passion of expression and a
+more mysterious grace and charm. The Western Teutons in their heroic
+poetry seem, on the other hand, to have been steadier and less
+flighty. They took earlier to the line of reasonable and dignified
+narrative, reducing the lyrical element, perhaps increasing the gnomic
+or reflective proportions of their work. So they succeeded in their
+own way, with whatever success belongs to <i>Beowulf</i>, <i>Waldere</i>,
+<i>Byrhtnoth</i>, not to speak of the new essays they made with themes
+taken from the Church, in the poems of <i>Andreas</i>, <i>Judith</i>, and all
+the rest. Meanwhile the Northerners were having their own difficulties
+and getting over them, or out of them. They knew far more about the
+gods, and made poems about them. They had no patience, so that they
+could not dilute and expand their stories in the Western way. They saw
+no good in the leisurely methods; they must have everything emphatic,
+everything full of poetical meaning; hence no large poetry, but a
+number of short poems with no slackness in them. With these they had
+good reason to be content, as a good day's work in their day. But
+whatever advantage the fiery Northern poems may have over the slower
+verse of the Anglo-Saxons, they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> do not correspond to the same
+intellectual wants, and they leave out something which seems to have
+been attained in the Western poetry. The North had still to find out
+what could be done with simpler materials, and without the magical
+light of the companions of Sigrun. The Icelandic prose histories are
+the solution of this new problem, a problem which the English had
+already tried and solved in their own manner in the quieter passages
+of their epic poetry, and, above all, in the severity of the poem of
+<i>Maldon</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The Sagas are partly indebted to a spirit of negative criticism and
+restraint; a tendency not purely literary, corresponding, at any rate,
+to a similar tendency in practical life. The energy, the passion, the
+lamentation of the Northern poetry, the love of all the wonders of
+mythology, went along with practical and intellectual clearness of
+vision in matters that required cool judgment. The ironical correction
+of sentiment, the tone of the <i>advocatus diaboli</i>, is habitual with
+many of the Icelandic writers, and many of their heroes. &quot;To see
+things as they really are,&quot; so that no incantation could transform
+them, was one of the gifts of an Icelandic hero,<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a> and appears to
+have been shared by his countrymen when they set themselves to compose
+the Sagas.</p>
+
+<p>The tone of the Sagas is generally kept as near as may be to that of
+the recital of true history. Nothing is allowed any preponderance over
+the story and the speeches in it. It is the kind of story furthest
+removed from the common pathetic fallacies of the Middle Ages. The
+rationalist mind has cleared away all the sentimental and most of the
+superstitious encumbrances and hindrances of strong narrative.</p>
+
+<p>The history of the early Northern rationalism and its practical
+results is part of the general history of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> religion and politics. In
+some respects it may have been premature; in many cases it seems (as
+might be expected) to have gone along with hardness and sterility of
+mind, and to have left an inheritance of vacuity behind it. The
+curious and elaborate hardness of the Icelandic Court poetry may
+possibly be a sign of this same temper; in another way, the prevalent
+coolness of Northern piety, even before the Reformation, is scarcely
+to be dissociated from the coolness of the last days of heathendom.
+The spirited acuteness of Snorri the Priest and his contemporaries was
+succeeded by a moderate and unenthusiastic fashion of religion, for
+the most part equally remote from the extravagances and the glories of
+the medieval Church. But with these things the Sagas have little to
+do; where they are in relation to this common rationalist habit of
+mind, it is all to their good. The Sagas are not injured by any
+scepticism or coolness in the minds of their authors. The positive
+habit of mind in the Icelanders is enough to secure them against a
+good deal of the conventional dulness of the Middle Ages. It made them
+dissatisfied with anything that seemed wanting in vividness or
+immediate force; it led them to select, in their histories, such
+things as were interesting in themselves, and to present them
+definitely, without any drawling commonplaces, or any makeshift
+rhetorical substitutes for accurate vision and clear record. It did
+not hinder, but it directed and concentrated the imagination. The
+self-repression in the Sagas is bracing. It gives greater clearness,
+greater resonance; it does not cut out or renounce anything that is
+really worth keeping.</p>
+
+<p>If not the greatest charm of the Sagas, at any rate that which is
+perhaps most generally appreciated by modern readers is their economy
+of phrasing in the critical passages, the brevity with which the
+incidents<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> and speeches are conveyed, the restriction of all
+commentary to the least available compass. Single phrases in the great
+scenes of the Sagas are full-charged with meaning to a degree hardly
+surpassed in any literature, certainly not in the literatures of
+medieval Europe. Half a dozen words will carry all the force of the
+tragedy of the Sagas, or render all the suspense and terror of their
+adventurous moments, with an effect that is like nothing so much as
+the effect of some of the short repressed phrases of Shakespeare in
+<i>Hamlet</i> or <i>King Lear</i>. The effect is attained not by study of the
+central phrase so much as by the right arrangement and selection of
+the antecedents; that is, by right proportion in the narrative. It is
+in this way that the killing of Gunnar's dog, in the attack on
+Lithend, is made the occasion for one of the great strokes of
+narrative. The words of Gunnar, when he is roused by the dog's
+howl&#8212;&quot;Sore art thou handled, Sam, my fosterling, and maybe it is
+meant that there is not to be long between thy death and mine!&quot;&#8212;are a
+perfect dramatic indication of everything the author wishes to
+express&#8212;the coolness of Gunnar, and his contempt for his enemies, as
+well as his pity for his dog. They set everything in tune for the
+story of Gunnar's death which follows. It is in this way that the
+adventures of the Sagas are raised above the common form of mere
+reported &quot;fightings and flockings,&quot; the common tedious story of raids
+and reprisals. This is one of the kinds of drama to be found in the
+Sagas, and not exclusively in the best of them. One of the conditions
+of this manner of composition and this device of phrasing is that the
+author shall be able to keep himself out of the story, and let things
+make their own impression. This is the result of the Icelandic habit
+of restraint. The intellectual coolness of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> Sagas is a pride that
+keeps them from pathetic effusions; it does not impede the dramatic
+passion, it merely gives a lesson to the sensibilities and sympathies,
+to keep them out of the way when they are not wanted.</p>
+
+<p>This is one notable difference of temper and rhetoric between the
+Sagas and the old English poems. One of the great beauties of the old
+English poetry is its understanding of the moods of lamentation&#8212;the
+mood of Ossian it might be called, without much error in the name. The
+transience and uncertainty of the world, the memory of past good
+fortune, and of things lost,&#8212;with themes like these the Anglo-Saxon
+poets make some of their finest verse; and while this fashion of
+meditation may seem perhaps to have come too readily, it is not the
+worst poets who fall in with it. In the Icelandic poetry the notes of
+lamentation are not wanting, and it cannot be said that the Northern
+elegies are less sweet or less thrilling in their grief than those of
+England in the kindred forms of verse. It is enough to think of
+<i>Gudrun's Lament</i> in the &quot;Elder Edda,&quot; or of <i>Sonatorrek</i>, Egil
+Skallagrimsson's elegy on the death of his two sons. It was not any
+congenital dulness or want of sense that made the Sagas generally
+averse to elegy. No mere writer of Sagas was made of stronger temper
+than Egil, and none of them need have been ashamed of lamentation
+after Egil had lamented. But they saw that it would not do, that the
+fabric of the Saga was not made for excessive decoration of any kind,
+and least of all for parenthesis of elegy. The English heroic poetry
+is more relenting. <i>Beowulf</i> is invaded by pathos in a way that often
+brings the old English verse very nearly to the tone of the great
+lament for Lancelot at the end of the <i>Morte d'Arthur</i>; which, no
+doubt, is justification<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> enough for any lapse from the pure heroic. In
+the Sagas the sense of all the vanity of human wishes is expressed in
+a different way: the lament is turned into dramatic action; the
+author's sympathy is not shown in direct effusions, but in his
+rendering of the drama.<a name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a> The best instance of this is the story of
+Howard of Icefirth.</p>
+
+<p>Howard's son Olaf, a high-spirited and generous young man, comes under
+the spite of a domineering gentleman, all the more because he does
+some good offices of his own free will for this tyrannical person.
+Olaf is attacked and killed by the bully and his friends; then the
+story goes on to tell of the vengeance of his father and mother. The
+grief of the old man is described as a matter of fact; he was lame and
+feeble, and took to his bed for a long time after his son's death.
+Then he roused himself, and he and his wife went to look for help, and
+finally were able to bring down their enemy. In all this there is no
+reflexion or commentary by the author. The pathos is turned into
+narrative; it is conveyed by means of the form of the story, the
+relation of the incidents to one another. The passion of the old
+people turns into resolute action, and is revealed in the perseverance
+of Bjargey, Olaf's mother, tracking out her enemy and coming to her
+kinsmen to ask for help. She rows her boat round her enemy's ship and
+finds out his plans; then she goes to her brothers' houses, one after
+another, and &quot;borrows&quot; avengers for her son. The repression and irony
+of the Icelandic character are shown in the style of her address to
+her brothers. &quot;I have come to borrow<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> your nets,&quot; she says to one, and
+&quot;I have come to borrow your turf-spade,&quot; to another; all which is
+interpreted aright by the brothers, who see what her meaning is. Then
+she goes home to her husband; and here comes in, not merely irony, but
+an intentional rebuke to sentiment. Her husband is lying helpless and
+moaning, and she asks him whether he has slept. To which he answers in
+a stave of the usual form in the Sagas, the purport of which is that
+he has never known sleep since the death of Olaf his son. &quot;'Verily
+that is a great lie,' says she, 'that thou hast never slept once these
+three years. But now it is high time to be up and play the man, if
+thou wilt have revenge for Olaf thy son; because never in thy days
+will he be avenged, if it be not this day.' And when he heard his
+wife's reproof he sprang out of bed on to the floor, and sang this
+other stave,&quot;&#8212;of which the substance is still lamentation, but
+greatly modified in its effect by the action with which it is
+accompanied. Howard seems to throw off his age and feebleness as time
+goes on, and the height of his passion is marked by a note of his
+cheerfulness and gladness after he has killed his enemy. This is
+different from the method of <i>Beowulf</i>, where the grief of a father
+for his son is rendered in an elegy, with some beauty and some
+irrelevance, as if the charm of melancholy were too much for the
+story-teller.</p>
+
+<p>The hardness of the Sagas is sometimes carried too far for the taste
+of some readers, and there is room for some misgiving that in places
+the Sagas have been affected by the contrary vice from that of
+effusive pathos, namely, by a pretence of courage and endurance. In
+some of the Northern poetry, as in <i>Ragnar's Death-Song</i>,<a name="FNanchor_57_57" id="FNanchor_57_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a> there
+may be detected the same kind of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> insincere and exaggerated heroism as
+in the modern romantic imitations of old Northern sentiment, now
+fortunately less common than in the great days of the Northern
+romantic movement at the beginning of this century. The old Northern
+poetry seems to have become at one stage too self-conscious of the
+literary effect of magnanimity, too quick to seize all the literary
+profit that was to be made out of the conventional Viking. The Viking
+of the modern romantic poets has been the affliction of many in the
+last hundred years; none of his patrons seem to have guessed that he
+had been discovered, and possibly had begun to be a bore, at a time
+when the historical &quot;Viking Age&quot; had scarcely come to its close. There
+is little in the Icelandic Sagas to show any affinity with his forced
+and ostentatious bravery; but it may be suspected that here and there
+the Sagas have made some use of the theatrical Viking, and have thrown
+their lights too strongly on their death scenes. Some of the most
+impressive passages of the Sagas are those in which a man receives a
+death-wound with a quaint remark, and dies forthwith, like Atli in the
+story of Grettir, who was thrust through as he stood at his door, and
+said, &quot;Those broad spears are in fashion now,&quot; as he went down. This
+scene is one of the best of its kind; there is no fault to be found
+with it. But there are possibly too many scenes and speeches of the
+same sort; enough to raise the suspicion that the situation and the
+form of phrase were becoming a conventional device, like some of the
+&quot;machines&quot; in the secondary Sagas, and in the too-much-edited parts of
+the better ones. This suspicion is not one that need be scouted or
+choked off. The worser parts and baser parts of the literature are to
+be detected by any means and all means. It is well in criticism,
+however, to supplement this amputating<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> practice by some regard for
+the valid substances that have no need of it, and in this present case
+to look away from the scenes where there is suspicion of journey work
+and mechanical processes to the masterpieces that set the standard;
+more especially to the story of the burning of Njal, which more than
+any other is full of the peculiar strength and quality of the Sagas.</p>
+
+<p>The beauty of <i>Nj&#225;la</i>, and especially of the chapters about Njal's
+death, is the result of a harmony between two extremes of sentiment,
+each of which by itself was dangerous, and both of which have here
+been brought to terms with each other and with the whole design of the
+work. The ugliness of Skarphedinn's demeanour might have turned out to
+be as excessive as the brutalities of <i>Svarfd&#230;la</i> or <i>Lj&#243;svetninga
+Saga</i>; the gentleness of Njal has some affinities with the gentleness
+of the martyrs. Some few passages have distinctly the homiletic or
+legendary tone about them:&#8212;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Then Flosi and his men made a great pile before each of the
+doors, and then the women-folk who were inside began to weep
+and to wail.</p>
+
+<p>Njal spoke to them, and said: &quot;Keep up your hearts, nor
+utter shrieks, for this is but a passing storm, and it will
+be long before you have another such; and put your faith in
+God, and believe that He is so merciful that He will not let
+us burn both in this world and the next.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Such words of comfort had he for them all, and others still
+more strong (c. 128, Dasent's translation).</p></div>
+
+<p>It is easy to see in what school the style of this was learned, and of
+this other passage, about Njal after his death:&#8212;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Then Hjallti said, &quot;I shall speak what I say with all
+freedom of speech. The body of Bergthora looks as it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> was
+likely she would look, and still fair; but Njal's body and
+visage seem to me so bright that I have never seen any dead
+man's body so bright as this&quot; (c. 131).</p></div>
+
+<p>At the other extreme are the heathenish manners of Skarphedinn, who,
+in the scene at the Althing, uses all the bad language of the old
+&quot;flytings&quot; in the heroic poetry,<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a> who &quot;grins&quot; at the attempts to
+make peace, who might easily, by a little exaggeration and change of
+emphasis, have been turned into one of the types of the false heroic.</p>
+
+<p>Something like this has happened to Egil, in another Saga, through
+want of balance, want of comprehensive imagination in the author. In
+<i>Nj&#225;la</i>, where no element is left to itself, the picture is complete
+and full of variety. The prevailing tone is neither that of the homily
+nor that of the robustious Viking; it is the tone of a narrative that
+has command of itself and its subject, and can play securely with
+everything that comes within its scope.</p>
+
+<p>In the death of Njal the author's imagination has found room for
+everything,&#8212;for the severity and the nobility of the old Northern
+life, for the gentleness of the new religion, for the irony in which
+the temper of Skarphedinn is made to complement and illustrate the
+temper of Njal.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Then Flosi went to the door and called out to Njal, and said
+he would speak with him and Bergthora.</p>
+
+<p>Now Njal does so, and Flosi said: &quot;I will offer thee, master
+Njal, leave to go out, for it is unworthy that thou shouldst
+burn indoors.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I will not go out,&quot; said Njal, &quot;for I am an old man, and
+little fitted to avenge my sons, but I will not live in
+shame.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then Flosi said to Bergthora: &quot;Come thou out, housewife, for
+I will for no sake burn thee indoors.&quot;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>&quot;I was given away to Njal young,&quot; said Bergthora, &quot;and I
+have promised him this, that we should both share the same
+fate.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>After that they both went back into the house.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What counsel shall we now take?&quot; said Bergthora.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We will go to our bed,&quot; says Njal, &quot;and lay us down; I have
+long been eager for rest.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then she said to the boy Thord, Kari's son: &quot;Thee will I
+take out, and thou shalt not burn in here.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Thou hast promised me this, grandmother,&quot; says the boy,
+&quot;that we should never part so long as I wished to be with
+thee; but methinks it is much better to die with thee and
+Njal than to live after you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then she bore the boy to her bed, and Njal spoke to his
+steward and said:&#8212;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now shalt thou see where we lay us down, and how I lay us
+out, for I mean not to stir an inch hence, whether reek or
+burning smart me, and so thou wilt be able to guess where to
+look for our bones.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He said he would do so.</p>
+
+<p>There had been an ox slaughtered, and the hide lay there.
+Njal told the steward to spread the hide over them, and he
+did so.</p>
+
+<p>So there they lay down both of them in their bed, and put
+the boy between them. Then they signed themselves and the
+boy with the cross, and gave over their souls into God's
+hand, and that was the last word that men heard them utter.</p>
+
+<p>Then the steward took the hide and spread it over them, and
+went out afterwards. Kettle of the Mark caught hold of him
+and dragged him out; he asked carefully after his
+father-in-law Njal, but the steward told him the whole
+truth. Then Kettle said:&#8212;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Great grief hath been sent on us, when we have had to share
+such ill-luck together.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Skarphedinn saw how his father laid him down and how he laid
+himself out, and then he said:&#8212;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Our father goes early to bed, and that is what was to be
+looked for, for he is an old man.&quot;</p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The harmonies of <i>Laxd&#230;la</i> are somewhat different from those of the
+history of Njal, but here again the elements of grace and strength, of
+gentleness and terror, are combined in a variety of ways, and in such
+a way as to leave no preponderance to any one exclusively. Sometimes
+the story may seem to fall into the exemplary vein of the &quot;antique
+poet historicall&quot;; sometimes the portrait of Kjartan may look as if it
+were designed, like the portrait of Amadis or Tirant the White, &quot;to
+fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle
+discipline.&quot; Sometimes the story is involved in the ordinary business
+of Icelandic life, and Kjartan and Bolli, the Sigurd and Gunnar of the
+tragedy, are seen engaged in common affairs, such as make the alloy of
+heroic narrative in the <i>Odyssey</i>. The hero is put to the proof in
+this way, and made to adapt himself to various circumstances.
+Sometimes the story touches on the barbarism and cruelty, which were
+part of the reality familiar to the whole of Iceland in the age of the
+Sturlungs, of which there is more in the authentic history of the
+Sturlungs than in the freer and more imaginative story of Kjartan. At
+one time the story uses the broad and fluent form of narrative,
+leaving scene after scene to speak for itself; at other times it
+allows itself to be condensed into a significant phrase. Of these
+emphatic phrases there are two especially, both of them speeches of
+Gudrun, and the one is the complement of the other: the one in the
+tone of irony, Gudrun's comment on the death of Kjartan, a repetition
+of Brynhild's phrase on the death of Sigurd;<a name="FNanchor_59_59" id="FNanchor_59_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a> the other Gudrun's
+confession to her son at the end of the whole matter.</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span></p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Gudrun meets her husband coming back, and says: &quot;A good
+day's work and a notable; I have spun twelve ells of yarn,
+and you have slain Kjartan Olaf's son.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Bolli answers: &quot;That mischance would abide with me, without
+thy speaking of it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Said Gudrun: &quot;I reckon not that among mischances; it seemed
+to me thou hadst greater renown that winter Kjartan was in
+Norway, than when he came back to Iceland and trampled thee
+under foot. But the last is best, that Hrefna will not go
+laughing to bed this night.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then said Bolli in great wrath: &quot;I know not whether she will
+look paler at this news than thou, and I doubt thou mightest
+have taken it no worse if we had been left lying where we
+fought, and Kjartan had come to tell of it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Gudrun saw that Bolli was angry, and said: &quot;Nay, no need of
+words like these; for this work I thank thee; there is an
+earnest in it that thou wilt not thwart me after.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<p>This is one of the crises of the story, in which the meaning of Gudrun
+is brought out in a short passage of dialogue, at the close of a
+section of narrative full of adventure and incident. In all that
+precedes, in the relations of Gudrun to Kjartan before and after her
+marriage with Bolli, as after the marriage of Kjartan and Hrefna, the
+motives are generally left to be inferred from the events and actions.
+Here it was time that Gudrun should speak her mind, or at least the
+half of her mind.</p>
+
+<p>Her speech at the end of her life is equally required, and the two
+speeches are the complement of one another. Bolli her son comes to see
+her and sits with her.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The story tells that one day Bolli came to Helgafell; for
+Gudrun was always glad when he came to see her.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> Bolli sat
+long with his mother, and there was much talk between them.
+At last Bolli said: &quot;Mother, will you tell me one thing? It
+has been in my mind to ask you, who was the man you loved
+best?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Gudrun answers: &quot;Thorkell was a great man and a lordly; and
+no man was goodlier than Bolli, nor of gentler breeding;
+Thord Ingwin's son was the most discreet of them all, a wise
+man in the law. Of Thorvald I make no reckoning.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then says Bolli: &quot;All this is clear, all the condition of
+your husbands as you have told; but it has not yet been told
+whom you loved best. You must not keep it secret from me
+longer.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Gudrun answers: &quot;You put me hard to it, my son; but if I am
+to tell any one, I will rather tell you than another.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Bolli besought her again to tell him. Then said Gudrun: &quot;I
+did the worst to him, the man that I loved the most.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now may we believe,&quot; says Bolli, &quot;that there is no more to
+say.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He said that she had done right in telling him what he
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>Gudrun became an old woman, and it is said that she lost her
+sight. She died at Helgafell, and there she rests.</p></div>
+
+<p>This is one of the passages which it is easy to quote, and also
+dangerous. The confession of Gudrun loses incalculably when detached
+from the whole story, as also her earlier answer fails, by itself, to
+represent the meaning and the art of the Saga. They are the two keys
+that the author has given; neither is of any use by itself, and both
+together are of service only in relation to the whole story and all
+its fabric of incident and situation and changing views of life.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="III.V"></a>V</h3>
+
+<h3>COMEDY</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> Poetical Justice of Tragedy is observed, and rightly observed, in
+many of the Sagas and in the greater plots. Fate and Retribution
+preside over the stories of Njal and his sons, and the <i>Lovers of
+Gudrun</i>. The story of Gisli works itself out in accordance with the
+original forebodings, yet without any illicit process in the logic of
+acts and motives, or any intervention of the mysterious powers who
+accompany the life of Gisli in his dreams. Even in less consistent
+stories the same ideas have a part; the story of Gudmund the Mighty,
+which is a series of separate chapters, is brought to an end in the
+Nemesis for Gudmund's injustice to Thorkell Hake. But the Sagas claim
+exemption from the laws of Tragedy, when poetical Justice threatens to
+become tyrannical. Partly by the nature of their origin, no doubt, and
+their initial dependence on historical recollections of actual
+events,<a name="FNanchor_60_60" id="FNanchor_60_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a> they are driven to include a number of things that might
+disappoint a well-educated gallery of spectators; the drama is not
+always worked out, or it may be that the meaning of a chapter or
+episode lies precisely in the disappointment of conventional
+expectations.</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span></p>
+<p>There is only one comedy, or at most two, among the Sagas&#8212;the story
+of the Confederates (<i>Bandamanna Saga</i>) with an afterpiece, the short
+story of Alecap (<i>Olkofra &#222;&#225;ttr</i>). The composition of the Sagas,
+however, admits all sorts of comic passages and undignified
+characters, and it also quietly unravels many complications that seem
+to be working up for a tragic ending. The dissipation of the storm
+before it breaks is, indeed, so common an event that it almost becomes
+itself a convention of narrative in the Sagas, by opposition to the
+common devices of the feud and vengeance. There is a good instance of
+this paradoxical conclusion in <i>Arons Saga</i> (c. 12), an authentic
+biography, apparently narrating an actual event. The third chapter of
+<i>Gl&#250;ma</i> gives another instance of threatened trouble passing away.
+Ivar, a Norwegian with a strong hatred of Icelanders, seems likely to
+quarrel with Eyolf, Glum's father, but being a gentleman is won over
+by Eyolf's bearing. This is a part of the Saga where one need not
+expect to meet with any authentic historical tradition. The story of
+Eyolf in Norway is probably mere literature, and shows the working of
+the common principles of the Saga, as applied by an author of fiction.
+The sojourn of Grettir with the two foster-brothers is another
+instance of a dangerous situation going off without result. The whole
+action of <i>V&#225;pnfir&#240;inga Saga</i> is wound up in a reconciliation, which
+is a sufficient close; but, on the other hand, the story of Glum ends
+in a mere exhaustion of the rivalries, a drawn game. One of the later
+more authentic histories, the story of Thorgils and Haflidi, dealing
+with the matters of the twelfth century and not with the days of
+Gunnar, Njal, and Snorri the Priest, is a story of rivalry passing
+away, and may help to show how the composers of the Sagas were
+influenced by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> their knowledge and observation of things near their
+own time in their treatment of matters of tradition.</p>
+
+<p>Even more striking than this evasion of the conventional plot of the
+blood-feud, is the freedom and variety in respect of the minor
+characters, particularly shown in the way they are made to perplex the
+simple-minded spectator. To say that all the characters in the Sagas
+escape from the limitations of mere typical humours might be to say
+too much; but it is obvious that simple types are little in favour,
+and that the Icelandic authors had all of them some conception of the
+ticklish and dangerous variability of human dispositions, and knew
+that hardly any one was to be trusted to come up to his looks, for
+good or evil. Popular imagination has everywhere got at something of
+this sort in its views of the lubberly younger brother, the ash-raker
+and idler who carries off the princess. Many of the heroes of the
+Sagas are noted to have been slow in their growth and unpromising,
+like Glum, but there are many more cases of change of disposition in
+the Sagas than can be summed up under this old formula. There are
+stories of the quiet man roused to action, like Thorarin in
+<i>Eyrbyggja</i>, where it is plain that the quietness was strength from
+the first. A different kind of courage is shown by Atli, the
+poor-spirited prosperous man in <i>H&#225;var&#240;ar Saga</i>, who went into hiding
+to escape being dragged into the family troubles, but took heart and
+played the man later on. One of the most effective pieces of comedy in
+the Sagas is the description of his ill-temper when he is found out,
+and his gradual improvement. He comes from his den half-frozen, with
+his teeth chattering, and nothing but bad words for his wife and her
+inconvenient brother who wants his help. His wife puts him to bed, and
+he comes to think better of himself and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> world; the change of his
+mind being represented in the unobtrusive manner which the Sagas
+employ in their larger scenes.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most humorous and effective contradictions of the popular
+judgment is that episode in <i>Nj&#225;la</i>, where Kari has to trust to the
+talkative person whose wife has a low opinion of him. It begins like
+farce: any one can see that Bjorn has all the manners of the
+swaggering captain; his wife is a shrew and does not take him at his
+own valuation. The comedy of Bjorn is that he proves to be something
+different both from his own Bjorn and his wife's Bjorn. He is the
+idealist of his own heroism, and believes in himself as a hero. His
+wife knows better; but the beauty of it all is that his wife is wrong.
+His courage, it is true, is not quite certain, but he stands his
+ground; there is a small particle of a hero in him, enough to save
+him. His backing of Kari in the fight is what many have longed to see,
+who have found little comfort in the discomfiture of Bobadil and
+Parolles, and who will stand to it that the chronicler has done less
+than justice to Sir John Falstaff both at Gadshill and Shrewsbury.
+Never before Bjorn of <i>Nj&#225;la</i> was there seen on any theatre the person
+of the comfortable optimist, with a soul apparently damned from the
+first to a comic exposure and disgrace, but escaping this because his
+soul has just enough virtue to keep him steady. The ordeal of Bjorn
+contains more of the comic spirit than all the host of stage cowards
+from Pyrgopolinices to Bob Acres, precisely because it introduces
+something more than the simple humour, an essence more spiritual and
+capricious.</p>
+
+<p>Further, the partnership of Kari and Bjorn, and Kari's appreciation of
+his idealist companion, go a long way to save Kari from a too
+exclusive and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> limited devotion to the purpose of vengeance. There is
+much to be said on behalf of this Bjorn. His relations with Kari
+prevent the hero of the latter part of the book from turning into a
+mere hero. The humorous character of the squire brings out something
+new in the character of the knight, a humorous response; all which
+goes to increase the variety of the story, and to widen the difference
+between this story and all the monotonous and abstract stories of
+chivalrous adventures.</p>
+
+<p>The Sagas have comedy in them, comic incidents and characters, because
+they have no notion of the dignity of abstract and limited heroics;
+because they cannot understand the life of Iceland otherwise than in
+full, with all its elements together. The one intentionally comic
+history, <i>Bandamanna Saga</i>, &quot;The Confederates,&quot; which is exceptional
+in tone and plot, is a piece of work in which what may be called the
+form or spirit or idea of the heroic Saga is brought fully within
+one's comprehension by means of contrast and parody. <i>Bandamanna Saga</i>
+is a complete work, successful in every detail; as an artistic piece
+of composition it will stand comparison with any of the Sagas. But it
+is comedy, not tragedy; it is a mock-heroic, following the lines of
+the heroic model, consistently and steadily, and serving as a
+touchstone for the vanity of the heroic age. It is worth study, for
+Comedy is later and therefore it would seem more difficult than
+Tragedy, and this is the first reasonable and modern comedy in the
+history of modern Europe. Further, the method of narrative, and
+everything in it except the irony, belong to all the Sagas in common;
+there is nothing particularly new or exceptional in the style or the
+arrangement of the scenes; it is not so much a parody or a
+mock-heroic, as an heroic work inspired with comic irony. It is not a
+new kind of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> Saga, it is the old Saga itself put to the ordeal by the
+Comic Muse, and proving its temper under the severest of all strains.</p>
+
+<p>This is the story of the Confederates.&#8212;There was a man named Ufeig
+who lived in Midfirth, a free-handed man, not rich, who had a son
+named Odd. The father and son disagreed, and Odd, the son, went off to
+make his own fortune, and made it, without taking any further notice
+of his father. The two men are contrasted; Ufeig being an unsuccessful
+man and a humorist, too generous and too careless to get on in the
+world, while Odd, his son, is born to be a prosperous man. The main
+plot of the story is the reconciliation of the respectable son and the
+prodigal father, which is brought about in the most perfect and
+admirable manner.</p>
+
+<p>Odd got into trouble. He had a lawsuit against Uspak, a violent person
+whom he had formerly trusted, who had presumed too much, had been
+disgraced, and finally had killed the best friend of Odd in one of the
+ways usual in such business in the Sagas. In the course of the lawsuit
+a slight difficulty arose&#8212;one of Odd's jurymen died, and another had
+to be called in his place. This was informal, but no one at first made
+anything of it; till it occurred to a certain great man that Odd was
+becoming too strong and prosperous, and that it was time to put him
+down. Whereupon he went about and talked to another great man, and
+half persuaded him that this view was the right one; and then felt
+himself strong enough to step in and break down the prosecution by
+raising the point about the formation of the jury. Odd went out of the
+court without a word as soon as the challenge was made.</p>
+
+<p>While he was thinking it over, and not making much of it, there
+appeared an old, bent, ragged man,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> 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. &quot;Impossible! it is not like a gentleman to try to take in
+an old man like me; how could you be beaten?&quot; 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. &quot;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?&quot; and so on, impressively and emotionally, in the
+name of Equity, while all the time (equity + <i>x</i>) 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> 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 <i>Sturlunga Saga</i>; the essence of that
+history is preserved in the comedy of the <i>Banded Men</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Nj&#225;la</i>; 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;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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: &quot;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.&quot; 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: &quot;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!&quot; Then said Uspak: &quot;This
+is an ill piece of work; this was meant for Odd and not for
+you.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="III.VI"></a>VI</h3>
+
+<h3>THE ART OF NARRATIVE</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> 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&#8212;the organic unity that
+is felt in every particular detail. It is absurd to take separately
+the details of a great work like <i>Nj&#225;la</i>, 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 <i>Bandamanna Saga</i> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 impres<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>sion; and the result is attained by
+following the order of impressions in the mind of one of the actors,
+or of a looker-on. &quot;To see things as they are&quot; is an equivocal
+formula, which may be claimed as their own privilege by many schools
+and many different degrees of intelligence. &quot;To see things as they
+become,&quot; the rule of Lessing's <i>Laocoon</i>, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>&#8212;a crowd of men moving, not known whether friends
+or enemies. So it was in <i>Thorgils Saga</i> (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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;he wrought evil in the sight of the Lord,&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>No more than this is told of the unavailing penance<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> 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
+&quot;facts&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Laxd&#230;la</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> all the day, and laid him down at the edge
+of the gully, above.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Thorolf, the thief, shall not have this to laugh at, that I
+was afraid to ride on my way without a host of men.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Thorkell Whelp makes answer: &quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then said Kjartan: &quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>After that the brothers and their men rode west again.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hold your tongue,&quot; said Thorkell; &quot;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> 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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And so it had to be as Thorkell wished.</p></div>
+
+<p>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,&#8212;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&#8212;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> 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
+<i>Laxd&#230;la</i>, 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&#8212;&quot;too much blood and too little
+brains.&quot; 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 <i>Bandamanna Saga</i> in its criticism of
+the nobles and their rivalries; although the author of <i>Laxd&#230;la</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Clarissa Harlowe</i> or <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> 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&#8212;&quot;from without
+inwards&quot;&#8212;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> a hero of the likeness of Kjartan is contrasted with a dark,
+malevolent, not ignoble figure,&#8212;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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="III.VII"></a>VII</h3>
+
+<h3>EPIC AND HISTORY</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> 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 <i>Nj&#225;la</i> and
+<i>Laxd&#230;la</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The historical work contained in the <i>Sturlunga Saga</i> 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 <i>Frithiof</i>, 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 <i>Sturlunga Saga</i> falls outside the
+order to which <i>Njal</i> and <i>Gisli</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> made by Ari Thorgilsson (<i>ob.</i> 1148), especially in
+his <i>Landn&#225;mab&#243;k</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>It was too strict for his greatest successor in historical writing in
+Iceland. Snorri Sturluson is the author of <i>Lives of the Kings of
+Norway</i>, apparently founded upon Ari's <i>Book of Kings</i>, which has been
+lost as an independent work. Snorri's <i>Lives</i> themselves are extant in
+a shape very far from authentic; one has to choose between the
+abridged and inconvenient shape of <i>Heimskringla</i>, 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
+<i>Heimskringla</i>, 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 <i>Edda</i>;
+and in the histories of Olaf Tryggvason and of Saint Olaf, kings of
+Norway, he has given companions to the very noblest of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> Sagas
+dealing with the Icelandic chiefs. Between the more scientific work of
+Ari and the more imaginative work of Snorri comes, half-way, the <i>Life
+of King Sverre</i> (<i>ob.</i> 1202), written at the king's own dictation by
+the Abbot Karl of Thingeyri.</p>
+
+<p>Ari collected the historical materials, both for Iceland and Norway,
+and put them together in the extant <i>Landn&#225;mab&#243;k</i> and the lost <i>Kings'
+Lives</i>. Snorri Sturluson treated the <i>Kings' Lives</i> in the spirit of
+the greater Icelandic Sagas; his <i>Lives</i> belong to heroic literature,
+if there is any meaning in that name. The <i>Life of Sverre</i> is not so
+glorious as the <i>Life</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Sverris Saga</i>, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> 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
+<i>Nj&#225;la</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Sturlunga Saga</i> 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
+<i>Nj&#225;la</i> or <i>G&#237;sla</i>, with <i>Hrafnkels Saga</i> or <i>Bandamanna</i>, in the
+qualities in which these excel.</p>
+
+<p>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&#8212;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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> 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, &quot;You are more
+pious than people think.&quot;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Bodvar answered: &quot;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.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<p>The intervention at the end is very well given, particularly Ketill
+the priest's story of his own enemy.</p>
+
+<p><i>Sturlu Saga</i>, 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 &quot;a ruffian by habit and repute.&quot; There
+is a considerable likeness between the characters of Sturla and of
+Snorri the priest, as that is presented in <i>Eyrbyggja</i> and elsewhere.
+A comparison of the rise of Snorri, as told in <i>Eyrbyggja</i>, with the
+life of Sturla will bring out the unaltered persistence of the old
+ways and the old standards, while the advantage lies<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> with the later
+subject in regard to concentration of interest. The <i>Life of Sturla</i>
+is not so varied as <i>Eyrbyggja</i>, 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&#8212;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It fell at Hvamm in the winter nights (about<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, &quot;Now he is coming to ask me to buy his wethers,&quot; 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.
+&quot;Nothing so far; only Einar has driven all Ingjald's beasts.&quot; Then
+Gudny sprang up and shouted to the men: &quot;Up, lads! Sturla is out, and
+his weapons with him, and Ingjald's gear is gone!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It is a piece of clean and exact description, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> 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,&#8212;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&#8212;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 &quot;soothfastness&quot;; 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.</p>
+
+<p>It is the same kind of excellence that is found in the other
+subsidiary parts of <i>Sturlunga</i>, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> 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.<a name="FNanchor_61_61" id="FNanchor_61_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a></p>
+
+<p>The <i>Islendinga</i> or <i>Sturlunga Saga</i> 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 &quot;saviour of society&quot; like Henry VII. There was nothing
+but the family interests of the great houses, and the <i>Sturlunga Saga</i>
+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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The beauty of <i>Sturlunga</i> 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 <i>Paston Letters</i>
+with more intimate knowledge and experience. It is a history and not
+an epic; the title of epic which may be claimed for <i>Nj&#225;la</i> and
+<i>Laxd&#230;la</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> heroic
+Sagas have remained in what must be very like their old oral form&#8212;a
+string of episodes. <i>Eyrbyggja</i>, <i>Vatnsd&#230;la</i>, <i>Fl&#243;amanna</i>,
+<i>Svarfd&#230;la</i>, are of this sort. <i>Sturlunga</i>, has not more unity than
+<i>Eyrbyggja</i>, 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
+<i>Sturlunga</i>, they are more vivid than in any other Icelandic book. In
+no other is the art of description so nearly perfect.</p>
+
+<p>The scenes of <i>Sturlunga</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>This is the end of the wedding at Flugumyri, in October of the year
+1253, as told by Sturla:&#8212;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p style="text-align: center"><b>THE BURNING OF FLUGUMYRI</b></p>
+
+<p>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 Gr&#246;n, and Kolbein was offering him quarter, for
+there was a pact between them, that if ever it came to that,
+they should<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> 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, &quot;I will take quarter for
+myself, if I may bring out another man along with me.&quot;
+Kolbein agreed to this at once, excepting only Gizur and his
+sons.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Corselet-biter</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I wish my friends to have the good of these,&quot; he says, &quot;if
+things go as I would have them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Gizur saw that Groa took their parting much to heart.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have to look after the lad Thorlak, my sister's son,&quot;
+says she.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Thver&#225;, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Arni the Bitter is here,&quot; says he; &quot;and I will not ask for
+quarter. I see one lying not far away makes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> me like it well
+enough if I travel the same road with him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then said Kolbein: &quot;Is there no man here remembers Snorri
+Sturluson?&quot;<a name="FNanchor_62_62" id="FNanchor_62_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a></p>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> 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.</p></div>
+
+<p>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
+(<i>sk&#225;li</i>) at Flugumyri, before the assailants were driven back and had
+to take to fire, as is told above.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Finnesburh</i> brought out with emphasis, as a proper part of the
+composition:&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+<span style="margin-left: 5.5em;">swurdl&#233;oma st&#243;d,</span><br />
+Swylce eall Finnesburh f&#253;renu w&#509;re.<br />
+<br />
+The sword-light rose, as though all Finnsburgh were aflame.<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Joseph Andrews</i> to the matter of the <i>Voyage to Lisbon</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>The imaginative treatment of the stories of Njal and Gisli had been
+founded on real knowledge of life; in <i>Sturlunga</i> 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. <i>Sturlunga</i> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Life of King Hacon of Norway</i>. The <i>H&#225;konar
+Saga</i>, as compared with <i>Sturlunga</i>, 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 <i>Sturlunga</i>. 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.
+<i>Sturlunga</i>, in Iceland, is made up of mere anarchy; <i>H&#225;konar Saga</i> is
+the counterpart of <i>Sturlunga</i>, exhibiting the cure of anarchy in
+Norway under an active king. But while the political import of
+Sturla's <i>Hacon</i> is thus greater, the literary force is much less, in
+comparison with the strong work of <i>Sturlunga</i>. 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 <i>Sturlunga</i>, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> 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
+<i>Rival Kings</i> (<i>Kongsemnerne</i>) 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 &quot;ancient Birchlegs&quot;), 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.</p>
+
+<p>After Sturla, and after the fall of the Commonwealth of Iceland,
+although there were still some interesting biographies to be
+written&#8212;the <i>Life of Bishop Arne</i>, the <i>Life of Bishop Laurence</i>&#8212;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 J&#243;n 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 J&#243;n 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> old spirit lived
+long after the failure of the old literature.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;the way that things are shared&quot; in this world, and may
+raise some grudges against the dispensing fortune that has ordered the
+<i>Life of St. Louis</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Life of St. Louis</i> is
+different from that of <i>Sturlunga</i>, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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:&#8212;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> 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&#8212;<span title="Greek: dol&#244;i d' ho ge dakrya keuthen">&#948;&#959;&#955;&#969;&#953; &#948;' &#959; &#947;&#949; &#948;&#945;&#954;&#961;&#965;&#945; &#954;&#949;&#965;&#952;&#949;&#957;</span>&#8212;&quot;he would not
+confess that he wept.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Life
+of St. Louis</i> transposed into the mood of the <i>Odyssey</i> or of <i>Nj&#225;la</i>.
+It is hard to see who would be a gainer thereby&#8212;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> prisoners from the Saracens, is not
+only the whole <i>Life of St. Louis</i> 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 (<i>le peuple menu
+Nostre Signour</i>). There was no one there but had friends in prison
+among the Saracens, &quot;so they did not rebuke me,&quot; says Joinville; but
+only two ventured to speak on his side, and one of these was shouted
+at (<i>mout felonessement</i>) 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&#8212;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: &quot;The king is a fool, Sire
+de Joinville, if he does not take your advice against all the council
+of the realm of France&quot;; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> 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 (<i>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</i>), 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> would not have
+written, as Joinville does, &quot;the king came and put his hands on my
+head&quot;; he would have said, &quot;John found that his head was being held&quot;;
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+&quot;medieval&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="III.VIII"></a>VIII</h3>
+
+<h3>THE NORTHERN PROSE ROMANCES</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> 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 &quot;romantic&quot; ideas and formulas.</p>
+
+<p>One of the extant versions of the <i>Foster-brothers' Story</i> 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,<a name="FNanchor_63_63" id="FNanchor_63_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a> and which has an English
+counterpart in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> alliterative prose of &#198;lfric. 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 (&quot;they were
+drenched through, and their clothes froze on them&quot;) into the
+incongruous statement that &quot;the daughters of Ran (the sea-goddess)
+came and wooed them and offered them rest in their embraces,&quot;&#8212;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 &quot;pathetic fallacy,&quot; 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:&#8212;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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; <i>all that night the Dog (devourer) of the
+elder-tree howled with unwearying jaws and worried the earth
+with grim fangs of cold</i>. 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;</p></div>
+
+<p>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 <i>F&#243;stbr&#230;&#240;ra</i> variations<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> show the
+beginning of a process of decay, in which the lines of separation
+between prose and poetry are cut through.</p>
+
+<p>Except, however, as an indication of a general decline of taste, these
+diversions in <i>F&#243;stbr&#230;&#240;ra Saga</i> 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
+Tegn&#233;r as the groundwork of his elegant romantic poem, a brilliant
+example of one particular kind of modern medievalism. The significance
+of Tegn&#233;r's choice is that he went for his story to the secondary
+order of Sagas. The original <i>Frithiof</i> is almost as remote as Tegn&#233;r
+himself from the true heroic tradition; and, like Tegn&#233;r'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 Tegn&#233;r'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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The &quot;romantic movement&quot; 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
+<i>Strengleikar</i> (the Lays of Marie de France), in <i>Karlamagnus Saga</i>,
+in the Norwegian versions of Tristram, Perceval, Iwain, and other
+books of chivalry.<a name="FNanchor_64_64" id="FNanchor_64_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a> 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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> The phrase <i>n&#225;tt&#250;ra amorsins</i> (= <i>natura amoris</i>)
+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 <i>Nj&#225;la</i> and <i>Laxd&#230;la</i>; there is a strain in them that
+distinguishes them from the ordinary professional medieval romance in
+French, English, or German.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Ynglinga Saga</i> be his, an historical abstract of
+Northern mythical history; though his aim, like that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> of Saxo
+Grammaticus, is more purely scientific than is the case with Snorri.
+The later mythical romances are of different kinds. The <i>Volsunga
+Saga</i> 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. <i>Halfs Saga</i> follows the same method.
+The story of <i>Hrolf Kraki</i>, full of interest from its connexion with
+the matter of <i>Beowulf</i> and of Saxo Grammaticus, is more like
+<i>Volsunga Saga</i> in its procedure.<a name="FNanchor_65_65" id="FNanchor_65_65"></a><a href="#Footnote_65_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a></p>
+
+<p>The other class<a name="FNanchor_66_66" id="FNanchor_66_66"></a><a href="#Footnote_66_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a> contains the Sagas of <i>Frithiof</i> and <i>Viglund</i>,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Among the original Sagas there are some that show the beginning of the
+process by which the substance was eliminated, and the romantic
+<i>eidolon</i> left to walk about by itself. The introductions of many of
+the older Sagas, of <i>Gisli</i> and <i>Grettir</i> for example, giving the
+adventures of the hero's ancestors, are made up in this way; and the
+best Sagas have many conventional passages&#8212;Viking exploits,
+discomfiture of berserkers, etc.&#8212;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Kormaks Saga</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>The plot of <i>Laxd&#230;la</i>, the story of the <i>Lovers of Gudrun</i>, 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
+<i>Laxd&#230;la</i> 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 <i>Frithiof</i> is considerable.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Thorstein the White</i>,
+where the result<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> is more summary and more in accordance with poetical
+justice than in <i>Laxd&#230;la</i> or <i>Gunnlaug</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>Another short story of the same class and the same family tradition
+(Vopnafjord), the story of <i>Thorstein Staffsmitten</i>, looks like a
+clever working-up of a stock theme&#8212;the quiet man roused.<a name="FNanchor_67_67" id="FNanchor_67_67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a> 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 <i>Girart de Viane</i>; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Njal</i> and <i>Gisli</i> is accompanied.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There are some other romantic transformations of the old heroic
+matters to be noticed, before turning away from the Northern world and
+its &quot;twilight of the gods&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>R&#237;mur</i>, 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.<a name="FNanchor_68_68" id="FNanchor_68_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>
+for the <i>F&#230;reyinga Saga</i>; and Icelandic books, possibly near relations
+of <i>Codex Regius</i>, 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
+<i>Roland</i> and <i>Tristram</i>, in that refuge of the old songs of the
+world.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h1>THE OLD FRENCH EPIC</h1>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>THE OLD FRENCH EPIC</h3>
+
+<h4>(<i>Chansons de Geste</i>)</h4>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> appears to be generally the case in all old epic literature, and it
+is not surprising, that the existing specimens come from the end of
+the period of its greatest excellence, and generally represent the
+epic fashion, not quite at its freshest and best, but after it has
+passed its culmination, and is already on the verge of decline. This
+condition of things is exemplified in <i>Beowulf</i>; and the Sagas also,
+here and there, show signs of over-refinement and exhaustion. In the
+extant mass of old French epic this condition is enormously
+exaggerated. The <i>Song of Roland</i> itself, even in its earliest extant
+form, is comparatively late and unoriginal; while the remainder of
+French epic poetry, in all its variety, is much less authentic than
+<i>Roland</i>, sensibly later, and getting rapidly and luxuriantly worse
+through all the stages of lethargy.</p>
+
+<p>It is the misfortune of French epic that so much should have been
+preserved of its &quot;dotages,&quot; so little of the same date and order as
+the <i>Song of Roland</i>, and nothing at all of the still earlier
+epic&#8212;the more original <i>Roland</i> of a previous generation. The
+exuberance, however, of the later stages of French epic, and its long
+persistence in living beyond its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> due time, are proof of a certain
+kind of vitality. The French epic in the twelfth century, long after
+its best days were over, came into the keenest and closest rivalry
+with the younger romantic schools in their first vigour. Fortune has
+to some extent made up for the loss of the older French poems by the
+preservation of endless later versions belonging in date to the
+exciting times of the great romantic revolution in literature. Feeble
+and drowsy as they often are, the late-born hosts of the French epic
+are nevertheless in the thick of a great European contest, matched not
+dishonourably against the forces of Romance. They were not the
+strongest possible champions of the heroic age, but they were <i>there</i>,
+in the field, and in view of all spectators. At this distance of time,
+we can see how much more fully the drift of the old Teutonic world was
+caught and rendered by the imagination of Iceland; how much more there
+is in Grettir or Skarphedinn than in Ogier the Dane, or Raoul de
+Cambrai, or even Roland and Oliver. But the Icelandic work lay outside
+of the consciousness of Europe, and the French epic was known
+everywhere. There are no such masterpieces in the French epic as in
+the Icelandic prose. The French epic, to make up for that, has an
+exciting history; it lived by antagonism, and one may look on and see
+how the <i>chansons de geste</i> were fighting for their life against the
+newer forms of narrative poetry. In all this there is the interest of
+watching one of the main currents of history, for it was nothing less
+than the whole future imaginative life of Europe that was involved in
+the debate between the stubborn old epic fashion and the new romantic
+adventurers.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>chansons de geste</i> stand in a real, positive, ancestral relation
+to all modern literature; there is something of them in all the poetry
+of Europe. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> Icelandic histories can make no such claim. Their
+relation to modern life is slighter, in one sense; more spiritual, in
+another. They are not widely known, they have had no share in
+establishing the forms or giving vogue to the commonplaces of modern
+literature. Now that they are published and accessible to modern
+readers, their immediate and present worth, for the friends of
+Skarphedinn and Gunnar, is out of all proportion to their past
+historical influence. They have anticipated some of the literary
+methods which hardly became the common property of Europe till the
+nineteenth century; even now, when all the world reads and writes
+prose stories, their virtue is unexhausted and unimpaired. But this
+spiritual affinity with modern imaginations and conversations, across
+the interval of medieval romance and rhetoric, is not due to any
+direct or overt relation. The Sagas have had no influence; that is the
+plain historical fact about them.</p>
+
+<p>The historical influence and importance of the <i>chansons de geste</i>, on
+the other hand, is equally plain and evident. Partly by their
+opposition to the new modes of fiction, and partly by compliance with
+their adversaries, they belong to the history of those great schools
+of literature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries from which all
+modern imaginations in prose and rhyme are descended. The &quot;dolorous
+rout&quot; of Roncesvalles, and not the tragedy of the Niblungs, still less
+the history of Gunnar or of Njal, is the heroic origin of modern
+poetry; it is remembered and renowned, <span title="Greek: pasi melousa">&#960;&#945;&#963;&#953; &#956;&#949;&#955;&#959;&#965;&#963;&#945;</span>, among
+the poets who have given shape to modern imaginative literature, while
+the older heroics of the Teutonic migration are forgotten, and the
+things of Iceland are utterly unknown.</p>
+
+<p>French epic has some great advantages in comparison with the epic
+experiments of Teutonic verse.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> For one thing, it exists in great
+quantity; there is no want of specimens, though they are not all of
+the best sort or the best period. Further, it has no difficulty, only
+too much ease, in keeping a long regular course of narrative. Even
+<i>Beowulf</i> appears to have attained to its epic proportions by a
+succession of efforts, and with difficulty; it labours rather heavily
+over the longer epic course. <i>Maldon</i> is a poem that runs freely, but
+here the course is shorter, and it carries much less weight. The
+Northern poems of the &quot;Elder Edda&quot; never attain the right epic scale
+at all; their abrupt and lyrical manner is the opposite of the epic
+mode of narration. It is true that the <i>chansons de geste</i> are far
+from the perfect continuity of the Homeric narrative. <i>Roland</i> is
+described by M. Gaston Paris in terms not unlike those that are
+applied by Ten Brink in his criticism of <i>Beowulf</i>:&#8212;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&quot;On peut dire que la <i>Chanson de Roland</i> (ainsi que toutes
+nos plus anciennes chansons de geste) se d&#233;veloppe non pas,
+comme les po&#232;mes hom&#233;riques, par un courant large et
+ininterrompu, non pas, comme le <i>Nibelungenlied</i>, par des
+battements d'ailes &#233;gaux et lents, mais par un suite
+d'explosions successives, toujours arr&#234;t&#233;es court et
+toujours reprenant avec soudainet&#233;&quot; (<i>Litt. fr. au moyen
+&#226;ge</i>, p. 59).</p></div>
+
+<p><i>Roland</i> is a succession of separate scenes, with no gradation or
+transition between them. It still bears traces of the lyrical origins
+of epic. But the narrative, though broken, is neither stinted nor
+laboured; it does not, like <i>Beowulf</i>, give the impression that it has
+been expanded beyond the convenient limits, and that the author is
+scant of breath. And none of the later <i>chansons de geste</i> are so
+restricted and reserved in their design as <i>Roland</i>; most of them are
+diffuse and long. The French and the Teutonic epics are at opposite
+extremes of style.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The French epics are addressed to the largest conceivable
+audience.<a name="FNanchor_69_69" id="FNanchor_69_69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a> They are plain and simple, as different as possible from
+the allusive brevity of the Northern poems. Even the plainest of the
+old English poems, even <i>Maldon</i>, has to employ the poetical diction,
+the unprosaic terms and figures of the Teutonic School. The
+alliterative poetry down to its last days has a vocabulary different
+from that of prose, and much richer. The French epic language is not
+distinguished and made difficult in this way; it is &quot;not prismatic but
+diaphanous.&quot; Those who could understand anything could understand it,
+and the <i>chansons de geste</i> easily found currency in the market-place,
+when they were driven by the new romances from their old place of
+honour in &quot;bower and hall.&quot; The Teutonic poetry, even at its simplest,
+must have required more attention in its hearers than the French,
+through the strangeness and the greater variety of its vocabulary. It
+is less familiar, less popular. Whatever dignity may be acquired by
+the French epic is not due to any special or elaborate convention of
+phrase. Where it is weak, its poverty is not disguised, as in the
+weaker portions of Teutonic poetry, by the ornaments and synonyms of
+the <i>Gradus</i>. The commonplaces of French epic are not imposing.<a name="FNanchor_70_70" id="FNanchor_70_70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70_70" class="fnanchor">[70]</a>
+With this difference between the French and the Teutonic conventions,
+there is all the more interest in a comparison of the two kinds, where
+they come into comparison through any resemblance of their subjects or
+their thought, as in <i>Byrhtnoth</i> and <i>Roland</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span></p><p>The French epics have generally a larger political field, more
+numerous armies, and more magnificent kings, than the Teutonic. In the
+same degree, their heroism is different from that of the earlier
+heroic age. The general motives of patriotism and religion, France and
+Christendom, prevent the free use of the simpler and older motives of
+individual heroism. The hero of the older sort is still there, but his
+game is hindered by the larger and more complex political conditions
+of France; or if these are evaded, still the mere size of the country
+and numbers of the fighting-men tell against his importance; he is
+dwarfed by his surroundings. The limitation of the scenes in the poems
+of <i>Beowulf</i>, <i>Ermanaric</i>, and <i>Attila</i> throws out the figures in
+strong relief. The mere extent of the stage and the number of the
+supernumeraries required for the action of most of the French stories
+appear to have told against the definiteness of their characters; as,
+on the other hand, the personages in <i>Beowulf</i>, without much
+individual character of their own, seem to gain in precision and
+strength from the smallness of the scene in which they act. There is
+less strict economy in the <i>chansons de geste</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from this, there is real and essential vagueness in their
+characters; their drama is rudimentary. The simplicity of the French
+epic style, which is addressed to a large audience and easily
+intelligible, is not capable of much dramatic subtlety. It can be made
+to express a variety of actions and a variety of moods, but these are
+generally rendered by means of common formulas, without much dramatic
+insight or intention. While the fragments of Teutonic epic seem to
+give evidence of a growing dramatic imagination, and the Northern
+poems, especially, of a series of experiments in character, the French
+epic imagination appears to have remained content with its
+established<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> and abstract formulas for different modes of sentiment
+and passion. It would not be easy to find anything in French epic that
+gives the same impression of discovery and innovation, of the search
+for dramatic form, of the absorption of the poet's mind in the pursuit
+of an imaginary character, as is given, again and again, by the
+Northern poems of the Volsung cycle. Yet the <i>chansons de geste</i> are
+often true and effective in their outlines of character, and include a
+quantity of &quot;humours and observation,&quot; though their authors seem to
+have been unable to give solidity to their sketches.</p>
+
+<p>The weakness of the drama in the French epics, even more than their
+compliance with foreign romance in the choice of incidents or
+machinery, is against their claim to be reckoned in the higher order
+of heroic narrative. They are romantic by the comparative levity of
+their imagination; the story, with them, is too much for the
+personages. But it is still the problem of heroic character that
+engages them, however feebly or conventionally they may deal with it.
+They rely, like the Teutonic epic and the Sagas, on situations that
+test the force of character, and they find those situations in the
+common conditions of an heroic age, subject of course to the
+modifications of the comparatively late period and late form of
+society to which they belong. <i>Roland</i> is a variation on the one
+perpetual heroic theme; it has a grander setting, a grander
+accompaniment, than <i>Byrhtnoth</i> or <i>Waldere</i>, but it is essentially
+the old story of the heroic age,&#8212;no knight-errantry, but the last
+resistance of a man driven into a corner.</p>
+
+<p>The greatness of the poem of <i>Roland</i> is that of an author who knows
+his own mind, who has a certain mood of the heroic imagination to
+express, and is at no loss for his instrument or for the lines of his
+work.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The poem, as has been already noted, has a general likeness in its
+plan to the story of Finnesburh as told in <i>Beowulf</i>, and to the poems
+of the death of Attila. The plot falls into two parts, the second part
+being the vengeance and expiation.</p>
+
+<p>Although the story is thus not absolutely simple, like the adventures
+of Beowulf, no epic has a more magnificent simplicity of effect. The
+other personages, Charlemagne, Ganelon, Oliver, King Marsile, have to
+Roland nothing like the importance of Agamemnon, Ajax, Diomede, or
+Hector, as compared with Achilles in the <i>Iliad</i>. The poem is almost
+wholly devoted to the praise and glorification of a single hero; it
+retains very much of the old manners of the earlier stages of epic
+poetry, before it ceased to be lyric. It is a poem in honour of a
+chieftain.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time, this lyrical tone in <i>Roland</i> and this pathetic
+concentration of the interest on one personage do not interfere with
+the epic plan of the narrative, or disturb the lines of the
+composition. The central part of the poem is on the Homeric scale; the
+fighting, the separate combats, are rendered in an Homeric way.
+<i>Byrhtnoth</i> and <i>Roland</i> are the works that have given the best
+medieval counterpart to the battles of Homer. There is more of a
+crisis and a climax in <i>Roland</i> than in the several battles of the
+<i>Iliad</i>, and a different sort of climax from that of <i>Byrhtnoth</i>.
+Everything leads to the agony and heroic death of Roland, and to his
+glory as the unyielding champion of France and Christendom. It is not
+as in the <i>Iliad</i>, where different heroes have their day, or as at
+Maldon, where the fall of the captain leads to the more desperate
+defence and the more exalted heroism of his companions. Roland is the
+absolute master of the <i>Song of Roland</i>. No other heroic poetry
+conveys the same effect of pre-eminent sim<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>plicity and grandeur. There
+is hardly anything in the poem except the single mood; its simplicity
+is overpowering, a type of heroic resistance for all the later poets
+of Europe. This impressive effect is aided, it is true, by an infusion
+of the lyrical tone and by playing on the pathetic emotions. Roland is
+ideal and universal, and the story of his defeat, of the blast of his
+horn, and the last stroke of Durendal, is a kind of funeral march or
+&quot;heroic symphony&quot; into which a meaning may be read for every new hero,
+to the end of the world; for any one in any age whose <i>Mood is the
+more as the Might lessens</i>. Yet although Roland has this universal or
+symbolical or musical meaning&#8212;unlike the more individual personages
+in the Sagas, who would resent being made into allegories&#8212;the total
+effect is mainly due to legitimate epic means. There is no stinting of
+the epic proportions or suppression of the epic devices. The <i>Song of
+Roland</i> is narrative poetry, a model of narrative design, with the
+proper epic spaces well proportioned, well considered, and filled with
+action. It may be contrasted with the <i>Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrok</i>,
+which is an attempt to get the same sort of moral effect by a process
+of lyrical distillation from heroic poetry; putting all the strongest
+heroic motives into the most intense and emphatic form. There is
+something lyrical in <i>Roland</i>, but the poem is not governed by lyrical
+principles; it requires the deliberation and the freedom of epic; it
+must have room to move in before it can come up to the height of its
+argument. The abruptness of its periods is not really an interruption
+of its even flight; it is an abruptness of detail, like a broken sea
+with a larger wave moving under it; it does not impair or disguise the
+grandeur of the movement as a whole.</p>
+
+<p>There are other poems among the <i>chansons de</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> <i>geste</i> which admit of
+comparison with <i>Roland</i>, though <i>Roland</i> is supreme; other epics in
+which the simple motives of heroism and loyalty are treated in a
+simple and noble way, without any very strong individual character
+among the personages. Of these rather abstract expositions of the
+heroic ideal, some of the finest are to be found in the cycle of
+William of Orange, more especially in the poems relating the exploits
+of William and his nephew Vivian, and the death of Vivian in the
+battle against the Moors&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+En icel jor que la dolor fu grans<br />
+Et la bataille orible en Aliscans.<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>Like <i>Roland</i>, the poem of <i>Aliscans</i> is rather lyrical in its effect,
+reiterating and reinforcing the heroic motives, making an impression
+by repetition of one and the same mood; a poem of the glorification of
+France. It shows, at the same time, how this motive might be degraded
+by exaggeration and amplification. There are too many Moors in it (as
+also in <i>Roland</i>), and the sequel is reckless and extravagant, where
+William of Orange rides to the king's court for help and discovers an
+ally in the enormous scullion of the king's kitchen, Rainouart, the
+Morgante of French epic. Rainouart, along with William of Orange, was
+seen by Dante in Paradise. In his gigantic and discourteous way he was
+one of the champions of Christendom, and his manners are interesting
+as a variation from the conventional heroic standards. But he takes up
+too much room; he was not invented by the wide and comprehensive epic
+imagination which finds a place for many varieties of mankind in its
+story, but by some one who felt that the old epic forms were growing
+thin and unsatisfactory, and that there was need of some violent
+diversion to keep the audiences awake. This new<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> device is not
+abandoned till Rainouart has been sent to Avalon&#8212;the epic form and
+spirit losing themselves in a misappropriation of Romance. These
+excursions are of course not to be ascribed to the central authors of
+the cycle of William of Orange; but already even in the most heroic
+parts of the cycle there are indications of the flagging imagination,
+the failure of the old motives, which gave an opening to these wild
+auxiliary forces. Where the epic came to trust too much to the mere
+heroic sentiment, to the moral of <i>Roland</i>, to the contrast of knight
+and infidel, there was nothing for it but either to have recourse to
+the formal heroics of Camoens or Tasso,&#8212;for which the time had not
+yet come,&#8212;or to be dissolved altogether in a medley of adventures,
+and to pass from its old station in the front of literature to those
+audiences of the market-place that even now, in some parts of the
+world, have a welcome for Charlemagne and his peers.<a name="FNanchor_71_71" id="FNanchor_71_71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71_71" class="fnanchor">[71]</a></p>
+
+<p>Those of the French epics in which the motives of <i>Roland</i> are in some
+form or other repeated, in which the defence of Christendom is the
+burden, are rightly considered the best representatives of the whole
+body. But there are others in which with less dignity of theme there
+is more freedom, and in which an older epic type, more akin to the
+Teutonic, nearer in many ways to the Icelandic Sagas, is preserved,
+and for a long time maintains itself distinct from all the forms of
+romance and the romantic schools. It is not in <i>Roland</i> or in
+<i>Aliscans</i> that the epic interest in character is most pronounced and
+most effective. Those among the <i>chansons de geste</i> which make least
+of the adventures in comparison with the personages, which think more
+of the tragic situation than of rapid<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> changes of scene and incident,
+are generally those which represent the feuds and quarrels between the
+king and his vassals, or among the great houses themselves; the
+anarchy, in fact, which belongs to an heroic age and passes from
+experience into heroic literature. There is hardly any of the
+<i>chansons de geste</i> in which this element of heroic anarchy is not to
+be found in a greater or less degree. In <i>Roland</i>, for example, though
+the main action is between the French and the Moors, it is jealousy
+and rivalry that bring about the catastrophe, through the treason of
+Ganelon. This sort of jealousy, which is subordinate in <i>Roland</i>,
+forms the chief motive of some of the other epics. These depend for
+their chief interest on the vicissitudes of family quarrels almost as
+completely as the Sagas. These are the French counterparts of
+<i>Eyrbyggja</i>, and of the stories of Glum or Gisli. In France, as in
+Iceland, the effect of the story is produced as much by the energy of
+the characters as by the interest of adventures. Only in the French
+epic, while they play for larger stakes, the heroes are incomparably
+less impressive. The imagination which represents them is different in
+kind from the Icelandic, and puts up with a very indefinite and
+general way of denoting character. Though the extant poems are late,
+some of them have preserved a very elementary psychology and a very
+simple sort of ethics, the artistic formulas and devices of a
+rudimentary stage which has nothing to correspond to it in the extant
+Icelandic prose.</p>
+
+<p><i>Raoul de Cambrai</i> in its existing form is a late poem; it has gone
+through the process of translation from assonance into rhyme, and like
+<i>Huon of Bordeaux</i>, though by a different method, it has been fitted
+with a romantic continuation. But the first part of the poem
+apparently keeps the lines of an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> older and more original version. The
+story is not one of the later cyclic fabrications; it has an
+historical basis and is derived from the genuine epic tradition of
+that tenth-century school which unfortunately is only known through
+its descendants and its influence. <i>Raoul de Cambrai</i>, though in an
+altered verse and later style, may be taken as presenting an old story
+still recognisable in most of its original features, especially in its
+moral.</p>
+
+<p>Raoul de Cambrai, a child at his father's death, is deprived of his
+inheritance. To make up for this he is promised, later, the first fief
+that falls vacant, and asserts his claim in a way that brings him into
+continual trouble,&#8212;a story with great opportunities for heroic
+contrasts and complications. The situation is well chosen; it is
+better than that of the story of Glum, which is rather like
+it<a name="FNanchor_72_72" id="FNanchor_72_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_72_72" class="fnanchor">[72]</a>&#8212;the right is not all on one side. Raoul has a just cause, but
+cannot make it good; he is driven to be unjust in order to come by his
+own. Violence and excess in a just cause will make a tragic history;
+there is no fault to be found with the general scheme or principle in
+this case. It is in the details that the barbarous simplicity of the
+author comes out. For example, in the invasion of the lands on which
+he has a claim, Raoul attacks and burns a nunnery, and in it the
+mother of his best friend and former squire, Bernier. The injured man,
+his friend, is represented as taking it all in a helpless dull
+expostulatory way. The author has no language to express any
+imaginative passion; he can only repeat, in a muffled professional
+voice, that it was really a very painful and discreditable affair. The
+violent passions here are those of the heroic age in its most
+barbarous form; more sudden and uncontrolled even than the anger of
+Achilles. But<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> with all their vehemence and violence there is no real
+tragic force, and when the hero is killed by his friend, and the
+friend is sorry afterwards, there is nothing but the mere formal and
+abstract identity of the situation to recall to mind the tragedy of
+Kjartan and Bolli.</p>
+
+<p><i>Garin le Loherain</i> is a story with a similar plot,&#8212;the estrangement
+and enmity of old friends, &quot;sworn companions.&quot; Though no earlier than
+<i>Raoul de Cambrai</i>, though belonging in date to the flourishing period
+of romance, it is a story of the older heroic age, and its contents
+are epic. Its heroes are unsophisticated, and the incidents,
+sentiments, and motives are primitive and not of the romantic school.
+The story is much superior to <i>Raoul de Cambrai</i> in speed and
+lightness; it does not drag at the critical moments; it has some
+humour and some grace. Among other things, its gnomic passages
+represent very fairly the dominant heroic ideas of courage and good
+temper; it may be appealed to for the humanities of the <i>chansons de
+geste</i>, expressed in a more fluent and less emphatic shape than
+<i>Roland</i>. The characters are taken very lightly, but at least they are
+not obtuse and awkward. If there is not much dramatic subtlety, there
+is a recognition and appreciation of different aspects of the same
+character. The story proceeds like an Icelandic Saga, through
+different phases of a long family quarrel, springing from a
+well-marked origin; foreshadowed and accompanied, as in many of the
+Sagas, by the hereditary felonious character of the one party, which
+yet is not blackened too much nor wholly unrelieved.</p>
+
+<p>As in many of the Icelandic stories, there is a stronger dramatic
+interest in the adversary, the wrong side, than in the heroes. As with
+Kari and Flosi in <i>Nj&#225;la</i>, as with Kjartan and Bolli in <i>Laxd&#230;la</i>, and
+with Sigmund and Thrond of Gata in <i>F&#230;reyinga</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> <i>Saga</i>, so in the story
+of Garin it is Fromont the enemy whose case is followed with most
+attention, because it is less simple than that of the heroes, Garin of
+Lorraine and Begon his brother. The character of Fromont shows the
+true observation, as well as the inadequate and sketchy handling, of
+the French epic school. Fromont is in the wrong; all the trouble
+follows from his original misconduct, when he refused to stand by
+Garin in a war of defence against the Moors:&#8212;</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+Iluec comence li grans borroflemens.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But Fromont's demeanour afterwards is not that of a traitor and a
+felon, such as his father was. He belongs to a felonious house; he is
+the son of Hardr&#233;, one of the notorious traitors of French epic
+tradition; but he is less than half-hearted in his own cause, always
+lamentable, perplexed, and peevish, always trying to be just, and
+always dragged further into iniquity by the mischief-makers among his
+friends. This idea of a distracted character is worked out as well as
+was possible for a poet of that school, in a passage of narrative
+which represents more than one of the good qualities of French epic
+poetry,&#8212;the story of the death of Begon, and the vengeance exacted
+for him by his brother Garin. This episode shows how the French poets
+could deal with matter like that of the Sagas. The story is well told,
+fluently and clearly; it contains some fine expressions of heroic
+sentiment, and a good fight, as well as the ineffectual sorrows and
+good intentions of the anti-hero Fromont, with all the usual tissue of
+violence which goes along with a feud in heroic narrative, when the
+feud is regarded as something impersonal and fatal, outside the wishes
+of the agents in it.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said here that although the story of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> Garin and of the feud
+between the house of Lorraine and their enemies is long drawn out and
+copious in details, it is not confused, but falls into a few definite
+episodes of warfare, with intervals of truce and apparent
+reconciliation. Of these separate acts in the tragedy, the <i>Death of
+Begon</i> is the most complete in itself; the most varied, as well as the
+most compact. The previous action is for a modern taste too much
+occupied with the commonplaces of epic warfare, Homeric combats in the
+field, such as need the heroic motives of Maldon or Roncesvalles to
+make them interesting. In the story of the <i>Death of Begon</i> there is a
+change of scene from the common epic battlefield; the incidents are
+not taken from the common stock of battle-poetry, and the Homeric
+supernumeraries are dismissed.</p>
+
+<p>This episode<a name="FNanchor_73_73" id="FNanchor_73_73"></a><a href="#Footnote_73_73" class="fnanchor">[73]</a> begins after an interval in the feud, and tells how
+Begon one day thought of his brother Garin whom he had not seen for
+seven years and more (the business of the feud having been slack for
+so long), and how he set out for the East country to pay his brother a
+visit, with the chance of a big boar-hunt on the way. The opening
+passage is a very complete and lively selection from the experience
+and the sentiments of the heroic age; it represents the old heroic
+temper and the heroic standard of value, with, at the same time, a
+good deal of the gentler humanities.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>One day Begon was in his castle of Belin; at his side was
+the Duchess Beatrice, and he kissed her on the mouth: he saw
+his two sons coming through the hall (so the story runs).
+The elder was named Gerin and the younger Hernaudin; the one
+was twelve and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> other was ten years old, and with them
+went six noble youths, running and leaping with one another,
+playing and laughing and taking their sport.</p>
+
+<p>The Duke saw them and began to sigh, and his lady questioned
+him:&#8212;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ah, my Lord Duke, why do you ponder thus? Gold and silver
+you have in your coffers; falcons on their perch, and furs
+of the vair and the grey, and mules and palfreys; and well
+have you trodden down your enemies: for six days' journey
+round you have no neighbour so stout but he will come to
+your levy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Said the Duke: &quot;Madame, you have spoken true, save in one
+thing. Riches are not in the vair and the grey, nor in
+money, nor in mules and horses, but riches are in kinsmen
+and friends: the heart of a man is worth all the gold in the
+land. Do you not remember how I was assailed and beset at
+our home-coming? and but for my friends how great had been
+my shame that day! Pepin has set me in these marches where I
+have none of my near friends save Rigaut and Hervi his
+father; I have no brother but one, Garin the Lothering, and
+full seven years are past and gone that I have not seen him,
+and for that I am grieved and vexed and ill at ease. Now I
+will set off to see my brother Garin, and the child Girbert
+his son that I have never seen. Of the woods of Vicogne and
+of St. Bertin I hear news that there is a boar there; I will
+run him down, please the Lord, and will bring the head to
+Garin, a wonder to look upon, for of its like never man
+heard tell.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<p>Begon's combined motives are all alike honest, and his rhetoric is as
+sound as that of Sarpedon or of Gunnar. Nor is there any reason to
+suppose, any more than in the case of Byrhtnoth, that what is striking
+in the poem is due to its comparative lateness, and to its
+opportunities of borrowing from new discoveries in literature. If that
+were so, then we might find similar things among the newer fashions
+of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> the contemporary twelfth-century literature; but in fact one does
+not find in the works of the romantic school the same kind of humanity
+as in this scene. The melancholy of Begon at the thought of his
+isolation&#8212;&quot;Bare is back without brother behind it&quot;&#8212;is an adaptation
+of a common old heroic motive which is obscured by other more showy
+ideas in the romances. The conditions of life are here essentially
+those of the heroic age, an age which has no particular ideas of its
+own, which lives merely on such ideas as are struck out in the
+collision of lawless heavy bodies, in that heroic strife which is the
+parent of all things, and, among the rest, of the ideas of loyalty,
+fellowship, fair dealing, and so on. There is nothing romantic or
+idealist in Begon; he is merely an honest country gentleman, rather
+short of work.</p>
+
+<p>He continues in the same strain, after the duchess has tried to
+dissuade him. She points out to him the risk he runs by going to hunt
+on his enemy's marches,&#8212;</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+C'est en la marche Fromont le po&#235;sti,<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>&#8212;and tells him of her foreboding that he will never return alive. His
+answer is like that of Hector to Polydamas:&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Diex! dist il, dame, merveilles avez dit:<br />
+Ja mar croiroie sorciere ne devin;<br />
+Par aventure vient li biens el pa&#239;s,<br />
+Je ne lairoie, por tot l'or que Diex fist,<br />
+Que je n'i voise, que talens m'en est prins.<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>The hunting of the boar is as good as anything of its kind in history,
+and it is impossible to read it without wishing that it had been
+printed a few years earlier to be read by Sir Walter Scott. He would
+have applauded as no one else can this story of the chase and of the
+hunter separated from his com<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>panions in the forest. There is one line
+especially in the lament for Begon after his death which is enough by
+itself to prove the soundness of the French poet's judgment, and his
+right to a welcome at Abbotsford: &quot;This was a true man; his dogs loved
+him&quot;:&#8212;</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+Gentis hons fu, moult l'amoient si chien.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Begon came by his death in the greenwood. The forester found him there
+and reported him to Fromont's seneschal, who called out six of his men
+to go and take the poacher; and along with them went Thibaut,
+Fromont's nephew, an old rival of Begon. Begon set his back to an
+aspen tree and killed four of the churls and beat off the rest, but
+was killed himself at last with an arrow.</p>
+
+<p>The four dead men were brought home and Begon's horse was led away:&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+En une estable menerent le destrier<br />
+Fronce et hennit et si grate des pies<br />
+Que nus de char ne li ouse aprochier.<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>Begon was left lying where he fell and his three dogs came back to
+him:&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Seul ont Begon en la forest laissi&#233;:<br />
+Et jouste lui revindrent si trois chien,<br />
+Hulent et braient com fuissent enragi&#233;.<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>This most spirited passage of action and adventure shows the poet at
+his best; it is the sort of thing that he understands, and he carries
+it through without a mistake. It is followed by an attempt at another
+theme where something more is required of the author, and his success
+is not so perfect. He is drawn into the field of tragic emotion. Here,
+though his means are hardly sufficient for elaborate work, he sketches
+well. The character of Fromont when the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> news of his opponent's death
+is brought to him comes out as something of a different value from the
+sheer barbarism of <i>Raoul de Cambrai</i>. The narrative is light and
+wanting in depth, but there is no untruth and no dulness in the
+conception, and the author's meaning is perfectly clear. Fromont is
+different from the felons of his own household. Fromont is the
+adversary, but he is a gentleman. Even when he knows no more of the
+event than that a trespasser has been killed in the forest, he sends
+his men to bring in the body;&#8212;</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+Frans hons de l'autre doient avoir piti&#233;<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>&#8212;and when he sees who it is (<i>vif l'ot v&#233;u, mort le reconnut bien</i>)
+he breaks out into strong language against the churls who have killed
+the most courteous knight that ever bore arms. Mingled with this
+sentiment is the thought of all the trouble to come from the revival
+of the feud, but his vexation does not spring from mere self-interest.
+Fromondin his son is also angry with Thibaut his cousin; Thibaut ought
+to be flayed alive for his foul stroke. But while Fromondin is
+thinking of the shame of the murder which will be laid to the account
+of his father's house, Fromont's thought is more generous, a thought
+of respect and regret for his enemy. The tragedy of the feud continues
+after this; as before, Fromont is involved by his irrepressible
+kinsmen, and nothing comes of his good thoughts and intentions.</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Our wills and fates do so contrary run,<br />
+Our thoughts are ours, the ends none of our own.<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>This moral axiom is understood by the French author, and in an
+imaginative, not a didactic way, though his imagination is not strong
+enough to make much of it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In this free, rapid, and unforced narrative, that nothing might be
+wanting of the humanities of the French heroic poetry, there is added
+the lament for Begon, by his brother and his wife. Garin's lament is
+what the French epic can show in comparison with the famous lament for
+Lancelot at the end of the <i>Mort d'Arthur</i>:&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Ha! sire Begues, li Loherains a dit<br />
+Frans chevaliers, corajeus et hardis!<br />
+Fel et angris contre vos anemis<br />
+Et dols et simples a trestoz vos amis!<br />
+Tant mar i fustes, biaus fr&#232;res, biaus amis!<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>Here the advantage is with the English romantic author, who has
+command of a more subtle and various eloquence. On the other hand, the
+scene of the grief of the Duchess Beatrice, when Begon is brought to
+his own land, and his wife and his sons come out to meet him, shows a
+different point of view from romance altogether, and a different
+dramatic sense. The whole scene of the conversation between Beatrice
+and Garin is written with a steady hand; it needs no commentary to
+bring out the pathos or the dramatic truth of the consolation offered
+by Garin.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>She falls fainting, she cannot help herself; and when she
+awakens her lamenting is redoubled. She mourns over her
+sons, Hernaudin and Gerin: &quot;Children, you are orphans; dead
+is he that begot you, dead is he that was your
+stay!&quot;&#8212;&quot;Peace, madame,&quot; said Garin the Duke, &quot;this is a
+foolish speech and a craven. You, for the sake of the land
+that is in your keeping, for your lineage and your lordly
+friends&#8212;some gentle knight will take you to wife and
+cherish you; but it falls to me to have long sorrow. The
+more I have of silver and fine gold, the more will be my
+grief and vexation of spirit. Hernaudin and Gerin are my
+nephews; it will be mine to suffer many a war for them, to
+watch late, and to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> rise up early.&quot;&#8212;&quot;Thank you, uncle,&quot;
+said Hernaudin: &quot;Lord! why have I not a little habergeon of
+my own? I would help you against your enemies!&quot; The Duke
+hears him, and takes him in his arms and kisses the child.
+&quot;By God, fair nephew, you are stout and brave, and like my
+brother in face and mouth, the rich Duke, on whom God have
+mercy!&quot; When this was said, they go to bury the Duke in the
+chapel beyond Belin; the pilgrims see it to this day, as
+they come back from Galicia, from St. James.<a name="FNanchor_74_74" id="FNanchor_74_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74_74" class="fnanchor">[74]</a></p></div>
+
+<p><i>Roland</i>, <i>Raoul de Cambrai</i>, and <i>Garin le Loherain</i> represent three
+kinds of French heroic poetry. <i>Roland</i> is the more purely heroic
+kind, in which the interest is concentrated on the passion of the
+hero, and the hero is glorified by every possible means of patriotism,
+religion, and the traditional ethics of battle, with the scenery and
+the accompaniments all chosen so as to bring him into relief and give
+him an ideal or symbolical value, like that of the statues of the
+gods. <i>Raoul</i> and <i>Garin</i>, contrasted with <i>Roland</i>, are two varieties
+of another species; namely, of the heroic poetry which (like the
+<i>Odyssey</i> and the Icelandic stories) represents the common life of an
+heroic age, without employing the ideal motives of great causes,
+religious or patriotic, and without giving to the personages<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> any
+great representative or symbolical import. The subjects of <i>Raoul</i> and
+<i>Garin</i> belong to the same order. The difference between them is that
+the author of the first is only half awake to the chances offered by
+his theme. The theme is well chosen, not disabled, like so many
+romantic plots, by an inherent fallacy of ethics or imagination; a
+story that shapes itself naturally, if the author has the wit to see
+it. The author of <i>Raoul de Cambrai</i>, unhappily, has &quot;no more wit than
+a Christian or an ordinary man,&quot; and leaves his work encumbered with
+his dulness of perception; an evidence of the fertility of the heroic
+age in good subjects, and of the incompetence of some of the artists.
+<i>Garin</i>, on the other hand, shows how the common subject-matter might
+be worked up by a man of intelligence, rather discursive than
+imaginative, but alive to the meaning of his story, and before
+everything a continuous narrator, with the gift of natural sequence in
+his adventures. He relates as if he were following the course of
+events in his own memory, with simplicity and lucidity, qualities
+which were not beyond the compass of the old French verse and diction.
+He does not stop to elaborate his characters; he takes them perhaps
+too easily. But his lightness of spirit saves him from the untruth of
+<i>Raoul de Cambrai</i>; and while his ethics are the commonplaces of the
+heroic age, these commonplaces are not mere formulas or cant; they are
+vividly realised.</p>
+
+<p>There is no need to multiply examples in order to prove the capacity
+of French epic for the same kind of subjects as those of the Sagas;
+that is, for the representation of strenuous and unruly life in a
+comprehensive and liberal narrative, noble in spirit and not much
+hampered by conventional nobility or dignity.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>Roland</i> is the great achievement of French epic, and there are other
+poems, also, not far removed from the severity of <i>Roland</i> and
+inspired by the same patriotic and religious ardour. But the poem of
+<i>Garin of Lorraine</i> (which begins with the defence of France against
+the infidels, but very soon passes to the business of the great
+feud&#8212;its proper theme), though it is lacking in the political
+motives, not to speak of the symbolical imagination of <i>Roland</i>, is
+significant in another way, because though much later in date, though
+written at a time when Romance was prevalent, it is both archaic in
+its subject and also comprehensive in its treatment. It has something
+like the freedom of movement and the ease which in the Icelandic Sagas
+go along with similar antique subjects. The French epic poetry is not
+all of it made sublime by the ideas of <i>Roland</i>; there is still scope
+for the free representation of life in different moods, with character
+as the dominant interest.</p>
+
+<p>It should not be forgotten that the French epic has room for comedy,
+not merely in the shape of &quot;comic relief,&quot; though that unhappily is
+sometimes favoured by the <i>chansons de geste</i>, and by the romances as
+well, but in the &quot;humours&quot; inseparable from all large and unpedantic
+fiction.</p>
+
+<p>A good deal of credit on this account may be claimed for Galopin, the
+reckless humorist of the party of Garin of Lorraine, and something
+rather less for Rigaut the Villain Unwashed, another of Garin's
+friends. This latter appears to be one of the same family as Hreidar
+the Simple, in the Saga of Harald Hardrada; a figure of popular
+comedy, one of the lubbers who turn out something different from their
+promise. Clumsy strength and good-nature make one of the most
+elementary compounds, and may<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> easily be misused (as in <i>Rainouart</i>)
+where the author has few scruples and no dramatic consistency. Galopin
+is a more singular humorist, a ribald and a prodigal, yet of gentle
+birth, and capable of good service when he can be got away from the
+tavern.</p>
+
+<p>There are several passages in the <i>chansons de geste</i> where, as with
+<i>Rainouart</i>, the fun is of a grotesque and gigantic kind, like the fun
+to be got out of the giants in the Northern mythology, and the trolls
+in the Northern popular tales. The heathen champion Corsolt in the
+<i>Coronemenz Loo&#239;s</i> makes good comedy of this sort, when he accosts the
+Pope: &quot;Little man! why is your head shaved?&quot; and explains to him his
+objection to the Pope's religion: &quot;You are not well advised to talk to
+me of God: he has done me more wrong than any other man in the world,&quot;
+and so on.<a name="FNanchor_75_75" id="FNanchor_75_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_75_75" class="fnanchor">[75]</a></p>
+
+<p>Also, in a less exaggerated way, there is some appreciation of the
+humour to be found in the con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span>trast between the churl and the knight,
+and their different points of view; as in the passage of the <i>Charroi
+de Nismes</i> where William of Orange questions the countryman about the
+condition of the city under its Saracen masters, and is answered with
+information about the city tolls and the price of bread.<a name="FNanchor_76_76" id="FNanchor_76_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76_76" class="fnanchor">[76]</a> It must
+be admitted, however, that this slight passage of comedy is far
+outdone by the conversation in the romance of <i>Aucassin and
+Nicolette</i>, between Aucassin and the countryman, where the author of
+that story seems to get altogether beyond the conventions of his own
+time into the region of Chaucer, or even somewhere near the forest of
+Arden. The comedy of the <i>chansons de geste</i> is easily satisfied with
+plain and robust practical jokes. Yet it counts for something in the
+picture, and it might be possible, in a detailed criticism of the
+epics, to distinguish between the comic incidents that have an
+artistic value and intention, and those that are due merely to the
+rudeness of those common minstrels who are accused (by their rivals in
+epic poetry) of corrupting and debasing the texts.</p>
+
+<p>There were many ways in which the French epic was degraded at the
+close of its course&#8212;by dilution<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> and expansion, by the growth of a
+kind of dull parasitic, sapless language over the old stocks, by the
+general failure of interest, and the transference of favour to other
+kinds of literature. Reading came into fashion, and the minstrels lost
+their welcome in the castles, and had to betake themselves to more
+vulgar society for their livelihood. At the same time, epic made a
+stand against the new modes and a partial compliance with them; and
+the <i>chansons de geste</i> were not wholly left to the vagrant reciters,
+but were sometimes copied out fair in handsome books, and held their
+own with the romances.</p>
+
+<p>The compromise between epic and romance in old French literature is
+most interesting where romance has invaded a story of the simpler kind
+like <i>Raoul de Cambrai</i>. Stories of war against the infidel, stories
+like those of William of Orange, were easily made romantic. The poem
+of the <i>Prise d'Orange</i>, for example, an addition to this cycle, is a
+pure romance of adventure, and a good one, though it has nothing of
+the more solid epic in it. Where the action is carried on between the
+knights of France and the Moors, one is prepared for a certain amount
+of wonder; the palaces and dungeons of the Moors are the right places
+for strange things to happen, and the epic of the defence of France
+goes easily off into night excursions and disguises: the Moorish
+princess also is there, to be won by the hero. All this is natural;
+but it is rather more paradoxical to find the epic of family feuds,
+originally sober, grave, and business-like, turning more and more
+extravagant, as it does in the <i>Four Sons of Aymon</i>, which in its
+original form, no doubt, was something like the more serious parts of
+<i>Raoul de Cambrai</i> or of the <i>Lorrains</i>, but which in the extant
+version is expanded and made wonderful, a story of wild adventures,
+yet with traces<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> still of its origin among the realities of the heroic
+age, the common matters of practical interest to heroes.</p>
+
+<p>The case of <i>Huon of Bordeaux</i> is more curious, for there the original
+sober story has been preserved, and it is one of the best and most
+coherent of them all,<a name="FNanchor_77_77" id="FNanchor_77_77"></a><a href="#Footnote_77_77" class="fnanchor">[77]</a> till it is suddenly changed by the sound of
+Oberon's horn and passes out of the real world altogether.</p>
+
+<p>The lines of the earlier part of the story are worth following, for
+there is no better story among the French poems that represent the
+ruder heroic age&#8212;a simple story of feudal rivalries and jealousies,
+surviving in this strange way as an introduction to the romance of
+<i>Oberon</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The Emperor Charlemagne, one hundred and twenty-five years old, but
+not particularly reverend, holds a court at Paris one Whitsuntide and
+asks to be relieved of his kingdom. His son Charlot is to succeed him.
+Charlot is worthless, the companion of traitors and disorderly
+persons; he has made enough trouble already in embroiling Ogier the
+Dane with the Emperor. Charlemagne is infatuated and will have his son
+made king:&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Si m'a&#239;t Diex, tu auras si franc fiet<br />
+Com Damediex qui tot puet justicier<br />
+Tient Paradis de regne droiturier!<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>Then the traitor Amaury de la Tor de Rivier gets up and brings forward
+the case of Bordeaux, which has rendered no service for seven years,
+since the two brothers, Huon and Gerard, were left orphans. Amaury
+proposes that the orphans should be dispossessed. Charlemagne agrees
+at once, and with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span>draws his assent again (a painful spectacle!) when
+it is suggested to him that Huon and his brother have omitted their
+duties in pure innocence, and that their father Sewin was always
+loyal.</p>
+
+<p>Messengers are sent to bring Huon and Gerard to Paris, and every
+chance is to be given them of proving their good faith to the Emperor.</p>
+
+<p>This is not what Amaury the traitor wants; he goes to Charlot and
+proposes an ambuscade to lie in wait for the two boys and get rid of
+them; his real purpose being to get rid of the king's son as well as
+of Huon of Bordeaux.</p>
+
+<p>The two boys set out, and on the way fall in with the Abbot of Clugni,
+their father's cousin, a strong-minded prelate, who accompanies them.
+Outside Paris they come to the ambush, and the king's son is
+despatched by Amaury to encounter them. What follows is an admirable
+piece of narrative. Gerard rides up to address Charlot; Charlot rides
+at him as he is turning back to report to Huon and the Abbot, and
+Gerard who is unarmed falls severely wounded. Then Huon, also unarmed,
+rides at Charlot, though his brother calls out to him: &quot;I see helmets
+flashing there among the bushes.&quot; With his scarlet mantle rolled round
+his arm he meets the lance of Charlot safely, and with his sword, as
+he passes, cuts through the helmet and head of his adversary.</p>
+
+<p>This is good enough for Amaury, and he lets Huon and his party ride on
+to the city, while he takes up the body of Charlot on a shield and
+follows after.</p>
+
+<p>Huon comes before the Emperor and tells his story as far as he knows
+it; he does not know that the felon he has killed is the Emperor's
+son. Charlemagne gives solemn absolution to Huon. Then appears Amaury
+with a false story, making<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> Huon the aggressor. Charlemagne forgets
+all about the absolution and snatches up a knife, and is with
+difficulty calmed by his wise men.</p>
+
+<p>The ordeal of battle has to decide between the two parties; there are
+elaborate preparations and preliminaries, obviously of the most vivid
+interest to the audience. The demeanour of the Abbot of Clugni ought
+not to be passed over: he vows that if Heaven permits any mischance to
+come upon Huon, he, the Abbot, will make it good on St. Peter himself,
+and batter his holy shrine till the gold flies.</p>
+
+<p>In the combat Huon is victorious; but unhappily a last treacherous
+effort of his enemy, after he has yielded and confessed, makes Huon
+cut off his head in too great a hurry before the confession is heard
+by the Emperor or any witnesses:&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Le teste fist voler ens el larris:<br />
+Hues le voit, mais ce fu sans jehir.<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The head went flying over the lea, but it had no more words
+to speak.</p>
+
+<p>Huon is not forgiven by the Emperor; the Emperor spares his life,
+indeed, but sends him on a hopeless expedition.</p>
+
+<p>And there the first part of the story ends. The present version is
+dated in the early part of the reign of St. Louis; it is contemporary
+with Snorri Sturluson and Sturla his nephew, and exhibits, though not
+quite in the Icelandic manner, the principal motives of early unruly
+society, without much fanciful addition, and with a very strong hold
+upon the tragic situation, and upon the types of character. As in
+<i>Raoul de Cambrai</i>, right and wrong are mixed; the Emperor has a real
+grievance against Huon, and Huon, with little fault of his own, is put
+apparently in the wrong. The interests involved are of the strongest
+possible. There<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> was not a single lord among those to whom the
+minstrel repeated his story who did not know that he might have to
+look out for encroachments and injustice&#8212;interference at any
+rate&#8212;from the king, and treachery from his neighbours. No one hoped
+to leave his castles and lands in peace to his son, who did not also
+fear that his son might be left defenceless and his lands exposed to
+competition; a fear most touchingly expressed in the lament of William
+of Poitiers, when he set out on the first Crusade.<a name="FNanchor_78_78" id="FNanchor_78_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78_78" class="fnanchor">[78]</a></p>
+
+<p>Whatever general influences of law or politics or social economy are
+supposed to be at work in the story of <i>Huon of Bordeaux</i>,&#8212;and all
+this earlier part of it is a story of feudal politics and legal
+problems,&#8212;these influences were also present in the real world in
+which the maker and the hearers of the poem had their life. It is
+plain and serious dealing with matter of fact.</p>
+
+<p>But after the ordeal of battle in which Huon kills the traitor, the
+tone changes with great abruptness and a new story begins.</p>
+
+<p>The commission laid upon Huon by the implacable and doting Emperor is
+nothing less than that which afterwards was made a byword for all
+impossible enterprises&#8212;&quot;to take the Great Turk by the beard.&quot; He is
+to go to Babylon and, literally, to beard the Admiral there, and carry
+off the Admiral's daughter. The audience is led away into the wide
+world of Romance. Huon goes to the East by way of Rome and
+Brindisi&#8212;naturally enough&#8212;but the real world ends at Brindisi;
+beyond that everything is magical.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h1>ROMANCE</h1>
+
+<h2>AND THE OLD FRENCH ROMANTIC SCHOOLS</h2>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>ROMANCE</h3>
+
+<h4>AND THE OLD FRENCH ROMANTIC SCHOOLS</h4>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Romance</span> in many varieties is to be found inherent in Epic and in
+Tragedy; for some readers, possibly, the great and magnificent forms
+of poetry are most attractive when from time to time they forget their
+severity, and when the tragic strength is allowed to rest, as in the
+fairy interludes of the <i>Odyssey</i>, or the similes of the clouds,
+winds, and mountain-waters in the <i>Iliad</i>. If Romance be the name for
+the sort of imagination that possesses the mystery and the spell of
+everything remote and unattainable, then Romance is to be found in the
+old Northern heroic poetry in larger measure than any epic or tragic
+solemnity, and in no small measure also even in the steady course of
+the Icelandic histories. Possibly Romance is in its best place here,
+as an element in the epic harmony; perhaps the romantic mystery is
+most mysterious when it is found as something additional among the
+graver and more positive affairs of epic or tragic personages. The
+occasional visitations of the dreaming moods of romance, in the middle
+of a great epic or a great tragedy, are often more romantic than the
+literature which is nothing but romance from beginning to end. The
+strongest poets, Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, have along with their
+strong reasoning enough of the lighter and fainter grace and charm to
+be the despair<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> of all the &quot;romantic schools&quot; in the world. In the
+Icelandic prose stories, as has been seen already, there is a similar
+combination. These stories contain the strongest imaginative work of
+the Middle Ages before Dante. Along with this there is found in them
+occasionally the uncertain and incalculable play of the other, the
+more airy mode of imagination; and the romance of the strong Sagas is
+more romantic than that of the medieval works which have no other
+interest to rely upon, or of all but a very few.</p>
+
+<p>One of the largest and plainest facts of medieval history is the
+change of literature in the twelfth century, and the sudden and
+exuberant growth and progress of a number of new poetical forms;
+particularly the courtly lyric that took shape in Provence, and passed
+into the tongues of Italy, France, and Germany, and the French romance
+which obeyed the same general inspiration as the Proven&#231;al poetry, and
+was equally powerful as an influence on foreign nations. The French
+Romantic Schools of the twelfth century are among the most definite
+and the most important appearances even in that most wonderful age;
+though it is irrational to contrast them with the other great
+historical movements of the time, because there is no real separation
+between them. French romance is part of the life of the time, and the
+life of the twelfth century is reproduced in French romance.</p>
+
+<p>The rise of these new forms of story makes an unmistakable difference
+between the age that preceded them and everything that comes after.
+They are a new, fresh, and prosperous beginning in literature, and
+they imply the failure of the older manner of thought, the older
+fashion of imagination, represented in the epic literature of France,
+not to speak of the various Teutonic forms of heroic verse and prose
+that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span> are related to the epic of France only by a remote common
+ancestry, and a certain general likeness in the conditions of &quot;heroic&quot;
+life.</p>
+
+<p>The defeat of French epic, as has been noted already, was slow and
+long resisted; but the victory of romance was inevitable. Together
+with the influence of the Proven&#231;al lyric idealism, it determined the
+forms of modern literature, long after the close of the Middle Ages.
+The change of fashion in the twelfth century is as momentous and
+far-reaching in its consequences as that to which the name
+&quot;Renaissance&quot; is generally appropriated. The later Renaissance,
+indeed, in what concerns imaginative literature, makes no such abrupt
+and sudden change of fashion as was made in the twelfth century. The
+poetry and romance of the Renaissance follow naturally upon the
+literature of the Middle Ages; for the very good reason that it was
+the Middle Ages which began, even in their dark beginnings, the modern
+study of the humanities, and in the twelfth century made a remarkable
+and determined effort to secure the inheritance of ancient poetry for
+the advantage of the new tongues and their new forms of verse. There
+is no such line of division between Ariosto and Chrestien of Troyes as
+there is between Chrestien and the primitive epic.</p>
+
+<p>The romantic schools of the twelfth century are the result and
+evidence of a great unanimous movement, the origins of which may be
+traced far back in the general conditions of education and learning,
+in the influence of Latin authors, in the interchange of popular
+tales. They are among the most characteristic productions of the most
+impressive, varied, and characteristic period in the Middle Ages; of
+that century which broke, decisively, with the old &quot;heroic&quot;
+traditions, and made the division between the heroic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span> and the
+chivalric age. When the term &quot;medieval&quot; is used in modern talk, it
+almost always denotes something which first took definite shape in the
+twelfth century. The twelfth century is the source of most of the
+&quot;medieval&quot; influences in modern art and literature, and the French
+romances of that age are the original authorities for most of the
+&quot;Gothic&quot; ornaments adopted in modern romantic schools.</p>
+
+<p>The twelfth-century French romances form a definite large group, with
+many ranks and divisions, some of which are easily distinguished,
+while all are of great historical interest.</p>
+
+<p>One common quality, hardly to be mistaken, is that which marks them
+all as belonging to a romantic <i>school</i>, in almost all the modern
+senses of that term. That is to say, they are not the spontaneous
+product of an uncritical and ingenuous imagination; they are not the
+same sort of thing as the popular stories on which many of them are
+founded; they are the literary work of authors more or less
+sophisticated, on the look-out for new sensations and new literary
+devices. It is useless to go to those French books in order to catch
+the first fresh jet of romantic fancy, the &quot;silly sooth&quot; of the golden
+age. One might as well go to the <i>L&#233;gende des Si&#232;cles</i>. Most of the
+romance of the medieval schools is already hot and dusty and fatigued.
+It has come through the mills of a thousand active literary men, who
+know their business, and have an eye to their profits. Medieval
+romance, in its most characteristic and most influential form, is
+almost as factitious and professional as modern Gothic architecture.
+The twelfth-century dealers in romantic commonplaces are as fully
+conscious of the market value of their goods as any later poet who has
+borrowed from them their giants and enchanters, their forests and
+their magic castles;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> and these and similar properties are used in the
+twelfth century with the same kind of literary sharpness, the same
+attention to the demands of the &quot;reading public,&quot; as is shown by the
+various poets and novelists who have waited on the successes, and
+tried to copy the methods, of Goethe, Scott, or Victor Hugo. Pure
+Romance, such as is found in the old Northern poems, is very rare in
+the French stories of the twelfth century; the magical touch and the
+sense of mystery, and all the things that are associated with the name
+romance, when that name is applied to the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>, or <i>La
+Belle Dame sans Merci</i>, or the <i>Lady of Shalott</i>, are generally absent
+from the most successful romances of the great medieval romantic age,
+full though they may be of all the forms of chivalrous devotion and
+all the most wonderful romantic machines. Most of them are as
+different from the true irresistible magic of fancy as <i>Thalaba</i> from
+<i>Kubla Khan</i>. The name &quot;romantic school&quot; is rightly applicable to them
+and their work, for almost the last thing that is produced in a
+&quot;romantic school&quot; is the infallible and indescribable touch of
+romance. A &quot;romantic school&quot; is a company for the profitable working
+of Broceliande, an organised attempt to &quot;open up&quot; the Enchanted
+Ground; such, at least, is the appearance of a great deal of the
+romantic literature of the early part of the nineteenth century, and
+of its forerunner in the twelfth. There is this difference between the
+two ages, that the medieval romanticists are freer and more original
+than the moderns who made a business out of tales of terror and
+wonder, and tried to fatten their lean kine on the pastures of
+&quot;Gothic&quot; or of Oriental learning.</p>
+
+<p>The romance-writers of the twelfth century, though they did much to
+make romance into a mechanic art, though they reduced the game to a
+system and left<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> the different romantic combinations and conventions
+within the reach of almost any 'prentice hand, were yet in their way
+original explorers. Though few of them got out of their materials the
+kind of effect that appeals to us now most strongly, and though we
+think we can see what they missed in their opportunities, yet they
+were not the followers of any great man of their own time, and they
+chose their own way freely, not as bungling imitators of a greater
+artist. It is a disappointment to find that romance is rarely at its
+finest in the works that technically have the best right in the world
+to be called by that name. Nevertheless, the work that is actually
+found there is interesting in its own way, and historically of an
+importance which does not need to be emphasised.</p>
+
+<p>The true romantic interest is very unequally distributed over the
+works of the Middle Ages, and there is least of it in the authors who
+are most representative of the &quot;age of chivalry.&quot; There is a
+disappointment prepared for any one who looks in the greater romantic
+authors of the twelfth century for the music of the <i>Faery Queene</i> or
+<i>La Belle Dame sans Merci</i>. There is more of the pure romantic element
+in the poems of Brynhild, in the story of Njal, in the <i>Song of
+Roland</i>, than in the famous romances of Chrestien of Troyes or any of
+his imitators, though they have all the wonders of the Isle of Britain
+at their command, though they have the very story of Tristram and the
+very mystery of the Grail to quicken them and call them out. Elegance,
+fluency, sentiment, romantic adventures are common, but for words like
+those of Hervor at the grave of her father, or of the parting between
+Brynhild and Sigurd, or of Helgi and Sigrun, it would be vain to
+search in the romances of Benoit de Sainte More or of Chrestien. Yet
+these are the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> masters of the art of romance when it was fresh and
+strong, a victorious fashion.</p>
+
+<p>If the search be continued further, the search for that kind of
+imaginative beauty which these authors do not give, it will not be
+unsuccessful. The greater authors of the twelfth century have more
+affinity to the &quot;heroic romance&quot; of the school of the <i>Grand Cyrus</i>
+than to the dreams of Spenser or Coleridge. But, while this is the
+case with the most distinguished members of the romantic school, it is
+not so with all the rest. The magic that is wanting to the clear and
+elegant narrative of Benoit and Chrestien will be found elsewhere; it
+will be found in one form in the mystical prose of the <i>Queste del St.
+Graal</i>&#8212;a very different thing from Chrestien's <i>Perceval</i>&#8212;it will be
+found, again and again, in the prose of Sir Thomas Malory; it will be
+found in many ballads and ballad burdens, in <i>William and Margaret</i>,
+in <i>Binnorie</i>, in the <i>Wife of Usher's Well</i>, in the <i>Rime of the
+Count Arnaldos</i>, in the <i>K&#246;nigskinder</i>; it will be found in the most
+beautiful story of the Middle Ages, <i>Aucassin and Nicolette</i>; one of
+the few perfectly beautiful stories in the world, about which there is
+no need, in England at any rate, to say anything in addition to the
+well-known passages in which it has been praised. <i>Aucassin and
+Nicolette</i> cannot be made into a representative medieval romance:
+there is nothing else like it; and the qualities that make it what it
+is are the opposite of the rhetorical self-possession, the correct and
+deliberate narrative of Chrestien and his school. It contains the
+quintessence of romantic imagination, but it is quite unlike the most
+fashionable and successful romances.</p>
+
+<p>There are several stages in the history of the great Romantic School,
+as well as several distinct sources<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> of interest. The value of the
+best works of the school consists in their representation of the
+passion of love. They turn the psychology of the courtly amatory poets
+into narrative. Chaucer's address to the old poets,&#8212;&quot;Ye lovers that
+can make of sentiment,&quot;&#8212;when he complains that they have left little
+for him to glean in the field of poetry, does not touch the lyrical
+poets only. The narrative poetry of the courteous school is equally
+devoted to the philosophy of love. Narrative poets like Chrestien,
+when they turn to lyric, can change their instrument without changing
+the purport of their verse; lyric or narrative, it has the same
+object, the same duty. So also, two hundred years later, Chaucer
+himself or Froissart may use narrative or lyric forms indifferently,
+and observe the same &quot;courteous&quot; ideal in both.</p>
+
+<p>In the twelfth-century narratives, besides the interest of the
+love-story and all its science, there was the interest of adventure,
+of strange things; and here there is a great diversity among the
+authors, and a perceptible difference between earlier and later usage.
+Courteous sentiment, running through a succession of wonderful
+adventures, is generally enough to make a romance; but there are some
+notable varieties, both in the sentiment and in the incidents. The
+sentiment comes later in the history of literature than the
+adventures; the conventional romantic form of plot may be said to have
+been fixed before the romantic sentiment was brought to its furthest
+refinement. The wonders of romantic story are more easily traced to
+their origin, or at least to some of their earlier forms, than the
+spirit of chivalrous idealism which came in due time to take
+possession of the fabulous stories, and gave new meanings to the lives
+of Tristram and Lancelot.</p>
+
+<p>Variety of incident, remoteness of scene, and all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> the incredible
+things in the world, had been at the disposal of medieval authors long
+before the French Romantic Schools began to define themselves. The
+wonders of the East, especially, had very early come into literature;
+and the Anglo-Saxon <i>Epistle of Alexander</i> seems to anticipate the
+popular taste for Eastern stories, just as the Anglo-Saxon version of
+<i>Apollonius of Tyre</i> anticipates the later importation of Greek
+romance, and the appropriation of classical rhetoric, in the twelfth
+and thirteenth centuries; as the grace and brightness of the old
+English poems of St. Andrew or St. Helen seem to anticipate the
+peculiar charm of some of the French poems of adventures. In French
+literature before the vogue of romance can be said to have begun, and
+before the epic form had lost its supremacy, the poem of the
+<i>Pilgrimage of Charlemagne</i>, one of the oldest extant poems of the
+heroic cycle, is already far gone in subjection to the charm of mere
+unqualified wonder and exaggeration&#8212;rioting in the wonders of the
+East, like the Varangians on their holiday, when they were allowed a
+free day to loot in the Emperor's palace.<a name="FNanchor_79_79" id="FNanchor_79_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79_79" class="fnanchor">[79]</a> The poem of
+Charlemagne's journey to Constantinople is unrefined enough, but the
+later and more elegant romances deal often in the same kind of matter.
+Mere furniture counts for a good deal in the best romances, and they
+are full of descriptions of riches and splendours. The story of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> Troy
+is full of details of various sorts of magnificence; the city of Troy
+itself and &quot;Ylion,&quot; its master-tower, were built by Priam out of all
+kinds of marble, and covered with sculpture all over. Much further on
+in Benoit's poem (l. 14,553) Hector is brought home wounded to a room
+which is described in 300 lines, with particulars of its remarkable
+decorations, especially its four magical images. The tomb of
+Penthesilea (l. 25,690) is too much for the author:&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Sepolture ot et monument<br />
+Tant que se <i>Plenius</i> fust vis<br />
+Ou <i>cil qui fist Apocalis</i><br />
+Nel vos sauroient il retraire:<br />
+Por &#231;o si m'en dei gie bien taire:<br />
+N'en dirai plus, que n'oseroie;<br />
+Trop halte chose enva&#239;roie.<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>Pliny and the author of the Apocalypse are here acknowledged as
+masters and authorities in the art of description. In other places of
+the same work there is a very liberal use of natural history such as
+is common in many versions of the history of Alexander. There is, for
+example, a long description of the precious clothes of Briseide
+(Cressida) at her departure, especially of her mantle, which had been
+given to Calchas by an Indian poet in Upper India. It was made by
+nigromancy, of the skin of the beast <i>Dindialos</i>, which is hunted in
+the shadowless land by the savage people whose name is <i>Cenocefali</i>;
+and the fringes of the mantle were not of the sable, but of a &quot;beast
+of price&quot; that dwells in the water of Paradise:&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Dedans le flum de Paradis<br />
+Sont et conversent, &#231;o set l'on<br />
+Se c'est vrais que nos en lison.<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>Calchas had a tent which had belonged to Pharaoh:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span>&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Diomedes tant la conduit<br />
+Qu'il descendi al paveillon<br />
+Qui fu al riche Pharaon,<br />
+Cil qui noa en la mer roge.<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>In such passages of ornamental description the names of strange people
+and of foreign kings have the same kind of value as the names of
+precious stones, and sometimes they are introduced on their own
+account, apart from the precious work of Arabian or Indian artists. Of
+this sort is the &quot;dreadful sagittary,&quot; who is still retained in
+Shakespeare's <i>Troilus and Cressida</i> on the ultimate authority (when
+it comes to be looked into) of Benoit de Sainte More.<a name="FNanchor_80_80" id="FNanchor_80_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80_80" class="fnanchor">[80]</a></p>
+
+<p>A quotation by M. Gaston Paris (<i>Hist. litt. de la France</i>, xxx. p.
+210), from the unpublished romance of <i>Ider</i> (Edeyrn, son of Nudd),
+shows how this fashion of rich description and allusion had been
+overdone, and how it was necessary, in time, to make a protest against
+it. Kings' pavilions were a favourite subject for rhetoric, and the
+poet of <i>Ider</i> explains that he does not approve of this fashion,
+though he has pavilions of his own, and can describe them if he likes,
+as well as any one:&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Tels diz n'a fors savor de songe,<br />
+Tant en acreissent les paroles:<br />
+Mes jo n'ai cure d'iperboles:<br />
+<i>Yperbole</i> est chose non voire,<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span>Qui ne fu et qui n'est a croire,<br />
+C'en est la difinicion:<br />
+Mes tant di de cest paveillon<br />
+Qu'il n'en a nul soz ciel qu'il vaille.<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Many poets give themselves pains to describe gardens and
+pavilions and other things, and think they are beautifying
+their work, but this is all dreaming and waste of words; I
+will have no such hyperbole. (<i>Hyperbole</i> means by
+definition that which is untrue and incredible.) I will only
+say of this pavilion that there was not its match under
+heaven.</p></div>
+
+<p>The author, by his definition of <i>hyperbole</i><a name="FNanchor_81_81" id="FNanchor_81_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81_81" class="fnanchor">[81]</a> in this place,
+secures an ornamental word with which he consoles himself for his
+abstinence in other respects. This piece of science is itself
+characteristic of the rhetorical enterprise of the Romantic School; of
+the way in which Pliny, Isidore, and other encyclopaedic authors were
+turned into decorations. The taste for such things is common in the
+early and the later Middle Ages; all that the romances did was to give
+a certain amount of finish and neatness to the sort of work that was
+left comparatively rude by the earlier pedants. There many be
+discovered in some writers a preference for classical subjects in
+their ornamental digressions, or for the graceful forms of allegory,
+such as in the next century were collected for the Garden of the Rose,
+and still later for the <i>House of Fame</i>. Thus Chrestien seems to
+assert his superiority<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> of taste and judgment when, instead of
+Oriental work, he gives Enid an ivory saddle carved with the story of
+Aeneas and Dido (<i>Erec</i>, l. 5337); or when, in the same book, Erec's
+coronation mantle, though it is fairy work, bears no embroidered
+designs of Broceliande or Avalon, but four allegorical figures of the
+quadrivial sciences, with a reference by Chrestien to Macrobius as his
+authority in describing them. One function of this Romantic School,
+though not the most important, is to make an immediate literary profit
+out of all accessible books of learning. It was a quick-witted school,
+and knew how to turn quotations and allusions. Much of its art, like
+the art of <i>Euphues</i>, is bestowed in making pedantry look attractive.</p>
+
+<p>The narrative material imported and worked up in the Romantic School
+is, of course, enormously more important than the mere decorations
+taken out of Solinus or Macrobius. It is not, however, with the
+principal masters the most important part of their study. Chrestien,
+for example, often treats his adventures with great levity in
+comparison with the serious psychological passages; the wonder often
+is that he should have used so much of the common stuff of adventures
+in poems where he had a strong commanding interest in the sentiments
+of the personages. There are many irrelevant and unnecessary
+adventures in his <i>Erec</i>, <i>Lancelot</i>, and <i>Yvain</i>, not to speak of his
+unfinished <i>Perceval</i>; while in <i>Cliges</i> he shows that he did not rely
+on the commonplaces of adventure, on the regular machinery of romance,
+and that he might, when he chose, commit himself to a novel almost
+wholly made up of psychology and sentiment. Whatever the explanation
+be in this case, it is plain enough both that the adventures are of
+secondary value as compared with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span> the psychology, in the best
+romances, and that their value, though inferior, is still
+considerable, even in some of the best work of the &quot;courtly makers.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The greatest novelty in the twelfth-century narrative materials was
+due to the Welsh; not that the &quot;matter of Britain&quot; was quite
+overwhelming in extent, or out of proportion to the other stores of
+legend and fable. &quot;The matter of Rome the Great&quot; (not to speak again
+of the old epic &quot;matter of France&quot; and its various later romantic
+developments) included all known antiquity, and it was recruited
+continually by new importations from the East. The &quot;matter of Rome,&quot;
+however, the tales of Thebes and Troy and the wars of Alexander, had
+been known more or less for centuries, and they did not produce the
+same effect as the discovery of the Celtic stories. Rather, it may be
+held that the Welsh stories gave a new value to the classical
+authorities, and suggested new imaginative readings. As Chaucer's
+<i>Troilus</i> in our own time has inspired a new rendering of the <i>Life
+and Death of Jason</i>, so (it would seem) the same story of Jason got a
+new meaning in the twelfth century when it was read by Benoit de
+Sainte More in the light of Celtic romance. Then it was discovered
+that Jason and Medea were no more, and no less, than the adventurer
+and the wizard's daughter, who might play their parts in a story of
+Wales or Brittany. The quest of the Golden Fleece and the labours of
+Jason are all reduced from the rhetoric of Ovid, from their classical
+dignity, to something like what their original shape may have been
+when the story that now is told in Argyll and Connaught of the <i>King's
+Son of Ireland</i> was told or chanted, ages before Homer, of a king's
+son of the Greeks and an enchantress beyond sea. Something indeed, and
+that of the highest consequence, as will be seen, was kept by Benoit
+from his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> reading of the <i>Metamorphoses</i>; the passion of Medea,
+namely. But the story itself is hardly distinguishable in kind from
+<i>Libeaux Desconus</i>. It is not easy to say how far this treatment of
+Jason may be due to the Welsh example of similar stories, and how far
+to the general medieval disrespect for everything in the classics
+except their matter. The Celtic precedents can scarcely have been
+without influence on this very remarkable detection of the &quot;Celtic
+element&quot; in the voyage of the Argonauts, while at the same time Ovid
+ought not to be refused his share in the credit of medieval romantic
+adventure. Virgil, Ovid, and Statius are not to be underrated as
+sources of chivalrous adventure, even in comparison with the
+unquestioned riches of Wales or Ireland.</p>
+
+<p>There is more than one distinct stage in the progress of the Celtic
+influence in France. The culmination of the whole thing is attained
+when Chrestien makes the British story of the capture and rescue of
+Guinevere into the vehicle of his most finished and most courtly
+doctrine of love, as shown in the examples of Lancelot and the Queen.
+Before that there are several earlier kinds of Celtic romance in
+French, and after that comes what for modern readers is more
+attractive than the typical work of Chrestien and his school,&#8212;the
+eloquence of the old French prose, with its languor and its
+melancholy, both in the prose <i>Lancelot</i> and in the <i>Queste del St.
+Graal</i> and <i>Mort Artus</i>. In Chrestien everything is clear and
+positive; in these prose romances, and even more in Malory's English
+rendering of his &quot;French book,&quot; is to be heard the indescribable
+plaintive melody, the sigh of the wind over the enchanted ground, the
+spell of pure Romance. Neither in Chrestien of Troyes, nor yet in the
+earlier authors who dealt more simply<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> than he with their Celtic
+materials, is there anything to compare with this later prose.</p>
+
+<p>In some of the earlier French romantic work, in some of the lays of
+Marie de France, and in the fragments of the poems about Tristram,
+there is a kind of simplicity, partly due to want of skill, but in its
+effect often impressive enough. The plots made use of by the medieval
+artists are some of them among the noblest in the world, but none of
+the poets were strong enough to bring out their value, either in
+translating <i>Dido</i> and <i>Medea</i>, or in trying to educate Tristram and
+other British heroes according to the manners of the Court of
+Champagne. There are, however, differences among the
+misinterpretations and the failures. No French romance appears to have
+felt the full power of the story of Tristram and Iseult; no French
+poet had his mind and imagination taken up by the character of Iseult
+as more than one Northern poet was possessed by the tragedy of
+Brynhild. But there were some who, without developing the story as
+Chaucer did with the story of Troilus, at least allowed it to tell
+itself clearly. The Celtic magic, as that is described in Mr. Arnold's
+<i>Lectures</i>, has scarcely any place in French romance, either of the
+earlier period or of the fully-developed and successful chivalrous
+order, until the time of the prose books. The French poets, both the
+simpler sort and the more elegant, appear to have had a gift for
+ignoring that power of vagueness and mystery which is appreciated by
+some of the prose authors of the thirteenth century. They seem for the
+most part to have been pleased with the incidents of the Celtic
+stories, without appreciating any charm of style that they may have
+possessed. They treated them, in fact, as they treated Virgil and
+Ovid; and there is about as much of the &quot;Celtic spirit&quot; in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> French
+versions of <i>Tristram</i>, as there is of the genius of Virgil in the
+<i>Roman d'Eneas</i>. In each case there is something recognisable of the
+original source, but it has been translated by minds imperfectly
+responsive. In dealing with Celtic, as with Greek, Latin, or Oriental
+stories, the French romancers were at first generally content if they
+could get the matter in the right order and present it in simple
+language, like tunes played with one finger. One great advantage of
+this procedure is that the stories are intelligible; the sequence of
+events is clear, and where the original conception has any strength or
+beauty it is not distorted, though the colours may be faint. This
+earlier and more temperate method was abandoned in the later stages of
+the Romantic School, when it often happened that a simple story was
+taken from the &quot;matter of Britain&quot; and overlaid with the chivalrous
+conventional ornament, losing its simplicity without being developed
+in respect of its characters or its sentiment. As an example of the
+one kind may be chosen the <i>Lay of Guingamor</i>, one of the lays of
+Marie de France;<a name="FNanchor_82_82" id="FNanchor_82_82"></a><a href="#Footnote_82_82" class="fnanchor">[82]</a> as an example of the other, the Dutch romance of
+Gawain (<i>Walewein</i>), which is taken from the French and exhibits the
+results of a common process of adulteration. Or, again, the story of
+<i>Guinglain</i>, as told by Renaud de Beaujeu with an irrelevant &quot;courtly&quot;
+digression, may be compared with the simpler and more natural versions
+in English (<i>Libeaux Desconus</i>) and Italian (<i>Carduino</i>), as has been
+done by M. Gaston Paris; or the <i>Conte du Graal</i> of Chrestien with the
+English <i>Sir Perceval of Galles</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>Guingamor</i> is one of the best of the simpler kind<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> of romances. The
+theme is that of an old story, a story which in one form and another
+is extant in native Celtic versions with centuries between them. In
+essentials it is the story of Ossian in the land of youth; in its
+chief motive, the fairy-bride, it is akin to the old Irish story of
+Connla. It is different from both in its definite historical manner of
+treating the subject. The story is allowed to count for the full value
+of all its incidents, with scarcely a touch to heighten the importance
+of any of them. It is the argument of a story, and little more. Even
+an argument, however, may present some of the vital qualities of a
+fairy story, as well as of a tragic plot, and the conclusion,
+especially, of <i>Guingamor</i> is very fine in its own way, through its
+perfect clearness.</p>
+
+<p>There was a king in Britain, and Guingamor was his nephew. The queen
+fell in love with him, and was driven to take revenge for his
+rejection of her; but being less cruel than other queens of similar
+fortune, she planned nothing worse than to send him into the <i>lande
+aventureuse</i>, a mysterious forest on the other side of the river, to
+hunt the white boar. This white boar of the adventurous ground had
+already taken off ten knights, who had gone out to hunt it and had
+never returned. Guingamor followed the boar with the king's hound. In
+his wanderings he came on a great palace, with a wall of green marble
+and a silver shining tower, and open gates, and no one within, to
+which he was brought back later by a maiden whom he met in the forest.
+The story of their meeting was evidently, in the original, a story
+like that of Weland and the swan-maidens, and those of other swan or
+seal maidens, who are caught by their lovers as Weland caught his
+bride. But the simplicity of the French story here is in excess of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span>
+what is required even by the illiterate popular versions of similar
+incidents.</p>
+
+<p>Guingamor, after two days in the rich palace (where he met the ten
+knights of the king's court, who had disappeared before), on the third
+day wished to go back to bring the head of the white boar to the king.
+His bride told him that he had been there for three hundred years, and
+that his uncle was dead, with all his retinue, and his cities fallen
+and destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>But she allowed him to go, and gave him the boar's head and the king's
+hound; and told him after he had crossed the river into his own
+country to eat and drink nothing.</p>
+
+<p>He was ferried across the river, and there he met a charcoal-burner
+and asked for news of the king. The king had been dead for three
+hundred years, he was told; and the king's nephew had gone hunting in
+the forest and had never been seen again. Guingamor told him his
+story, and showed him the boar's head, and turned to go back.</p>
+
+<p>Now it was after nones and turning late. He saw a wild apple-tree and
+took three apples from it; but as he tasted them he grew old and
+feeble and fell from his horse.</p>
+
+<p>The charcoal-burner had followed him and was going to help him, when
+he saw two damsels richly dressed, who came to Guingamor and
+reproached him for his forgetfulness. They put him gently on a horse
+and brought him to the river, and ferried him over, along with his
+hound. The charcoal-burner went back to his own house at nightfall.
+The boar's head he took to the king of Britain that then was, and told
+the story of Guingamor, and the king bade turn it into a lay.</p>
+
+<p>The simplicity of all this is no small excellence in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span> a story. If
+there is anything in this story that can affect the imagination, it is
+there unimpaired by anything foreign or cumbrous. It is unsupported
+and undeveloped by any strong poetic art, but it is sound and clear.</p>
+
+<p>In the Dutch romance of <i>Walewein</i>, and doubtless in its French
+original (to show what is gained by the moderation and restriction of
+the earlier school), another story of fairy adventures has been
+dressed up to look like chivalry. The story of Walewein is one that
+appears in collections of popular tales; it is that of Mac Iain
+Direach in Campbell's <i>West Highland Tales</i> (No. xlvi.), as well as of
+Grimm's <i>Golden Bird</i>. The romance observes the general plot of the
+popular story; indeed, it is singular among the romances in its close
+adherence to the order of events as given in the traditional oral
+forms. Though it contains 11,200 lines, it begins at the beginning and
+goes on to the end without losing what may be considered the original
+design. But while the general economy is thus retained, there are
+large digressions, and there is an enormous change in the character of
+the hero. While Guingamor in the French poem has little, if anything,
+to distinguish him from the adventurer of popular fairy stories, the
+hero in this Dutch romance is Gawain,&#8212;Gawain the Courteous, in
+splendid armour, playing the part of Mac Iain Direach. The discrepancy
+is very great, and there can be little doubt that the story as told in
+Gaelic fifty years ago by Angus Campbell, quarryman, is, in respect of
+the hero's condition and manners, more original than the medieval
+romance. Both versions are simple enough in their plot, and their plot
+is one and the same: the story of a quest for something wonderful,
+leading to another quest and then another, till the several problems
+are solved and the adventurer returns<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> successful. In each story (as
+in Grimm's version also) the Fox appears as a helper.</p>
+
+<p>Mac Iain Direach is sent to look for the Blue Falcon; the giant who
+owns the Falcon sends him to the big Women of the Isle of Jura to ask
+for their white glaive of light. The Women of Jura ask for the bay
+filly of the king of Erin; the king of Erin sends him to woo for him
+the king's daughter of France. Mac Iain Direach wins all for himself,
+with the help of the Fox.</p>
+
+<p>Gawain has to carry out similar tasks: to find and bring back to King
+Arthur a magical flying Chessboard that appeared one day through the
+window and went out again; to bring to King Wonder, the owner of the
+Chessboard, &quot;the sword of the strange rings&quot;; to win for the owner of
+the sword the Princess of the Garden of India.</p>
+
+<p>Some things in the story, apart from the hero, are different from the
+popular versions. In <i>Walewein</i> there appears quite plainly what is
+lost in the Gaelic and the German stories, the character of the
+strange land in which the quests are carried out. Gawain has to pass
+through or into a hill to reach the land of King Wonder; it does not
+belong to the common earth. The three castles to which he comes have
+all of them water about them; the second of them, Ravensten, is an
+island in the sea; the third is beyond the water of Purgatory, and is
+reached by two perilous bridges, the bridge of the sword and the
+bridge under water, like those in Chrestien's <i>Lancelot</i>. There is a
+distinction here, plain enough, between the human world, to which
+Arthur and his Court belong, and the other world within the hill, and
+the castles beyond the waters. But if this may be supposed to belong
+to an older form of the story not evident in the popular versions, a
+story of adventures in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> land of the Dead, on the other hand the
+romance has no conception of the meaning of these passages, and gets
+no poetical result from the chances here offered to it. It has nothing
+like the vision of Thomas of Erceldoune; the waters about the magic
+island are tame and shallow; the castle beyond the Bridge of Dread is
+loaded with the common, cheap, pedantic &quot;hyperboles,&quot; like those of
+the <i>P&#232;lerinage</i> or of Benoit's <i>Troy</i>. Gawain is too heavily
+armoured, also, and even his horse Gringalet has a reputation of his
+own; all inconsistent with the lightness of the fairy tale. Gawain in
+the land of all these dreams is burdened still by the heavy chivalrous
+conventions. The world for him, even after he has gone through the
+mountain, is still very much the old world with the old stale business
+going on; especially tournaments and all their weariness. One natural
+result of all this is that the Fox's part is very much reduced. In the
+Gaelic story, Mac Iain Direach and his friend Gille Mairtean (the Lad
+of March, the Fox) are a pair of equals; they have no character, no
+position in the world, no station and its duties. They are quite
+careless, and they move freely. Gawain is slow, and he has to put in a
+certain amount of the common romantic business. The authors of that
+romantic school, if ever they talked shop, may have asked one another,
+&quot;Where do you put your Felon Red Knight? Where do you put your doing
+away of the Ill Custom? or your tournaments?&quot; and the author of
+<i>Walewein</i> would have had an answer ready. Everything is there all
+right: that is to say, all the things that every one else has, all the
+mechanical business of romance. The Fox is postponed to the third
+adventure, and there, though he has not quite grown out of his
+original likeness to the Gille Mairtean, he is evidently constrained.
+Sir Gawain of the romance, this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> courteous but rather dull and
+middle-aged gentleman in armour, is not his old light-hearted
+companion.</p>
+
+<p>Still, though this story of <i>Gawain</i> is weighed down by the
+commonplaces of the Romantic School, it shows through all its
+encumbrances what sort of story it was that impressed the French
+imagination at the beginning of the School. It may be permitted to
+believe that the story of <i>Walewein</i> existed once in a simpler and
+clearer form, like that of <i>Guingamor</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The curious sophistication of <i>Guinglain</i> by Renaud de Beaujeu has
+been fully described and criticised by M. Gaston Paris in one of his
+essays (<i>Hist. litt. de la France</i>, xxx. p. 171). His comparison with
+the English and Italian versions of the story brings out the
+indifference of the French poets to their plot, and their readiness to
+sacrifice the unities of action for the sake of irrelevant sentiment.
+The story is as simple as that of Walewein; an expedition, this time,
+to rescue a lady from enchantment. She is bewitched in the form of a
+serpent, and freed by a kiss (<i>le fier basier</i>). There are various
+adventures on the journey; it has some resemblance to that of Gareth
+in the <i>Morte d'Arthur</i>, and of the Red Cross Knight in Spenser, which
+is founded upon Malory's <i>Gareth</i>.<a name="FNanchor_83_83" id="FNanchor_83_83"></a><a href="#Footnote_83_83" class="fnanchor">[83]</a> One of the adventures is in the
+house of a beautiful sorceress, who treats Guinglain with small
+consideration. Renaud de Beaujeu, in order to get literary credit from
+his handling of this romantic episode, brings Guinglain back to this
+enchantress after the real close of the story, in a kind of
+sentimental show-piece or appendix, by which the story is quite
+overweighted and thrown off its balance for the sake of a rhetorical
+demonstration. This of course belongs to the later period<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> of romance,
+when the simpler methods had been discredited; but the simpler form,
+much nearer the fashion of popular stories, is still kept more or less
+by the English and the Italian rhymes of &quot;Sir Lybeaux.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The most remarkable examples of the earlier French romantic methods
+are presented by the fragments remaining of the old Anglo-Norman poems
+on Tristram and Yseult, by B&#233;roul and Thomas, especially the
+latter;<a name="FNanchor_84_84" id="FNanchor_84_84"></a><a href="#Footnote_84_84" class="fnanchor">[84]</a> most remarkable, because in this case there is the
+greatest contradiction between the tragic capabilities of the story
+and the very simple methods of the Norman poets. It is a story that
+might test the tragic strength and eloquence of any poet in any age of
+the world; the poetical genius of Thomas is shown in his abstinence
+from effort. Hardly anything could be simpler. He does very little to
+fill out or to elaborate the story; he does nothing to vitiate his
+style; there is little ornament or emphasis. The story itself is
+there, as if the poet thought it an impertinence to add any harmonies
+of his own. If it were only extant as a whole, it would be one of the
+most notable of poems. Where else is there anything like it, for
+sincerity and for thinness?</p>
+
+<p>This poet of <i>Tristram</i> does not represent the prevalent fashion of
+his time. The eloquence and the passion of the amorous romances are
+commonly more effusive, and seldom as true. The lost <i>Tristram</i> of
+Chrestien would probably have made a contrast with the Anglo-Norman
+poem in this respect. Chrestien of Troyes is at the head of the French
+Romantic School, and his interest is in the science of love; not in
+ancient rude and passionate stories, such as the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span> story of
+Tristram&#8212;for it is rude and ancient, even in the French of
+Thomas&#8212;not in the &quot;Celtic magic,&quot; except for decorative and
+incidental purposes, but in psychology and analysis of the emotions,
+and in the appropriate forms of language for such things.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible (as M. Gaston Paris has shown) to separate the spirit
+of French romance from the spirit of the Proven&#231;al lyric poetry. The
+romances represent in a narrative form the ideas and the spirit which
+took shape as lyric poetry in the South; the romances are directly
+dependent upon the poetry of the South for their principal motives.
+The courtesy of the Proven&#231;al poetry, with its idealism and its
+pedantry, its psychological formalism, its rhetoric of antithesis and
+conceits, is to be found again in the narrative poetry of France in
+the twelfth century, just as, in the thirteenth, all the floods of
+lyrical idealism are collected in the didactic reservoir of the
+<i>Romaunt of the Rose</i>. The dominant interest in the French romances is
+the same as in the Proven&#231;al lyric poetry and in the <i>Romaunt of the
+Rose</i>; namely, the idealist or courteous science of love. The origins
+of this mode of thought are difficult to trace fully. The inquiry
+belongs more immediately to the history of Provence than of France,
+for the romancers are the pupils of the Proven&#231;al school; not
+independent practitioners of the same craft, but directly indebted to
+Provence for some of their main ideas and a good deal of their
+rhetoric. In Provence itself the origins are partly to be found in the
+natural (<i>i.e.</i> inexplicable) development of popular love-poetry, and
+in the corresponding progress of society and its sentiments; while
+among the definite influences that can be proved and explained, one of
+the strongest is that of Latin poetry, particularly of the <i>Art of
+Love</i>. About this there can be no doubt, however great may seem<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span> to be
+the interval between the ideas of Ovid and those of the Proven&#231;al
+lyrists, not to speak of their greater scholars in Italy, Dante and
+Petrarch. The pedantry of Ovid was taken seriously, for one thing, in
+an age when everything systematic was valuable just because it was a
+system; when every doctrine was profitable. For another thing, they
+found in Ovid the form, at least, of devotion, and again the <i>Art of
+Love</i> was not their only book. There were other writings of Ovid and
+works of other poets from whom the Middle Ages learned their lesson of
+chivalrous service; not for the most part, it must be confessed, from
+the example of &quot;Paynim Knights,&quot; but far more from the classical
+&quot;Legend of Good Women,&quot; from the passion of Dido and the other
+heroines. It is true that there were some names of ancient heroes that
+were held in honour; the name of Paris is almost inseparable from the
+name of Tristram, wherever a medieval poet has occasion to praise the
+true lovers of old time, and Dante followed the common form when he
+brought the names together in his fifth canto.</p>
+
+<p>But what made by far the strongest impression on the Middle Ages was
+not the example of Paris or of Leander, nor yet the passion of
+Catullus and Propertius, who were then unknown, but the poetry of the
+loyalty of the heroines, the fourth book of the <i>Aeneid</i>, the
+<i>Heroides</i> of Ovid, and certain parts of the <i>Metamorphoses</i>. If
+anything literary can be said to have taken effect upon the temper of
+the Middle Ages, so as to produce the manners and sentiments of
+chivalry, this is the literature to which the largest share of
+influence must be ascribed. The ladies of Romance all owe allegiance,
+and some of them are ready to pay it, to the queens of the Latin
+poets.<a name="FNanchor_85_85" id="FNanchor_85_85"></a><a href="#Footnote_85_85" class="fnanchor">[85]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> Virgil's Dido and Ovid's Medea taught the eloquence of
+love to the French poets, and the first chivalrous lovers are those
+who have learned to think poorly of the recreant knights of antiquity.</p>
+
+<p>The French romantic authors were scholars in the poetry of the
+Proven&#231;al School, but they also knew a good deal independently of
+their Proven&#231;al masters, and did not need to be told everything. They
+read the ancient authors for themselves, and drew their own
+conclusions from them. They were influenced by the special Proven&#231;al
+rendering of the common ideas of chivalry and courtesy; they were also
+affected immediately by the authors who influenced the Proven&#231;al
+School.</p>
+
+<p>Few things are more instructive in this part of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span> literature than the
+story of Medea in the <i>Roman de Troie</i> of Benoit de Sainte More. It
+might even claim to be the representative French romance, for it
+contains in an admirable form the two chief elements common to all the
+dominant school&#8212;adventure (here reduced from Ovid to the scale of a
+common fairy story, as has been seen already) and sentimental
+eloquence, which in this particular story is very near its original
+fountain-head.</p>
+
+<p>It is to be noted that Benoit is not in the least troubled by the
+Latin rhetoric when he has to get at the story. Nothing Latin, except
+the names, and nothing rhetorical remains to show that the story came
+from Ovid, and not from Blethericus or some other of his
+fellow-romancers in Wales,<a name="FNanchor_86_86" id="FNanchor_86_86"></a><a href="#Footnote_86_86" class="fnanchor">[86]</a> so long, that is, as the story is
+merely concerned with the Golden Fleece, the Dragon, the Bulls, and
+all the tasks imposed on Jason. But one essential thing is retained by
+Benoit out of the Latin which is his authority, and that is the way in
+which the love of Medea for Jason is dwelt upon and described.</p>
+
+<p>This is for medieval poetry one of the chief sources of the psychology
+in which it took delight,&#8212;an original and authoritative
+representation of the beginning and growth of the passion of love, not
+yet spoilt by the pedantry which later displayed itself unrestrained
+in the following generations of amatory poets, and which took its
+finest form in the poem of Guillaume de Lorris; but yet at the same
+time giving a starting-point and some encouragement to the later
+pedants, by its study of the different degrees of the passion, and by
+the success with which they are explained and made interesting. This
+is one of the masterpieces and one of the standards of composition<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span> in
+early French romance; and it gives one of the most singular proofs of
+the dependence of modern on ancient literature, in certain respects.
+It would not be easy to prove any real connexion between Homer and the
+Sagas, in order to explain the resemblances of temper, and even of
+incident, between them; but in the case of the medieval romances there
+is this direct and real dependence. The Medea of Apollonius Rhodius is
+at the beginning of medieval poetry, in one line of descent (through
+Virgil's Dido as well as Ovid's Medea); and it would be hard to
+overestimate the accumulated debt of all the modern poets whose
+rhetoric of passion, whether they knew it or not, is derived somehow
+from the earlier medieval masters of Dante or Chaucer, Boccaccio or
+Spenser.</p>
+
+<p>The &quot;medieval&quot; character of the work of Chrestien and his
+contemporaries is plain enough. But &quot;medieval&quot; and other terms of the
+same sort are too apt to impose themselves on the mind as complete
+descriptive formulas, and in this case the term &quot;medieval&quot; ought not
+to obscure the fact that it is modern literature, in one of its chief
+branches, which has its beginning in the twelfth century. No later
+change in the forms of fiction is more important than the
+twelfth-century revolution, from which all the later forms and
+constitutions of romance and novel are in some degree or other
+derived. It was this revolution, of which Chrestien was one of the
+first to take full advantage, that finally put an end to the old local
+and provincial restrictions upon narrative. The older schools of epic
+are bound to their own nation or tribe, and to the family traditions.
+These restrictions are no hindrance to the poetry of Homer, nor to the
+plots and conversations of the Sagas. Within these local restrictions
+the highest form of narrative art is possible. Nevertheless the period
+of these restrictions must come to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> an end; the heroic age cannot last
+for ever. The merit of the twelfth-century authors, Benoit, Chrestien,
+and their followers, is that they faced the new problems and solved
+them. In their productions it may be seen how the Western world was
+moving away from the separate national traditions, and beginning the
+course of modern civilisation with a large stock of ideas, subjects,
+and forms of expression common to all the nations. The new forms of
+story might be defective in many ways, thin or formal or extravagant
+in comparison with some of the older modes; but there was no help for
+it, there was no progress to be made in any other way.</p>
+
+<p>The first condition of modern progress in novel-writing, as in other
+more serious branches of learning, was that the author should be free
+to look about him, to reflect and choose, to pick up his ideas and his
+matter anyhow. He was turned out of the old limited region of epic
+tradition. The nations had several centuries to themselves, in the
+Dark Ages, in which they were at liberty to compose Homeric poems (&quot;if
+they had a mind&quot;), but by the twelfth century that time was over. The
+romancers of the twelfth century were in the same position as modern
+authors in regard to their choice of subjects. Their subjects were not
+prescribed to them by epic tradition. They were more or less
+reflective and self-conscious literary men, citizens of the universal
+world, ready to make the most of their education. They are the
+sophists of medieval literature; emancipated, enlightened and
+intelligent persons, with an apparatus of rhetoric, a set of abstract
+ideas, a repertory of abstract sentiments, which they could apply to
+any available subject. In this sophistical period, when the serious
+interest of national epic was lost, and when stories, collected from
+all the ends of the earth, were made the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span> receptacles of a common,
+abstract, sentimental pathos, it was of some importance that the
+rhetoric should be well managed, and that the sentiment should be
+refined. The great achievement of the French poets, on account of
+which they are to be remembered as founders and benefactors, is that
+they went to good masters for instruction. Solid dramatic
+interpretation of character was beyond them, and they were not able to
+make much of the openings for dramatic contrast in the stories on
+which they worked. But they were caught and held by the language of
+passion, the language of Dido and Medea; language not dramatic so much
+as lyrical or musical, the expression of universal passion, such as
+might be repeated without much change in a thousand stories. In this
+they were happily guided. The greater drama, the stronger characters,
+appeared in due time; but the dramas and the novels of Europe would
+not have been what they are, without the medieval elaboration of the
+simple motives, and the practice of the early romantic schools in
+executing variations on Love and Jealousy. It may be remarked that
+there were sources more remote and even more august, above and beyond
+the Latin poets from whom the medieval authors copied their phrasing;
+in so far as the Latin poets were affected by Athenian tragedy,
+directly or indirectly, in their great declamatory passages, which in
+turn affected the Middle Ages.</p>
+
+<p>The history of this school has no end, for it merges in the history of
+the romantic schools that are still flourishing, and will be continued
+by their successors. One of the principal lines of progress may be
+indicated, to conclude this discourse on Epic Poetry.</p>
+
+<p>The twelfth-century romances are in most things the antithesis to
+Homer, in narrative. They are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> fanciful, conceited, thin in their
+drama, affected in their sentiments. They are like the &quot;heroic
+romances&quot; of the seventeenth century, their descendants, as compared
+with the strong imagination of Cervantes or Shakespeare, who are the
+representatives, if not of the Homeric line, at any rate of the
+Homeric principles, in their intolerance of the formally pathetic or
+heroic, and who have all the great modern novelists on their side.</p>
+
+<p>But the early romantic schools, though they are generally formal and
+sentimental, and not dramatic, have here and there the possibilities
+of a stronger drama and a truer imagination, and seem at times almost
+to have worked themselves free from their pedantry.</p>
+
+<p>There is sentiment and sentiment: and while the pathos of medieval
+romance, like some of the effusion of medieval lyric, is often merely
+formal repetition of phrases, it is sometimes more natural, and
+sometimes the mechanical fancy seems to quicken into true poetical
+vision, or at least to make room for a sane appreciation of real life
+and its incidents. Chrestien of Troyes shows his genius most
+unmistakably in his occasional surprising intervals of true
+description and natural feeling, in the middle of his rhetoric; while
+even his sustained rhetorical dissertations, like those of the <i>Roman
+de la Rose</i> in the next century, are not absolutely untrue, or
+uncontrolled by observation of actual manners. Often the rhetorical
+apparatus interferes in the most annoying way with the clear vision.
+In the <i>Chevalier au Lion</i>, for example, there is a pretty sketch of a
+family party&#8212;a girl reading a romance to her father in a garden, and
+her mother coming up and listening to the story&#8212;from which there is a
+sudden and annoying change to the common impertinences of the amatory
+professional novelist.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span> This is the passage, with the two kinds of
+literature in abrupt opposition:&#8212;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Messire Yvain goes into the garden, and his people follow;
+and he sees a goodly gentleman reclining on a cloth of silk
+and leaning on his elbow; and a maiden was sitting before
+him reading out of a romance, I know not whose the story.
+And to listen to the romance a lady had drawn near; that was
+her mother, and he was her father, and well might they be
+glad to look on her and listen to her, for they had no other
+child. She was not yet sixteen years old, and she was so
+fair and gentle that the God of Love if he had seen her
+would have given himself to be her slave, and never would
+have bestowed the love of her on any other than himself. For
+her sake, to serve her, he would have made himself man,
+would have put off his deity, and would have stricken
+himself with the dart whose wound is never healed, except a
+disloyal physician tend it. It is not right that any should
+recover from that wound, unless there be disloyalty in it;
+and whoever is otherwise healed, he never loved with
+loyalty. <i>Of this wound I could talk to you without end</i>, if
+it pleased you to listen; but I know that some would say
+that all my talk was idleness, for the world is fallen away
+from true love, and men know not any more how to love as
+they ought, for the very talk of love is a weariness to
+them! (ll. 5360-5396).</p></div>
+
+<p>This short passage is representative of Chrestien's work, and indeed
+of the most successful and influential work of the twelfth-century
+schools. It is not, like some affected kinds of romance, entirely cut
+off from reality. But the glimpses of the real world are occasional
+and short; there is a flash of pure daylight, a breath of fresh air,
+and then the heavy-laden, enchanted mists of rhetoric and obligatory
+sentiment come rolling down and shut out the view.</p>
+
+<p>It is possible to trace out in some detail a line of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span> progress in
+medieval romance, in which there is a victory in the end for the more
+ingenuous kind of sentiment; in which the rhetorical romantic forms
+are altered and strengthened to bear the weight of true imagination.</p>
+
+<p>This line of progress is nothing less than the earlier life of all the
+great modern forms of novel; a part of European history which deserves
+some study from those who have leisure for it.</p>
+
+<p>The case may be looked at in this way. The romantic schools, following
+on the earlier heroic literature, generally substituted a more
+shallow, formal, limited set of characters for the larger and freer
+portraits of the heroic age, making up for this defect in the
+personages by extravagance in other respects&#8212;in the incidents, the
+phrasing, the sentimental pathos, the rhetorical conceits. The great
+advantage of the new school over the old was that it was adapted to
+modern cosmopolitan civilisation; it left the artist free to choose
+his subject anywhere, and to deal with it according to the laws of
+good society, without local or national restrictions. But the earlier
+work of this modern enlightenment in the Middle Ages was generally
+very formal, very meagre in imagination. The progress of literature
+was to fill out the romantic forms, and to gain for the new
+cosmopolitan schemes of fiction the same sort of substantial contents,
+the same command of human nature and its variety, as belong (with
+local or national restrictions) to some at any rate of the earlier
+epic authors. This being so, one of the interests of the study of
+medieval romance must be the discovery of those places in which it
+departs from its own dominant conventions, and seems to aim at
+something different from its own nature: at the recovery of the fuller
+life of epic for the benefit of romance. Epic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span> fulness of life within
+the limits of romantic form&#8212;that might be said to be the ideal which
+is <i>not</i> attained in the Middle Ages, but towards which many medieval
+writers seem to be making their way.</p>
+
+<p>Chrestien's story of <i>Geraint and Enid</i> (Geraint has to take the name
+of <i>Erec</i> in the French) is one of his earlier works, but cannot be
+called immature in comparison with what he wrote afterwards. In
+Chrestien's <i>Enid</i> there is not a little superfluity of the common
+sort of adventure. The story of Enid in the <i>Idylls of the King</i>
+(founded upon the Welsh <i>Geraint</i>, as given in Lady Charlotte Guest's
+<i>Mabinogion</i>) has been brought within compass, and a number of quite
+unnecessary adventures have been cut out. Yet the story here is the
+same as Chrestien's, and the drama of the story is not the pure
+invention of the English poet. Chrestien has all the principal
+motives, and the working out of the problem is the same. In one place,
+indeed, where the Welsh romance, the immediate source of Tennyson's
+<i>Enid</i>, has shortened the scene of reconciliation between the lovers,
+the Idyll has restored something like the proportions of the original
+French. Chrestien makes Erec speak to Enid and renounce all his
+ill-will, after the scene in which &quot;the brute Earl&quot; is killed; the
+Welsh story, with no less effect, allows the reconciliation to be
+taken for granted when Geraint, at this point in the history, with no
+speech of his reported, lifts Enid on his own horse. The Idyll goes
+back (apparently without any direct knowledge of Chrestien's version)
+to the method of Chrestien.</p>
+
+<p>The story of Enid in Chrestien is very unlike the other stories of
+distressed and submissive wives; it has none of the ineradicable
+falsity of the story of Griselda. How much is due to Chrestien for
+this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> can hardly be reckoned, in our ignorance of the materials he
+used. But taking into account the other passages, like that of the
+girl reading in the garden, where Chrestien shows a distinct original
+appreciation of certain aspects of life, it cannot be far wrong to
+consider Chrestien's picture of Enid as mainly his own; and, in any
+case, this picture is one of the finest in medieval romance. There is
+no comparison between Chrestien of Troyes and Homer, but it is not
+impious to speak of Enid along with Nausicaa, and there are few other
+ladies of romance who may claim as much as this. The adventure of the
+Sparrowhawk, one of the finest pieces of pure romance in the poetry of
+this century, is also one of the finest in the old French, and in many
+ways very unlike the commonplaces of chivalry, in the simplicity of
+the household where Enid waits on her father's guest and takes his
+horse to the stable, in the sincerity and clearness with which
+Chrestien indicates the gentle breeding and dignity of her father and
+mother, and the pervading spirit of grace and loyalty in the whole
+scene.<a name="FNanchor_87_87" id="FNanchor_87_87"></a><a href="#Footnote_87_87" class="fnanchor">[87]</a></p>
+
+<p>In the story of Enid, Chrestien has a subject which recommends itself
+to modern readers. The misunderstanding between Enid and her husband,
+and the reconciliation, are not peculiarly medieval, though the
+adventures through which their history is worked out are of the
+ordinary romantic commonplace.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Indeed the relation of husband and wife in this story is rather
+exceptionally divergent from the current romantic mode, and from the
+conventional law that true love between husband and wife was
+impossible. Afterwards, in his poem of <i>Lancelot</i> (<i>le Chevalier de la
+Charrette</i>), Chrestien took up and worked out this conventional and
+pedantic theory, and made the love of Lancelot and the Queen into the
+standard for all courtly lovers. In his <i>Enid</i>, however, there is
+nothing of this. At the same time, the courtly and chivalrous mode
+gets the better of the central drama in his <i>Enid</i>, in so far as he
+allows himself to be distracted unduly from the pair of lovers by
+various &quot;hyperboles&quot; of the Romantic School; there are a number of
+unnecessary jousts and encounters, and a mysterious exploit of Erec in
+a magic garden, which is quite out of connexion with the rest of the
+story. The final impression is that Chrestien wanted strength of mind
+or inclination to concentrate himself on the drama of the two lovers.
+The story is taken too lightly.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Cliges</i>, his next work, the dramatic situation is much less
+valuable than in <i>Enid</i>, but the workmanship is far more careful and
+exact, and the result is a story which may claim to be among the
+earliest of modern novels, if the Greek romances, to which it has a
+close relation, are not taken into account. The story has very little
+&quot;machinery&quot;; there are none of the marvels of the Faerie in it. There
+is a Thessalian witch (the heroine's nurse), who keeps well within the
+limits of possible witchcraft, and there is the incident of the
+sleeping-draught (familiar in the ballad of the <i>Gay Goshawk</i>), and
+that is all. The rest is a simple love-story (or rather a double
+love-story, for there is the history of the hero's father and mother,
+before his own begins), and the personages are merely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> true lovers,
+undistinguished by any such qualities as the sulkiness of Erec or the
+discretion of Enid. It is all pure sensibility, and as it happens the
+sensibility is in good keeping&#8212;not overdriven into the pedantry of
+the more quixotic troubadours and minnesingers, and not warped by the
+conventions against marriage. It is explained at the end that, though
+Cliges and Fenice are married, they are lovers still:&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+De s'amie a feite sa fame,<br />
+Mais il l'apele amie et dame,<br />
+Que por ce ne pert ele mie<br />
+Que il ne l'aint come s'amie,<br />
+Et ele lui autresi<br />
+Con l'an doit feire son ami:<br />
+Et chascun jor lor amors crut,<br />
+N'onques cil celi ne mescrut,<br />
+Ne querela de nule chose.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 7.5em"><i>Cliges</i>, l. 6753.</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>This poem of Chrestien's is a collection of the finest specimens of
+medieval rhetoric on the eternal theme. There is little incident, and
+sensibility has it all its own way, in monologues by the actors and
+digressions by the author, on the nature of love. It is rather the
+sentiment than the passion that is here expressed in the &quot;language of
+the heart&quot;; but, however that may be, there are both delicacy and
+eloquence in the language. The pensive Fenice, who debates with
+herself for nearly two hundred lines in one place (4410-4574), is the
+ancestress of many later heroines.</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Meis Fenice est sor toz pansive;<br />
+Ele ne trueve fonz ne rive<br />
+El panser dont ele est anplie,<br />
+Tant li abonde et mouteplie.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em"><i>Cliges</i>, l. 4339.</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>In the later works of Chrestien, in <i>Yvain</i>, <i>Lancelot</i>, and
+<i>Perceval</i>, there are new developments of romance,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> more particularly
+in the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. But these three later stories,
+unlike <i>Cliges</i>, are full of the British marvels, which no one would
+wish away, and yet they are encumbrances to what we must regard as the
+principal virtue of the poet&#8212;his skill of analysis in cases of
+sentiment, and his interest in such cases. <i>Cliges</i>, at any rate,
+however far it may come short of the <i>Chevalier de la Charrette</i> and
+the <i>Conte du Graal</i> in variety, is that one of Chrestien's poems, it
+might be said that one of the twelfth-century French romances, which
+best corresponds to the later type of novel. It is the most modern of
+them; and at the same time it does not represent its own age any the
+worse, because it also to some extent anticipates the fashions of
+later literature.</p>
+
+<p>In this kind of romance, which reduces the cost of the &quot;machinery,&quot;
+and does without enchanters, dragons, magic mists, and deadly castles,
+there are many other examples besides <i>Cliges</i>.</p>
+
+<p>A hundred years after Chrestien, one of his cleverest pupils wrote the
+Proven&#231;al story of <i>Flamenca</i>,<a name="FNanchor_88_88" id="FNanchor_88_88"></a><a href="#Footnote_88_88" class="fnanchor">[88]</a> a work in which the form of the
+novel is completely disengaged from the unnecessary accidents of
+romance, and reaches a kind of positive and modern clearness very much
+at variance in some respects with popular ideas of what is medieval.
+The Romance of the medieval Romantic School attains one of its highest
+and most distinctive points in <i>Flamenca</i>, and shows what it had been
+aiming at from the beginning&#8212;namely, the expression in an elegant
+manner of the ideas of the <i>Art of Love</i>, as understood in the polite
+society of those times. <i>Flamenca</i> is nearly contemporary with the
+<i>Roman de la Rose</i> of Guillaume de Lorris. Its inspiring ideas are the
+same, and though its influence on succeeding authors is
+indis<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span>cernible, where that of the <i>Roman de la Rose</i> is widespread and
+enduring, <i>Flamenca</i> would have as good a claim to be considered a
+representative masterpiece of medieval literature, if it were not that
+it appears to be breaking loose from medieval conventions where the
+<i>Roman de la Rose</i> makes all it can out of them. <i>Flamenca</i> is a
+simple narrative of society, with the indispensable three
+characters&#8212;the husband, the lady, and the lover. The scene of the
+story is principally at the baths of Bourbon, in the then present day;
+and of the miracles and adventures of the more marvellous and
+adventurous romances there is nothing left but the very pleasant
+enumeration of the names of favourite stories in the account of the
+minstrelsy at Flamenca's wedding. The author knew all that was to be
+known in romance, of Greek, Latin, or British invention&#8212;Thebes and
+Troy, Alexander and Julius Caesar, Samson and Judas Maccabeus, Ivain
+and Gawain and Perceval, Paris and Tristram, and all Ovid's <i>Legend of
+Good Women</i>&#8212;but out of all these studies he has retained only what
+suited his purpose. He does not compete with the Greek or the British
+champions in their adventures among the romantic forests. Chrestien of
+Troyes is his master, but he does not try to copy the magic of the
+Lady of the Fountain, or the Bridge of the Sword, or the Castle of the
+Grail. He follows the doctrine of love expounded in Chrestien's
+<i>Lancelot</i>, but his hero is not sent wandering at random, and is not
+made to display his courtly emotions among the ruins and shadows of
+the lost Celtic mythology, like Lancelot in Chrestien's poem. The life
+described in <i>Flamenca</i> is the life of the days in which it was
+composed; and the hero's task is to disguise himself as a clerk, so as
+to get a word with the jealously-guarded lady in church on Sundays,
+while giving her the Psalter to kiss after the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span> Mass. <i>Flamenca</i>, is
+really the triumph of Ovid, with the <i>Art of Love</i>, over all his
+Gothic competitors out of the fairy tales. The Proven&#231;al poet has
+discarded everything but the essential dominant interests, and in so
+doing has gone ahead of his master Chrestien, who (except in <i>Cliges</i>)
+allowed himself to be distracted between opposite kinds of story,
+between the school of Ovid and the school of Blethericus; and who,
+even in <i>Cliges</i>, was less consistently modern than his Proven&#231;al
+follower.</p>
+
+<p><i>Flamenca</i> is the perfection and completion of medieval romance in one
+kind and in one direction. It is all sentiment; the ideal courtly
+sentiment of good society and its poets, made lively by the author's
+knowledge of his own time and its manners, and his decision not to
+talk about anything else. It is perhaps significant that he allows his
+heroine the romance of <i>Flores and Blanchefleur</i> for her reading, an
+older story of true lovers, after the simpler pattern of Greek
+romance, which the author of <i>Flamenca</i> apparently feels himself
+entitled to refer to with the condescension of a modern and critical
+author towards some old-fashioned prettiness. He is completely
+self-possessed and ironical with regard to his story. His theme is the
+idle love whose origin is explained by Ovid; his personages are
+nothing to him but the instruments of the symphony which he composes
+and directs: <i>sopra lor vanit&#224; che par persona</i>, over and through
+their graceful inanity, passes the stream of sentiment, the shifting,
+flickering light which the Proven&#231;al author has borrowed from Ovid and
+transferred for his own purposes to his own time. It is perhaps the
+first complete modern appropriation of classical examples in literary
+art; for the poem of <i>Flamenca</i> is classical in more than one sense of
+the term&#8212;classical, not only because of its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span> comprehension of the
+spirit of the Latin poet and his code of manners and sentiment, but
+because of its clear proportions and its definite abstract lines of
+composition; because of the self-possession of the author and his
+subordination of details and rejection of irrelevances.</p>
+
+<p>Many things are wanting to <i>Flamenca</i> which it did not suit the author
+to bring in. It was left to other greater writers to venture on other
+and larger schemes with room for more strength and individuality of
+character, and more stress of passion, still keeping the romantic
+framework which had been designed by the masters of the twelfth
+century, and also very much of the sentimental language which the same
+masters had invented and elaborated.</p>
+
+<p>The story of the <i>Chastelaine de Vergi</i><a name="FNanchor_89_89" id="FNanchor_89_89"></a><a href="#Footnote_89_89" class="fnanchor">[89]</a> (dated by its editor
+between 1282 and 1288) is an example of a different kind from
+<i>Flamenca</i>; still abstract in its personages, still sentimental, but
+wholly unlike <i>Flamenca</i> in the tragic stress of its sentiment and in
+the pathos of its incidents. There is no plot in <i>Flamenca</i>, or only
+just enough to display the author's resources of eloquence; in the
+<i>Chastelaine de Vergi</i> there is no rhetorical expansion or effusion,
+but instead of that the coherent closely-reasoned argument of a
+romantic tragedy, with nothing in it out of keeping with the
+conditions of &quot;real life.&quot; It is a moral example to show the
+disastrous result of breaking the first law of chivalrous love, which
+enjoins loyal secrecy on the lover; the tragedy in this case arises
+from the strong compulsion of honour under which the commandment is
+transgressed.</p>
+
+<p>There was a knight who was the lover of the Chastelaine de Vergi,
+unknown to all the world.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span> Their love was discovered by the jealous
+machinations of the Duchess of Burgundy, whom the knight had
+neglected. The Duchess made use of her knowledge to insult the
+Chastelaine; the Chastelaine died of a broken heart at the thought
+that her lover had betrayed her; the knight found her dead, and threw
+himself on his sword to make amends for his unwilling disloyalty. Even
+a summary like this may show that the plot has capabilities and
+opportunities in it; and though the scheme of the short story does not
+allow the author to make use of them in the full detailed manner of
+the great novelists, he understands what he is about, and his work is
+a very fine instance of sensitive and clearly-executed medieval
+narrative, which has nothing to learn (in its own kind, and granting
+the conditions assumed by the author) from any later fiction.</p>
+
+<p>The story of the <i>Lady of Vergi</i> was known to Boccaccio, and was
+repeated both by Bandello and by Queen Margaret of Navarre.</p>
+
+<p>It is time to consider how the work of the medieval romantic schools
+was taken up and continued by many of the most notable writers of the
+period which no longer can be called medieval, in which modern
+literature makes a new and definite beginning; especially in the works
+of the two modern poets who have done most to save and adapt the
+inheritance of medieval romance for modern forms of
+literature&#8212;Boccaccio and Chaucer.</p>
+
+<p>The development of romance in these authors is not always and in all
+respects a gain. Even the pathetic stories of the <i>Decameron</i> (such as
+the <i>Pot of Basil</i>, <i>Tancred and Gismunda</i>, <i>William of Cabestaing</i>)
+seem to have lost something by the adoption of a different kind of
+grammar, a more learned rhetoric, in comparison with the best of the
+simple French<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span> stories, like the <i>Chastelaine de Vergi</i>. This is the
+case in a still greater degree where Boccaccio has allowed himself a
+larger scale, as in his version of the old romance of <i>Flores and
+Blanchefleur</i> (<i>Filocolo</i>), while his <i>Teseide</i> might be taken as the
+first example in modern history of the pernicious effect of classical
+studies. The <i>Teseide</i> is the story of Palamon and Arcita. The
+original is lost, but it evidently was a French romance, probably not
+a long one; one of the favourite well-defined cases or problems of
+love, easily understood as soon as stated, presenting the rivalry of
+the two noble kinsmen for the love of the lady Emily. It might have
+been made into one of the stories of the <i>Decameron</i>, but Boccaccio
+had other designs for it. He wished to write a classical epic in
+twelve books, and not very fortunately chose this simple theme as the
+groundwork of his operations. The <i>Teseide</i> is the first of the solemn
+row of modern epics; &quot;reverend and divine, abiding without motion,
+shall we say that they have being?&quot; Everything is to be found in the
+<i>Teseide</i> that the best classical traditions require in epic&#8212;Olympian
+machinery, catalogues of armies, descriptions of works of art to
+compete with the Homeric and Virgilian shields, elaborate battles, and
+epic similes, and funeral games. Chaucer may have been at one time
+tempted by all this magnificence; his final version of the story, in
+the <i>Knight's Tale</i>, is a proof among other things of his critical
+tact. He must have recognised that the <i>Teseide</i>, with all its
+ambition and its brilliancy of details, was a failure as a story; that
+this particular theme, at any rate, was not well fitted to carry the
+epic weight. These personages of romance were not in training for the
+heavy classical panoply. So he reduced the story of Palamon and Arcita
+to something not very different<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span> from what must have been its original
+scale as a romance. His modifications of Boccaccio here are a lesson
+in the art of narrative which can hardly be overvalued by students of
+that mystery.</p>
+
+<p>Chaucer's procedure in regard to his romantic subjects is often very
+difficult to understand. How firm and unwavering his critical
+meditations and calculations were may be seen by a comparison of the
+<i>Knight's Tale</i> with its Italian source. At other times and in other
+stories he appears to have worked on different principles, or without
+much critical study at all. The <i>Knight's Tale</i> is a complete and
+perfect version of a medieval romance, worked out with all the
+resources of Chaucer's literary study and reflexion; tested and
+considered and corrected in every possible way. The story of
+<i>Constance</i> (the <i>Man of Law's Tale</i>) is an earlier work in which
+almost everything is lacking that is found in the mere workmanship of
+the <i>Knight's Tale</i>; though not, of course, the humanity, the pathos,
+of Chaucer. The story of <i>Constance</i> appears to have been taken by
+Chaucer from one of the least artificial specimens of medieval
+romance, the kind of romance that worked up in a random sort of way
+the careless sequence of incidents in a popular traditional tale. Just
+as the tellers of the stories in Campbell's <i>Highland Tales</i>, and
+other authentic collections, make no scruple about proportion where
+their memory happens to fail them or their irrelevant fancy to
+distract them, but go on easily, dropping out a symmetrical adventure
+here and there, and repeating a favourite &quot;machine&quot; if necessary or
+unnecessary; so the story of <i>Constance</i> forgets and repeats itself.
+The voice is the voice of Chaucer, and so are the thoughts, but the
+order or disorder of the story is that of the old wives' tales when
+the old wives are drowsy. All the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span> principal situations occur twice
+over; twice the heroine is persecuted by a wicked mother-in-law, twice
+sent adrift in a rudderless boat, twice rescued from a churl, and so
+on. In this story the poetry of Chaucer appears as something almost
+independent of the structure of the plot; there has been no such
+process of design and reconstruction as in the <i>Knight's Tale</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It is almost as strange to find Chaucer in other stories, as in the
+<i>Franklin's Tale</i> and the <i>Clerk's Tale</i>, putting up with the most
+abstract medieval conventions of morality; the Point of Honour in the
+<i>Franklin's Tale</i>, and the unmitigated virtue of Griselda, are
+hopelessly opposed to anything like dramatic truth, and very far
+inferior as motives to the ethical ideas of many stories of the
+twelfth century. The truth of <i>Enid</i> would have given no opportunity
+for the ironical verses in which Chaucer takes his leave of the Clerk
+of Oxford and his heroine.</p>
+
+<p>In these romances Chaucer leaves some old medieval difficulties
+unresolved and unreconciled, without attempting to recast the
+situation as he found it in his authorities, or to clear away the
+element of unreason in it. He takes the framework as he finds it, and
+embroiders his poetry over it, leaving an obvious discrepancy between
+his poetry and its subject-matter.</p>
+
+<p>In some other stories, as in the <i>Legend of Good Women</i>, and the tale
+of Virginia, he is content with pathos, stopping short of vivid drama.
+In the <i>Knight's Tale</i> he seems to have deliberately chosen a
+compromise between the pathetic mood of pure romance and a fuller
+dramatic method; he felt, apparently, that while the contrast between
+the two rivals admitted of drama, the position of the lady<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span> Emily in
+the story was such as to prevent a full dramatic rendering of all the
+characters. The plot required that the lady Emily should be left
+without much share of her own in the action.</p>
+
+<p>The short and uncompleted poem of <i>Anelida</i> gains in significance and
+comes into its right place in Chaucer's works, when it is compared
+with such examples of the older school as the <i>Chastelaine de Vergi</i>.
+It is Chaucer's essay in that delicate abstract fashion of story which
+formed one of the chief accomplishments of the French Romantic School.
+It is his acknowledgment of his debt to the artists of sensibility,
+the older French authors, &quot;that can make of sentiment,&quot; and it proves,
+like all his writings, how quick he was to save all he could from the
+teaching of his forerunners, for the profit of &quot;that fair style that
+has brought him honour.&quot; To treat a simple problem, or &quot;case,&quot; of
+right and wrong in love, was a favourite task of medieval courtly
+poetry, narrative and lyric. Chaucer in his <i>Anelida</i> takes up this
+old theme again, treating it in a form between narrative and lyric,
+with the pure abstract melody that gives the mood of the actors apart
+from any dramatic individuality. He is one of the Extractors of
+Quintessence, and his <i>Anelida</i> is the formal spirit, impalpable yet
+definite, of the medieval courtly romance.</p>
+
+<p>It is not here, but in a poem the opposite of this in fulness and
+richness of drama, that Chaucer attains a place for himself above all
+other authors as the poet who saw what was needed to transform
+medieval romance out of its limitations into a new kind of narrative.
+Chaucer's <i>Troilus and Criseyde</i> is the poem in which medieval romance
+passes out of itself into the form of the modern novel. What Cervantes
+and what Fielding did was done first by Chaucer;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span> and this was the
+invention of a kind of story in which life might be represented no
+longer in a conventional or abstract manner, or with sentiment and
+pathos instead of drama, but with characters adapting themselves to
+different circumstances, no longer obviously breathed upon by the
+master of the show to convey his own ideas, but moving freely and
+talking like men and women. The romance of the Middle Ages comes to an
+end, in one of the branches of the family tree, by the production of a
+romance that has all the freedom of epic, that comprehends all good
+and evil, and excludes nothing as common or unclean which can be made
+in any way to strengthen the impression of life and variety. Chaucer
+was not tempted by the phantasm of the Epic Poem like Boccaccio, and
+like so many of the great and wise in later generations. The substance
+of Epic, since his time, has been appropriated by certain writers of
+history, as Fielding has explained in his lectures on that science in
+<i>Tom Jones</i>. The first in the line of these modern historians is
+Chaucer with his <i>Troilus and Criseyde</i>, and the wonder still is as
+great as it was for Sir Philip Sidney:&#8212;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Chaucer undoubtedly did excellently in his <i>Troylus</i> and
+<i>Cresseid</i>; of whom, truly I know not whether to mervaile
+more, either that he in that mistie time could see so
+clearely, or that wee in this cleare age walke so
+stumblingly after him.</p></div>
+
+<p>His great work grew out of the French Romantic School. The episode of
+Troilus and Briseide in Benoit's <i>Roman de Troie</i> is one of the best
+passages in the earlier French romance; light and unsubstantial like
+all the work of that School, but graceful, and not untrue. It is all
+summed up in the monologue of Briseide at the end of her story (l.
+20,308):<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span>&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Dex donge bien a Troylus!<br />
+Quant nel puis amer ne il mei<br />
+A cestui<a name="FNanchor_90_90" id="FNanchor_90_90"></a><a href="#Footnote_90_90" class="fnanchor">[90]</a> me done et otrei.<br />
+Molt voldreie aveir cel talent<br />
+Que n'e&#252;sse remembrement<br />
+Des ovres faites d'en arriere:<br />
+&#199;o me fait mal &#224; grant mani&#232;re!<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>Boccaccio took up this story, from the Latin version of the Tale of
+Troy, the <i>Historia Trojana</i> of Guido. His <i>Filostrato</i> is written on
+a different plan from the <i>Teseide</i>; it is one of his best works. He
+did not make it into an epic poem; the <i>Filostrato</i>, Boccaccio's
+<i>Troilus and Cressida</i>, is a romance, differing from the older French
+romantic form not in the design of the story, but in the new poetical
+diction in which it is composed, and its new poetical ideas. There is
+no false classicism in it, as there is in his <i>Palamon and Arcita</i>; it
+is a novel of his own time, a story of the <i>Decameron</i>, only written
+at greater length, and in verse. Chaucer, the &quot;great translator,&quot; took
+Boccaccio's poem and treated it in his own way, not as he had dealt
+with the <i>Teseide</i>. The <i>Teseide</i>, because there was some romantic
+improbability in the story, he made into a romance. The story of
+Troilus he saw was strong enough to bear a stronger handling, and
+instead of leaving it a romance, graceful and superficial as it is in
+Boccaccio, he deepened it and filled it with such dramatic imagination
+and such variety of life as had never been attained before his time by
+any romancer; and the result is a piece of work that leaves all
+romantic convention behind. The <i>Filostrato</i> of Boccaccio is a story
+of light love, not much more substantial, except in its new poetical
+language, than the story of <i>Flamenca</i>. In Chaucer the passion of
+Troilus is something different from the sentiment of romance; the
+changing mind of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span> Cressida is represented with an understanding of the
+subtlety and the tragic meaning of that life which is &quot;Time's fool.&quot;
+Pandarus is the other element. In Boccaccio he is a personage of the
+same order as Troilus and Cressida; they all might have come out of
+the Garden of the <i>Decameron</i>, and there is little to choose between
+them. Chaucer sets him up with a character and a philosophy of his
+own, to represent the world outside of romance. The Comic Genius
+claims a share in the tragedy, and the tragedy makes room for him,
+because the tragic personages, &quot;Tragic Comedians&quot; as they are, can
+bear the strain of the contrast. The selection of personages and
+motives is made in another way in the romantic schools, but this poem
+of Chaucer's is not romance. It is the fulfilment of the prophecy of
+Socrates, just before Aristophanes and the tragic poet had to be put
+to bed at the end of the <i>Symposium</i>, that the best author of tragedy
+is the best author of comedy also. It is the freedom of the
+imagination, beyond all the limits of partial and conventional forms.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="APPENDIX" id="APPENDIX"></a>APPENDIX</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a name="NOTE_A"></a>Note A</span> (<a href="#Page_133">p. 133</a>)</h3>
+
+<h4><i>Rhetoric of the Western and Northern Alliterative Poems</i></h4>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Any</span> page of the Anglo-Saxon poets, and of the &quot;Elder Edda,&quot; will show
+the difference between the &quot;continuous&quot; and the &quot;discrete&quot;&#8212;the
+Western and the Northern&#8212;modes of the alliterative verse. It may be
+convenient to select some passages here for reference.</p>
+
+<p>(1) As an example of the Western style (&quot;the sense variously drawn out
+from one verse to another&quot;), the speech of the &quot;old warrior&quot; stirring
+up vengeance for King Froda (<i>Beowulf</i>, l. 2041 <i>sq.</i>; see above,
+<a href="#Page_70">p.
+70</a>):&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+&#254;onne cwi&#240; &#230;t beore se &#240;e beah gesyh&#240;,<br />
+eald &#230;scwiga, se &#240;e eall geman<br />
+garcwealm gumena (him bi&#240; grim sefa)<br />
+onginne&#240; geomormod geongum cempan<br />
+&#254;urh hre&#240;ra gehygd higes cunnian,<br />
+wigbealu weccean, ond &#254;&#230;t word acwy&#240;:<br />
+&quot;Meaht &#240;u, min wine, mece gecnawan,<br />
+&#254;one &#254;in f&#230;der to gefeohte b&#230;r<br />
+under heregriman, hindeman si&#240;e,<br />
+dyre iren, &#254;&#230;r hine Dene slogon,<br />
+weoldon w&#230;lstowe, sy&#240;&#240;an Wi&#240;ergyld l&#230;g<br />
+&#230;fter h&#230;le&#254;a hryre, hwate Scyldingas?<br />
+Nu her &#254;ara banena byre nathwylces,<br />
+fr&#230;twum hremig, on flet g&#230;&#240;,<br />
+mordres gylpe&#240; ond &#254;one ma&#240;&#254;um byre&#240;<br />
+&#254;one &#254;e &#254;u mid rihte r&#230;dan sceoldest!&quot;<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>(The &quot;old warrior&quot;&#8212;no less a hero than Starkad himself, according to
+Saxo&#8212;bears a grudge on account of the slaying of Froda, and cannot
+endure the reconciliation that has been made. He sees the reconciled
+enemies still wearing the spoils of war, arm-rings, and even Froda's
+sword, and addresses Ingeld, Froda's son):&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Over the ale he speaks, seeing the ring,<br />
+the old warrior, that remembers all,<br />
+the spear-wrought slaying of men (his thought is grim),<br />
+with sorrow at heart begins with the young champion,<br />
+in study of mind to make trial of his valour,<br />
+to waken the havoc of war, and thus he speaks:<br />
+&quot;Knowest thou, my lord? nay, well thou knowest the falchion<br />
+that thy father bore to the fray,<br />
+wearing his helmet of war, in that last hour,<br />
+the blade of price, where the Danes him slew,<br />
+and kept the field, when Withergyld was brought down<br />
+after the heroes' fall; yea, the Danish princes slew him!<br />
+See now, a son of one or other of the men of blood,<br />
+glorious in apparel, goes through the hall,<br />
+boasts of the stealthy slaying, and bears the goodly heirloom<br />
+that thou of right shouldst have and hold!&quot;<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>(2) The Northern arrangement, with &quot;the sense concluded in the
+couplet,&quot; is quite different from the Western style. There is no need
+to quote more than a few lines. The following passage is from the last
+scene of <i>Helgi and Sigrun</i> (<i>C.P.B.</i>, i. p. 143; see
+<a href="#Page_72">p. 72</a>
+above&#8212;&quot;Yet precious are the draughts,&quot; etc.):&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Vel skolom drekka d&#253;rar veigar</span><br />
+&#254;&#243;tt misst hafim munar ok landa:<br />
+skal engi ma&#240;r angr-li&#243;&#240; kve&#240;a,<br />
+&#254;&#243;tt mer &#225; bri&#243;sti benjar l&#237;ti.<br />
+N&#250; ero br&#250;&#240;ir byrg&#240;ar &#237; haugi,<br />
+lof&#240;a d&#237;sir, hj&#225; oss li&#240;nom.<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>The figure of <i>Anadiplosis</i> (or the &quot;Redouble,&quot; as it is called in the
+<i>Arte of English Poesie</i>) is characteristic of a certain group of
+Northern poems. See the note on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span> this, with references, in <i>C.P.B.</i>,
+i. p. 557. The poems in which this device appears are the poems of the
+heroines (Brynhild, Gudrun, Oddrun), the heroic idylls of the North.
+In these poems the repetition of a phrase, as in the Greek pastoral
+poetry and its descendants, has the effect of giving solemnity to the
+speech, and slowness of movement to the line.</p>
+
+<p>So in the <i>Long Lay of Brynhild</i> (<i>C.P.B.</i>, i. p. 296):&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+sv&#225;rar sifjar, svarna ei&#240;a,<br />
+ei&#240;a svarna, unnar tryg&#240;ir;<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>and (<i>ibid.</i>)&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+hann vas fyr utan ei&#240;a svarna,<br />
+ei&#240;a svarna, unnar tryg&#240;ir;<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>and in the <i>Old Lay of Gudrun</i> (<i>C.P.B.</i>, i. p. 319)&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Hverr vildi mer hnossir velja<br />
+hnossir velja, ok hugat m&#230;la.<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>There are other figures which have the same effect:&#8212;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Gott es at r&#225;&#240;a R&#237;nar malmi,<br />
+ok unandi au&#240;i styra,<br />
+ok sitjandi s&#230;lo ni&#243;ta.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em"><i>C.P.B.</i>, i. p. 296.</span><br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>But apart from these emphatic forms of phrasing, all the sentences are
+so constructed as to coincide with the divisions of the lines, whereas
+in the Western poetry, Saxon and Anglo-Saxon, the phrases are made to
+cut across the lines, the sentences having their own limits,
+independent of the beginnings and endings of the verses.</p>
+
+
+<p>&#160;</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a name="NOTE_B"></a>Note B</span> (<a href="#Page_205">p. 205</a>)</h3>
+
+<h4><i>The Meeting of Kjartan and King Olaf Tryggvason<br />
+</i> (<i>Laxd&#230;la Saga</i>, c.
+40)</h4>
+
+<p>Kjartan rode with his father east from Hjardarholt, and they parted in
+Northwaterdale; Kjartan rode on to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span> the ship, and Bolli, his kinsman,
+went along with him. There were ten men of Iceland all together that
+followed Kjartan out of goodwill; and with this company he rides to
+the harbour. Kalf Asgeirsson welcomes them all. Kjartan and Bolli took
+a rich freight with them. So they made themselves ready to sail, and
+when the wind was fair they sailed out and down the Borg firth with a
+gentle breeze and good, and so out to sea. They had a fair voyage, and
+made the north of Norway, and so into Throndheim. There they asked for
+news, and it was told them that the land had changed its masters; Earl
+Hacon was gone, and King Olaf Tryggvason come, and the whole of Norway
+had fallen under his sway. King Olaf was proclaiming a change of law;
+men did not take it all in the same way. Kjartan and his fellows
+brought their ship into Nidaros.</p>
+
+<p>At that time there were in Norway many Icelanders who were men of
+reputation. There at the wharves were lying three ships all belonging
+to men of Iceland: one to Brand the Generous, son of Vermund
+Thorgrimsson; another to Hallfred the Troublesome Poet; the third ship
+was owned by two brothers, Bjarni and Thorhall, sons of Skeggi, east
+in Fleetlithe,&#8212;all these men had been bound for Iceland in the
+summer, but the king had arrested the ships because these men would
+not accept the faith that he was proclaiming. Kjartan was welcomed by
+them all, and most of all by Brand, because they had been well
+acquainted earlier. The Icelanders all took counsel together, and this
+was the upshot, that they bound themselves to refuse the king's new
+law. Kjartan and his mates brought in their ship to the quay, and fell
+to work to land their freight.</p>
+
+<p>King Olaf was in the town; he hears of the ship's coming, and that
+there were men in it of no small account. It fell out on a bright day
+in harvest-time that Kjartan's company saw a number of men going to
+swim in the river Nith. Kjartan said they ought to go too, for the
+sport; and so they did. There was one man of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span> the place who was far
+the best swimmer. Kjartan says to Bolli:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Will you try your swimming against this townsman?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Bolli answers: &quot;I reckon that is more than my strength.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I know not what is become of your hardihood,&quot; says Kjartan; &quot;but I
+will venture it myself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That you may, if you please,&quot; says Bolli.</p>
+
+<p>Kjartan dives into the river, and so out to the man that swam better
+than all the rest; him he takes hold of and dives under with him, and
+holds him under for a time, and then lets him go. After that they swam
+for a little, and then the stranger takes Kjartan and goes under with
+him, and holds him under, none too short a time, as it seemed to
+Kjartan. Then they came to the top, but there were no words between
+them. They dived together a third time, and were down longer than
+before. Kjartan thought it hard to tell how the play would end; it
+seemed to him that he had never been in so tight a place in his life.
+However, they come up at last, and strike out for the land.</p>
+
+<p>Then says the stranger: &quot;Who may this man be?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Kjartan told his name.</p>
+
+<p>The townsman said: &quot;You are a good swimmer; are you as good at other
+sports as at this?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Kjartan answers, but not very readily: &quot;When I was in Iceland it was
+thought that my skill in other things was much of a piece; but now
+there is not much to be said about it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The townsman said: &quot;It may make some difference to know with whom you
+have been matched; why do you not ask?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Kjartan said: &quot;I care nothing for your name.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The townsman says: &quot;For one thing you are a good man of your hands,
+and for another you bear yourself otherwise than humbly; none the less
+shall you know<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span> my name and with whom you have been swimming; I am
+Olaf Tryggvason, the king.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Kjartan makes no answer, and turns to go away. He had no cloak, but a
+coat of scarlet cloth. The king was then nearly dressed. He called to
+Kjartan to wait a little; Kjartan turned and came back, rather slowly.
+Then the king took from his shoulders a rich cloak and gave it to
+Kjartan, saying he should not go cloakless back to his men. Kjartan
+thanks the king for his gift, and goes to his men and shows them the
+cloak. They did not take it very well, but thought he had allowed the
+king too much of a hold on him.</p>
+
+<p>Things were quiet for a space; the weather began to harden with frost
+and cold. The heathen men said it was no wonder they had ill weather
+that autumn; it was all the king's newfangledness and the new law that
+had made the gods angry.</p>
+
+<p>The Icelanders were all together that winter in the town; and Kjartan
+took the lead among them. In time the weather softened, and men came
+in numbers to the town at the summons of King Olaf. Many men had taken
+the Christian faith in Throndheim, but those were more in number who
+were against it. One day the king held an assembly in the town, out on
+the point of Eyre, and declared the Faith with many eloquent words.
+The Thronds had a great multitude there, and offered battle to the
+king on the spot. The king said they should know that he had fought
+against greater powers than to think of scuffling with clowns in
+Throndheim. Then the yeomen were cowed, and gave in wholly to the
+king, and many men were christened; then the assembly broke up.</p>
+
+<p>That same evening the king sends men to the Icelanders' inn to observe
+and find out how they talked. When the messengers came there, there
+was a loud sound of voices within.</p>
+
+<p>Kjartan spoke, and said to Bolli: &quot;Kinsman, are you willing to take
+this faith of the king's?&quot;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>&quot;I am not,&quot; says Bolli, &quot;for it seems to me a feeble, pithless thing.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Says Kjartan: &quot;Seemed the king to you to have no threats for those
+that refused to accept his will?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Says Bolli: &quot;Truly the king seemed to us to come out clearly and leave
+no shadow on that head, that they should have hard measure dealt
+them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No man's underling will I be,&quot; says Kjartan, &quot;while I can keep my
+feet and handle a sword; it seems to me a pitiful thing to be taken
+thus like a lamb out of the pen, or a fox out of the trap. I hold it a
+far better choice, if one must die, to do something first that shall
+be long talked of after.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What will you do?&quot; says Bolli.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I will not make a secret of it,&quot; says Kjartan; &quot;burn the king's
+house, and the king in it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I call that no mean thing to do,&quot; says Bolli; &quot;but yet it will not
+be, for I reckon that the king has no small grace and good luck along
+with him; and he keeps a strong watch day and night.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Kjartan said that courage might fail the stoutest man; Bolli answered
+that it was still to be tried whose courage would hold out longest.
+Then many broke in and said that this talk was foolishness; and when
+the king's spies had heard so much, they went back to the king and
+told him how the talk had gone.</p>
+
+<p>On the morrow the king summons an assembly; and all the Icelanders
+were bidden to come. When all were met, the king stood up and thanked
+all men for their presence, those who were willing to be his friends
+and had taken the Faith. Then he fell to speech with the Icelanders.
+The king asks if they will be christened. They make little sound of
+agreement to that. The king said that they might make a choice that
+would profit them less.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Which of you was it that thought it convenient to burn me in my
+house?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then says Kjartan: &quot;You think that he will not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span> have the honesty to
+confess it, he that said this. But here you may see him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;See thee I may,&quot; says the king, &quot;and a man of no mean imagination;
+yet it is not in thy destiny to see my head at thy feet. And good
+enough cause might I have to stay thee from offering to burn kings in
+their houses in return for their good advice; but because I know not
+how far thy thought went along with thy words, and because of thy
+manly declaration, thou shalt not lose thy life for this; it may be
+that thou wilt hold the Faith better, as thou speakest against it more
+than others. I can see, too, that it will bring the men of all the
+Iceland ships to accept the Faith the same day that thou art
+christened of thine own free will. It seems to me also like enough
+that thy kinsmen and friends in Iceland will listen to what thou
+sayest when thou art come out thither again. It is not far from my
+thought that thou, Kjartan, mayst have a better Faith when thou
+sailest from Norway than when thou camest hither. Go now all in peace
+and liberty whither you will from this meeting; you shall not be
+penned into Christendom; for it is the word of God that He will not
+have any come to Him save in free will.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There was much approval of this speech of the king's, yet chiefly from
+the Christians; the heathen men left it to Kjartan to answer as he
+would. Then said Kjartan: &quot;We will thank you, Sir, for giving us your
+peace; this more than anything would draw us to accept your Faith,
+that you renounce all grounds of enmity and speak gently altogether,
+though you have our whole fortunes in your hand to-day. And this is in
+my mind, only to accept the Faith in Norway if I may pay some small
+respect to Thor next winter when I come to Iceland.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Then answered the king, smiling: &quot;It is well seen from the bearing of
+Kjartan that he thinks he has better surety in his strength and his
+weapons than there where Thor and Odin are.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>After that the assembly broke up.</p>
+
+<p>&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a name="NOTE_C"></a>Note C</span> (<a href="#Page_257">p. 257</a>)</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Eyjolf Karsson</i>: an Episode in the History of Bishop
+Gudmund Arason, <span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1222 (from <i>Arons Saga Hj&#246;rleifssonar</i>,
+c. 8, printed in <i>Biskupa S&#246;gur</i>, i., and in <i>Sturlunga</i>,
+ii. pp. 312-347).</p>
+
+<p>[Eyjolf Karsson and Aron stood by Bishop Gudmund in his
+troubles, and followed him out to his refuge in the island
+of Grimsey, lying off the north coast of Iceland, about 30
+miles from the mouth of Eyjafirth. There the Bishop was
+attacked by the Sturlungs, Sighvat (brother of Snorri
+Sturluson) and his son Sturla. His men were out-numbered;
+Aron was severely wounded. This chapter describes how Eyjolf
+managed to get his friend out of danger and how he went back
+himself and was killed.]</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Now the story turns to Eyjolf and Aron. When many of Eyjolf's men were
+down, and some had run to the church, he took his way to the place
+where Aron and Sturla had met, and there he found Aron sitting with
+his weapons, and all about were lying dead men and wounded. It is
+reckoned that nine men must have lost their lives there. Eyjolf asks
+his cousin whether he can move at all. Aron says that he can, and
+stands on his feet; and now they go both together for a while by the
+shore, till they come to a hidden bay; there they saw a boat ready
+floating, with five or six men at the oars, and the bow to sea. This
+was Eyjolf's arrangement, in case of sudden need. Now Eyjolf tells
+Aron that he means the boat for both of them; giving out that he sees
+no hope of doing more for the Bishop at that time.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But I look for better days to come,&quot; says Eyjolf.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It seems a strange plan to me,&quot; says Aron; &quot;for I thought that we
+should never part from Bishop Gudmund in this distress; there is
+something behind this, and I vow that I will not go unless you go
+first on board.&quot;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>&quot;That I will not, cousin,&quot; says Eyjolf; &quot;for it is shoal water here,
+and I will not have any of the oarsmen leave his oar to shove her off;
+and it is far too much for you to go afoot with wounds like yours. You
+will have to go on board.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, put your weapons in the boat,&quot; says Aron, &quot;and I will believe
+you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Aron now goes on board; and Eyjolf did as Aron asked him. Eyjolf waded
+after, pushing the boat, for the shallows went far out. And when he
+saw the right time come, Eyjolf caught up a battle-axe out of the
+stern of the boat, and gave a shove to the boat with all his might.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good-bye, Aron,&quot; says Eyjolf; &quot;we shall meet again when God pleases.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And since Aron was disabled with wounds, and weary with loss of blood,
+it had to be even so; and this parting was a grief to Aron, for they
+saw each other no more.</p>
+
+<p>Now Eyjolf spoke to the oarsmen and told them to row hard, and not to
+let Aron come back to Grimsey that day, and not for many a day if they
+could help it.</p>
+
+<p>They row away with Aron in their boat; but Eyjolf turns to the shore
+again and to a boat-house with a large ferry-boat in it, that belonged
+to the goodman Gnup. And at the same nick of time he sees the Sturlung
+company come tearing down from the garth, having finished their
+mischief there. Eyjolf takes to the boat-house, with his mind made up
+to defend it as long as his doom would let him. There were double
+doors to the boat-house, and he puts heavy stones against them.</p>
+
+<p>Brand, one of Sighvat's followers, a man of good condition, caught a
+glimpse of a man moving, and said to his companions that he thought he
+had made out Eyjolf Karsson there, and they ought to go after him.
+Sturla was not on the spot; there were nine or ten together. So they
+come to the boat-house. Brand asks who is there, and Eyjolf says it is
+he.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then you will please to come out and come before Sturla,&quot; says Brand.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Will you promise me quarter?&quot; says Eyjolf.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There will be little of that,&quot; says Brand.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Then it is for you to come on,&quot; says Eyjolf, &quot;and for me to guard; and
+it seems to me the shares are ill divided.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Eyjolf had a coat of mail, and a great axe, and that was all.</p>
+
+<p>Now they came at him, and he made a good and brave defence; he cut
+their pike-shafts through; there were stout strokes on both sides. And
+in that bout Eyjolf breaks his axe-heft, and catches up an oar, and
+then another, and both break with his blows. And in this bout Eyjolf
+gets a thrust under his arm, and it came home. Some say that he broke
+the shaft from the spear-head, and let it stay in the wound. He sees
+now that his defence is ended. Then he made a dash out, and got
+through them, before they knew. They were not expecting this; still
+they kept their heads, and a man named Mar cut at him and caught his
+ankle, so that his foot hung crippled. With that he rolls down the
+beach, and the sea was at the flood. In such plight as he was in,
+Eyjolf set to and swam; and swimming he came twelve fathoms from shore
+to a shelf of rock, and knelt there; and then he fell full length upon
+the earth, and spread his hands from him, turning to the East as if to
+pray.</p>
+
+<p>Now they launch the boat, and go after him. And when they came to the
+rock, a man drove a spear into him, and then another, but no blood
+flowed from either wound. So they turn to go ashore, and find Sturla
+and tell him the story plainly how it had all fallen out. Sturla held,
+and other men too, that this had been a glorious defence. He showed
+that he was pleased at the news.</p>
+
+<p>&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap"><a name="NOTE_D"></a>Note D</span> (<a href="#Page_360">p. 360</a>)</h3>
+
+<h4><i>Two Catalogues of Romances</i></h4>
+
+<p>There are many references to books and cycles of romance in medieval
+literature&#8212;minstrels' enumerations of their stock-in-trade, and
+humorous allusions like those of Sir Thopas, and otherwise. There are
+two passages, among others, which seem to do their best to cover the
+whole ground, or at least to exemplify all the chief groups. One of
+these is that referred to in the text, from <i>Flamenca</i>; the other is
+to be found, much later, in the <i>Complaint of Scotland</i> (1549).</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><b>I. <span class="smcap">Flamenca</span> (ll. 609-701)</b></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>
+Qui volc ausir diverses comtes<br />
+De reis, de marques e de comtes,<br />
+Auzir ne poc tan can si volc;<br />
+Anc null' aurella non lai colc,<br />
+Quar l'us comtet de Priamus,<br />
+E l'autre diz de Piramus;<br />
+L'us contet de la bell'Elena<br />
+Com Paris l'enquer, pois l'anmena;<br />
+L'autres comtava d'Ulixes,<br />
+L'autre d'Ector et d'Achilles;<br />
+L'autre comtava d'Eneas,<br />
+E de Dido consi remas<br />
+Per lui dolenta e mesquina;<br />
+L'autre comtava de Lavina<br />
+Con fes lo breu el cairel traire<br />
+A la gaita de l'auzor caire;<br />
+L'us contet d'Apollonices<br />
+De Tideu e d'Etidiocles;<br />
+L'autre comtava d'Apolloine<br />
+Comsi retenc Tyr de Sidoine;<br />
+L'us comtet del rei Alexandri<br />
+L'autre d'Ero et de Leandri;<br />
+L'us dis de Catmus quan fugi<br />
+Et de Tebas con las basti,<br />
+L'autre contava de Jason<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span>E del dragon que non hac son;<br />
+L'us comte d'Alcide sa forsa,<br />
+L'autre con tornet en sa forsa<br />
+Phillis per amor Demophon;<br />
+L'us dis com neguet en la fon<br />
+Lo bels Narcis quan s'i miret;<br />
+L'us dis de Pluto con emblet<br />
+Sa bella moillier ad Orpheu;<br />
+L'autre comtet del Philisteu<br />
+Golias, consi fon aucis<br />
+Ab treis peiras quel trais David;<br />
+L'us diz de Samson con dormi,<br />
+Quan Dalidan liet la cri;<br />
+L'autre comtet de Machabeu<br />
+Comen si combatet per Dieu;<br />
+L'us comtet de Juli Cesar<br />
+Com passet tot solet la mar,<br />
+E no i preguet Nostre Senor<br />
+Que nous cujes agues paor;<br />
+L'us diz de la Taula Redonda<br />
+Que no i venc homs que noil responda<br />
+Le reis segon sa conoissensa,<br />
+Anc nuil jorn ne i failli valensa;<br />
+L'autre comtava de Galvain,<br />
+E del leo que fon compain<br />
+Del cavallier qu'estors Luneta;<br />
+L'us diz de la piucella breta<br />
+Con tenc Lancelot en preiso<br />
+Cant de s'amor li dis de no;<br />
+L'autre comtet de Persaval<br />
+Co venc a la cort a caval;<br />
+L'us comtet d'Erec e d'Enida,<br />
+L'autre d'Ugonet de Perida;<br />
+L'us comtava de Governail<br />
+Com per Tristan ac grieu trebail,<br />
+L'autre comtava de Feniza<br />
+Con transir la fes sa noirissa<br />
+L'us dis del Bel Desconogut<br />
+E l'autre del vermeil escut<br />
+Que l'yras trobet a l'uisset;<br />
+L'autre comtava de Guiflet;<br />
+L'us comtet de Calobrenan,<br />
+L'autre dis con retenc un an<br />
+Dins sa preison Quec senescal<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span>Lo deliez car li dis mal;<br />
+L'autre comtava de Mordret;<br />
+L'us retrais lo comte Duret<br />
+Com fo per los Ventres faiditz<br />
+E per Rei Pescador grazits;<br />
+L'us comtet l'astre d'Ermeli,<br />
+L'autre dis com fan l'Ancessi<br />
+Per gein lo Veil de la Montaina;<br />
+L'us retrais con tenc Alamaina<br />
+Karlesmaines tro la parti,<br />
+De Clodoveu e de Pipi<br />
+Comtava l'us tota l'istoria;<br />
+L'autre dis con cazec de gloria<br />
+Donz Lucifers per son ergoil;<br />
+L'us diz del vallet de Nantoil,<br />
+L'autre d'Oliveir de Verdu.<br />
+L'us dis lo vers de Marcabru,<br />
+L'autre comtet con Dedalus<br />
+Saup ben volar, et d'Icarus<br />
+Co neguet per sa leujaria.<br />
+Cascus dis lo mieil que sabia.<br />
+Per la rumor dels viuladors<br />
+E per brug d'aitans comtadors<br />
+Hac gran murmuri per la sala.<br />
+</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>The allusions are explained by the editor, M. Paul Meyer. The stories
+are as follows: Priam, Pyramus, Helen, Ulysses, Hector, Achilles,
+Dido, Lavinia (how she sent her letter with an arrow over the
+sentinel's head, <i>Roman d'Eneas</i>, l. 8807, <i>sq.</i>), Polynices, Tydeus,
+and Eteocles; Apollonius of Tyre; Alexander; Hero and Leander; Cadmus
+of Thebes; Jason and the sleepless Dragon; Hercules; Demophoon and
+Phyllis (a hard passage); Narcissus; Pluto and the wife of Orpheus
+(&quot;Sir Orfeo&quot;); David and Goliath; Samson and Dalila; Judas Maccabeus;
+Julius Caesar; the Round Table, and how the king had an answer for all
+who sought him; Gawain and Yvain (&quot;of the lion that was companion of
+the knight whom Lunete rescued&quot;<a name="FNanchor_91_91" id="FNanchor_91_91"></a><a href="#Footnote_91_91" class="fnanchor">[91]</a>);<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span> of the British maiden who kept
+Lancelot imprisoned when he refused her love; of Perceval, how he rode
+into hall; Ugonet de Perida (?); Governail, the loyal comrade of
+Tristram; Fenice and the sleeping-draught (Chrestien's <i>Cliges</i>, see
+<a href="#Page_357">p. 357</a>, above); Guinglain (&quot;Sir Libeaus)&quot;; Chrestien's <i>Chevalier de
+la Charrette</i> (&quot;how the herald found the red shield at the entry,&quot; an
+allusion explained by M. Gaston Paris, in <i>Romania</i>, xvi. p. 101),
+Guiflet, Calobrenan, Kay punished for his railing accusations;
+Mordred; how the Count Duret was dispossessed by the Vandals and
+welcomed by the Fisher King (?); the luck of Hermelin (?); the Old Man
+of the Mountain and his Assassins; the Wars of Charlemagne; Clovis and
+Pepin of France; the Fall of Lucifer; Gui de Nanteuil; Oliver of
+Verdun; the Flight of Daedalus, and how Icarus was drowned through his
+vanity. The songs of Marcabrun, the troubadour, find a place in the
+list among the stories.</p>
+
+<p>The author of <i>Flamenca</i> has arranged his library, though there are
+some incongruities; Daedalus belongs properly to the &quot;matter of Rome&quot;
+with which the catalogue begins, and Lucifer interrupts the series of
+<i>Chansons de geste</i>. The &quot;matter of Britain,&quot; however, is all by
+itself, and is well represented.</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><b>II. <span class="smcap">The Complaynt of Scotland</span>, c. vi.</b></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">(Ed. J.A.H. Murray, <i>E.E.T.S.</i>, pp. 62-64)</p>
+
+<p>[This passage belongs to the close of the Middle Ages, when the old
+epic and romantic books were falling into neglect. There is no
+distinction here between literary romance and popular tales; the
+once-fashionable poetical works are reduced to their original
+elements. Arthur and Gawain are no more respected than the Red Etin,
+or the tale of the <i>Well at the World's End</i> (the reading <i>volfe</i> in
+the text has no defender); the Four Sons of Aymon have become what
+they were afterwards<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span> for Boileau (<i>Ep.</i> xi. 20), or rather for
+Boileau's gardener. But, on the whole, the list represents the common
+medieval taste in fiction. The <i>Chansons de geste</i> have provided the
+<i>Bridge of the Mantrible</i> (from <i>Oliver and Fierabras</i>, which may be
+intended in the <i>Flamenca</i> reference to Oliver), and the <i>Siege of
+Milan</i> (see <i>English Charlemagne Romances</i>, <i>E.E.T.S.</i>, part ii.), as
+well as the <i>Four Sons of Aymon</i> and <i>Sir Bevis</i>. The Arthurian cycle
+is popular; the romance of <i>Sir Ywain</i> (the Knight of the Lion) is
+here, however, the only one that can be definitely traced in the
+<i>Flamenca</i> list also, though of course there is a general
+correspondence in subject-matter. The classical fables from Ovid are
+still among the favourites, and many of them are common to both lists.
+See Dr. Furnivall's note, in the edition cited, pp. lxxiii.-lxxxii.]</p>
+
+<p>Quhen the scheiphird hed endit his prolixt orison to the laif of the
+scheiphirdis, i meruellit nocht litil quhen i herd ane rustic pastour
+of bestialite, distitut of vrbanite, and of speculatioune of natural
+philosophe, indoctryne his nychtbours as he hed studeit ptholome,
+auerois, aristotel, galien, ypocrites, or Cicero, quhilk var expert
+practicians in methamatic art. Than the scheiphirdis vyf said: my veil
+belouit hisband, i pray the to desist fra that tideus melancolic
+orison, quhilk surpassis thy ingyne, be rason that it is nocht thy
+facultee to disput in ane profund mater, the quhilk thy capacite can
+nocht comprehend. ther for, i thynk it best that ve recreat our selfis
+vytht ioyus comonyng quhil on to the tyme that ve return to the scheip
+fald vytht our flokkis. And to begin sic recreatione i thynk it best
+that everie ane of vs tel ane gude tayl or fable, to pas the tyme
+quhil euyn. Al the scheiphirdis, ther vyuis and saruandis, var glaid
+of this propositione. than the eldest scheiphird began, and al the
+laif follouit, ane be ane in their auen place. it vil be ouer prolixt,
+and no les tideus to reherse them agane vord be vord. bot i sal
+reherse sum of ther<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span> namys that i herd. Sum vas in prose and sum vas
+in verse: sum vas stories and sum var flet taylis. Thir var the namis
+of them as eftir follouis: the taylis of cantirberrye, Robert le
+dyabil duc of Normandie, the tayl of the volfe of the varldis end,
+Ferrand erl of Flandris that mareit the deuyl, the taiyl of the reyde
+eyttyn vitht the thre heydis, the tail quhou perseus sauit andromada
+fra the cruel monstir, the prophysie of merlyne, the tayl of the
+giantis that eit quyk men, on fut by fortht as i culd found, vallace,
+the bruce, ypomedon, the tail of the three futtit dug of norrouay, the
+tayl quhou Hercules sleu the serpent hidra that hed vij heydis, the
+tail quhou the king of est mure land mareit the kyngis dochtir of vest
+mure land, Skail gillenderson the kyngis sone of skellye, the tail of
+the four sonnis of aymon, the tail of the brig of the mantribil, the
+tail of syr euan, arthour's knycht, rauf <span title="colyear">col&#540;ear</span>, the seige of
+millan, gauen and gollogras, lancelot du lac, Arthour knycht he raid
+on nycht vitht gyltin spur and candil lycht, the tail of floremond of
+albanye that sleu the dragon be the see, the tail of syr valtir the
+bald leslye, the tail of the pure tynt, claryades and maliades,
+Arthour of litil <span title="bertangye">bertang&#540;e</span>, robene hude and litil ihone, the
+meruellis of mandiueil, the tayl of the <span title="yong">&#540;ong</span> tamlene and of the
+bald braband, the ryng of the roy Robert, syr egeir and syr gryme,
+beuis of southamtoun, the goldin targe, the paleis of honour, the tayl
+quhou acteon vas transformit in ane hart and syne slane be his auen
+doggis, the tayl of Pirramus and tesbe, the tail of the amours of
+leander and hero, the tail how Iupiter transformit his deir love yo in
+ane cou, the tail quhou that iason van the goldin fleice, Opheus kyng
+of portingal, the tail of the goldin appil, the tail of the thre veird
+systirs, the tail quhou that dedalus maid the laborynth to keip the
+monstir minotaurus, the tail quhou kyng midas gat tua asse luggis on
+his hede because of his auereis.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX</h2>
+
+
+<p>
+<i><a name="Aage">Aage</a></i>, Danish ballad, related to Helgi and Sigrun, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cf. York Powell, <i>C.P.B.</i> i. 502, and <i>Grimm Centenary Papers</i> (1886), p. 47</span><br />
+<br />
+Achilles, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Aeneid</i>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>, <a href="#Page_349">349</a><br />
+<br />
+Alboin the Lombard (O.E. &#198;lfwine, see <i><a href="#Davenant">Davenant</a></i>), <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a> n, <a href="#Page_189">189</a><br />
+<br />
+Alexander the Great, in old French poetry, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his <i>Epistle</i>; (Anglo-Saxon version), <a href="#Page_329">329</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Aliscans">Aliscans</a>, chanson de geste</i> of the cycle of William of Orange, <a href="#Page_296">296</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Alv&#237;ssm&#225;l</i>, in 'Elder Edda,' <a href="#Page_112">112</a><br />
+<br />
+Amadis of Gaul, a formal hero, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a><br />
+<br />
+Ammius (O.N. Ham&#240;er): see <i><a href="#Hamthismal">Ham&#240;ism&#225;l</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Andreas</i>, old English poem on the legend of St. Andrew, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a><br />
+<br />
+Andvari, <a href="#Page_115">115</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Angantyr</i>, the <i>Waking of</i>, poem in <i>Hervarar Saga</i>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a> n<br />
+<br />
+<i>Apollonius of Tyre</i>, in Anglo-Saxon, <a href="#Page_329">329</a><br />
+<br />
+Ari Thorgilsson, called the Wise (Ari Fr&#243;&#240;i, <span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1067-1148),<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his <i>Landn&#225;mab&#243;k</i> and <i>Konunga &#198;fi</i>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Ynglinga Saga</i>, <a href="#Page_279">279</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Ariosto, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_323">323</a><br />
+<br />
+Aristotle on the dramatic element in epic, <a href="#Page_17">17</a> <i>sq.</i>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his summary of the <i>Odyssey</i>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a> <i>sq.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Arnaldos, romance del Conde</i>, Spanish ballad, <a href="#Page_327">327</a><br />
+<br />
+Arni, Bishop of Skalholt (<i>ob.</i> 1298), his <i>Life</i> (<i>Arna Saga</i>), <a href="#Page_268">268</a><br />
+<br />
+Arni Beiskr (the Bitter), murderer of Snorri Sturluson, his death at Flugumyri, <a href="#Page_263">263</a><br />
+<br />
+Aron Hj&#246;rleifsson (<i>Arons Saga</i>), a friend of Bishop Gudmund, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_381">381</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+Asbj&#246;rnsen, P. Chr., <a href="#Page_170">170</a> n<br />
+<br />
+Asdis, Grettir's mother, <a href="#Page_216">216</a> n<br />
+<br />
+Askel: see <i><a href="#Reykdaela">Reykd&#230;la Saga</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Atlakvi&#240;a</i>, the <i>Lay of Attila</i>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a> <i>sq.</i>: see <i>
+<a href="#Attila">Attila</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Atlam&#225;l</i>, the <i>Greenland Poem of Attila</i>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>-156: see <i>
+<a href="#Attila">Attila</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Atli and Rimgerd, Contention of</i>, in 'Elder Edda,' <a href="#Page_113">113</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Atli">Atli</a> in <i>Grettis Saga</i>, his dying speech, <a href="#Page_218">218</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in <i>H&#225;var&#240;ar Saga</i>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Attila">Attila</a> (O.E. &#198;tla, O.N. Atli), the Hun, adopted as a German hero in epic tradition, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">different views of him in epic, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in <i>Waltharius</i>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in <i>Waldere</i>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in the 'Elder Edda,' <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a> <i>sq.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Aucassin et Nicolette</i>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a><br />
+<br />
+Audoin the Lombard (O.E. Eadwine), father of Alboin, <a href="#Page_67">67</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Aymon, Four Sons of</i>, i.e. <i>Renaus de Montauban</i> (<i>chanson de geste</i>), <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_387">387</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Balder, death of, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Bandamanna">Bandamanna</a> Saga</i>, 'The Confederates,' <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>-234<br />
+<br />
+Beatrice the Duchess, wife of Begon de Belin, mother of Gerin and Hernaudin, <a href="#Page_307">307</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+Begon de Belin, brother of Garin le Loherain, <i>q.v.</i><br />
+<br />
+Benoit de Sainte More, his <i>Roman de Troie</i>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Beowulf">Beowulf</a></i>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>-175, <a href="#Page_290">290</a><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">and the <i>Odyssey</i>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Beowulf</i> and the <i>H&#234;liand</i>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a><br />
+<br />
+Bergthora, Njal's wife, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+Bernier: see <i><a href="#Raoul">Raoul de Cambrai</a></i><br />
+<br />
+B&#233;roul: see <i><a href="#Tristram">Tristram</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Bevis, Sir</i>, <a href="#Page_388">388</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Biarkam&#225;l</i>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a><br />
+<br />
+Bjargey: see <i><a href="#Havarthar">H&#225;var&#240;ar Saga</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Bjorn, in <i>Nj&#225;la</i>, and his wife, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>-229<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Blethericus">Blethericus</a>, a Welsh author, <a href="#Page_348">348</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Boccaccio">Boccaccio</a>, his relation to the French Romantic School, and to Chaucer, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>-370<br />
+<br />
+Bodvild, <a href="#Page_95">95</a><br />
+<br />
+Boethius <i>On the Consolation of Philosophy</i>, a favourite book, <a href="#Page_46">46</a><br />
+<br />
+Bolli, Gudrun's husband (<i>Laxd&#230;la Saga</i>), <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a> <i>sq.</i>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">kills Kjartan, <a href="#Page_242">242</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Bolli the younger, son of Bolli and Gudrun, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>-224<br />
+<br />
+Bossu, on the Epic Poem, his opinion of Phaeacia, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a> n<br />
+<br />
+Bradley, Mr. Henry, on the first Riddle in the <i>Exeter Book</i>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a> (<i>Academy</i>, March 24, 1888, p. 198)<br />
+<br />
+Br&#233;ri, cited by Thomas as his authority for the story of Tristram: see <i>
+<a href="#Blethericus">Blethericus</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Brink, Dr. Bernhard Ten, some time Professor at Strassburg, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a><br />
+<br />
+Broceliande visited by Wace, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Brunanburh</i>, poem of the battle of, <a href="#Page_76">76</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Brynhild">Brynhild</a>, sister of Attila, wife of Gunnar the Niblung, <i>passim</i><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">long <i>Lay of</i>, in the 'Elder Edda' (<i>al. Sigur&#240;arkvi&#240;a in Skamma</i>), <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a> <i>sq.</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Hell-ride of</i>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">short <i>Lay of</i> (fragment), <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">lost poem concerning, paraphrased in <i>Volsunga Saga</i>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Danish ballad of: see <i><a href="#Sivard">Sivard</a></i></span><br />
+<br />
+Bugge, Dr. Sophus, sometime Professor in Christiania, <a href="#Page_77">77</a> n, <a href="#Page_87">87</a> n, <a href="#Page_137">137</a> n<br />
+<br />
+<i>Byrhtnoth</i>: see <i><a href="#Maldon">Maldon</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>C.P.B.</i>, i.e. <i><a href="#Corpus">Corpus Poeticum Boreale</a></i>, q.v.<br />
+<br />
+Campbell, J.F., of Islay, <a href="#Page_170">170</a> n, <a href="#Page_340">340</a><br />
+<br />
+Casket of whalebone (the Franks casket), in the British Museum, subjects represented on it, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">runic inscriptions, <a href="#Page_49">49</a> (cf. Napier, in <i>An English Miscellany</i>, Oxford 1901)</span><br />
+<br />
+Charles the Great, Roman Emperor (Charlemagne), different views of him in French Epic, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in <i>Huon de Bordeaux</i> <a href="#Page_314">314</a> <i>sq.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">history of, in Norwegian (<i>Karlamagnus Saga</i>), <a href="#Page_278">278</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Spanish (chap-book), <a href="#Page_297">297</a> n: see <i>
+<a href="#Pelerinage">P&#232;lerinage de Charlemagne</a></i></span><br />
+<br />
+Charlot: see <i><a href="#Huon">Huon de Bordeaux</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Charroi">Charroi</a> de Nismes</i>, <i>chanson de geste</i> of the cycle of William of Orange, quoted, <a href="#Page_312">312</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Chaucer">Chaucer</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a> n;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his relation to the French Romantic School, and to Boccaccio, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>-370</span><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Chrestien">Chrestien</a> de Troyes, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>, <a href="#Page_344">344</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his works,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>Tristan</i> (lost), <a href="#Page_344">344</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>Erec</i> (<i>Geraint and Enid</i>), <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>, <a href="#Page_355">355</a> <i>sq.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>Conte du Graal</i> (<i>Perceval</i>), <a href="#Page_327">327</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>Cliges</i>, <a href="#Page_333">333</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>Chevalier de la Charrette</i> (<i>Lancelot</i>), <a href="#Page_341">341</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>Yvain</i> (<i>Chevalier au Lion</i>), <a href="#Page_352">352</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a> <i>sq.</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his influence on the author of <i>Flamenca</i>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a> <i>sq.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Codex Regius</i> (2365, 4to), in the King's Library, Copenhagen: see
+<a href="#Edda"> <i>Edda, 'the Elder</i>'</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Com&#233;die Humaine, la</i>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br />
+<br />
+Connla (the story of the fairy-bride): see <i><a href="#Guingamor">Guingamor</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Contract, Social, in Iceland, <a href="#Page_59">59</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Coronemenz">Coronemenz</a> Loo&#239;s</i>, <i>chanson de geste</i> of the cycle of William of Orange, quoted, <a href="#Page_311">311</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Corpus">Corpus</a> Poeticum Boreale</i>, ed. G. Vigfusson and F. York Powell, Oxford, 1883, <i>passim</i><br />
+<br />
+Corsolt, a pagan, <a href="#Page_311">311</a><br />
+<br />
+Cressida, in <i>Roman de Troie</i>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the story treated in different ways by
+<a href="#Boccaccio">Boccaccio</a> and <a href="#Chaucer">Chaucer</a>, <i>q.v.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+Cynewulf, the poet, <a href="#Page_51">51</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Cynewulf and Cyneheard</i> (English Chronicle, <span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 755), <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a> n<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Dag, brother of Sigrun, <a href="#Page_72">72</a><br />
+<br />
+Dandie Dinmont, <a href="#Page_201">201</a><br />
+<br />
+Dante, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">his reference to William of Orange, <a href="#Page_296">296</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Dart, Song of the</i> (<i>Darra&#240;arli&#243;&#240;</i>, Gray's 'Fatal Sisters'), <a href="#Page_78">78</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Davenant">Davenant</a>, Sir William, on the heroic poem (Preface to <i>Gondibert</i>), quoted, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">author of a tragedy, 'Albovine King of the Lombards,' <a href="#Page_67">67</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Deor's Lament</i>, old English poem, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a><br />
+<br />
+Drangey, island in Eyjafirth, north of Iceland, Grettir's refuge, <a href="#Page_196">196</a><br />
+<br />
+Dryden and the heroic ideal, <a href="#Page_30">30</a><br />
+<br />
+Du Bartas, <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span><i>Edda</i>, a handbook of the Art of Poetry, by Snorri Sturluson, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a><br />
+<br />
+'<a name="Edda">Edda</a>,' 'the Elder,' 'the Poetic,' 'of S&#230;mund the Wise' (<i>Codex Regius</i>), <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a> <i>passim</i><br />
+<br />
+Egil the Bowman, Weland's brother, represented on the Franks casket (&#198;gili), <a href="#Page_48">48</a><br />
+<br />
+Egil Skallagrimsson, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a><br />
+<br />
+Einar Thorgilsson: see <i><a href="#Sturla">Sturla of Hvamm</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Ekkehard, Dean of St. Gall, author of <i>Waltharius</i>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Elene</i>, by Cynewulf, an old English poem on the legend of St. Helen (the Invention of the Cross), <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Eneas, Roman d'</i>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Enid</i>: see <i><a href="#Chrestien">Chrestien de Troyes</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Erec</i>: see <i><a href="#Chrestien">Chrestien de Troyes</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Eric the Red, his Saga in Hauk's book, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br />
+<br />
+Ermanaric (O.E. Eormenr&#237;c, O.N. J&#246;rmunrekr), <a href="#Page_22">22</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">killed by the brothers of Suanihilda, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>: see <i>
+<a href="#Hamthismal">Ham&#240;ism&#225;l</a></i></span><br />
+<br />
+Erp: see <i><a href="#Hamthismal">Ham&#240;ism&#225;l</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Exodus</i>, old English poem of, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a><br />
+<br />
+Eyjolf Karsson, a friend of Bishop Gudmund, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>, <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+Eyjolf Thorsteinsson: see <i><a href="#Gizur">Gizur</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Eyrbyggja">Eyrbyggja</a> Saga</i>, the story of the men of Eyre, <a href="#Page_187">187</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>F&#230;reyinga Saga</i>, the story of the men of the Faroes (Thrond of Gata and Sigmund Brestisson), <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a><br />
+<br />
+Faroese ballads, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a><br />
+<br />
+Fielding, Henry, <a href="#Page_266">266</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Fierabras</i>, <a href="#Page_388">388</a><br />
+<br />
+Finn: see <i><a href="#Finnesburh">Finnesburh</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Finnesburh">Finnesburh</a></i>, old English poem (fragment), published by Hickes from a Lambeth MS., now mislaid, <a href="#Page_81">81</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">episode in <i>Beowulf</i>, giving more of the story, <a href="#Page_81">81</a> <i>sq.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Fi&#246;lsvinnsm&#225;l</i> see <i><a href="#Svipdag">Svipdag</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Flamenca</i>, a Proven&#231;al romance, by a follower of Chrestien de Troyes, in the spirit of Ovid, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>-362;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">romances named in, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>-387</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Fl&#243;amanna Saga</i>, the story of the people of Floi, <a href="#Page_259">259</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Flores et Blanchefleur</i>, romance, referred to in <i>Flamenca</i>, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">translated by Boccaccio (<i>Filocolo</i>), <a href="#Page_364">364</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Flosi the Burner, in <i>Nj&#225;la</i>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+Flugumyri, a homestead in Northern Iceland (Skagafjord), Earl Gizur's house, burned October 1253, the story as given by Sturla, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>-264<br />
+<br />
+<i>F&#243;stbr&#230;&#240;ra Saga</i> (the story of the two sworn brethren, Thorgeir and Thormod) <a href="#Page_38">38</a> n, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Hauk's book, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">euphuistic interpolations in, <a href="#Page_275">275</a> <i>sq.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Frey">Frey</a>, poem of his wooing of Gerd (<i>Skirnism&#225;l</i>), in the 'Poetic Edda,' <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Frithiof the Bold</i>, a romantic Saga, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+Froda (Fr&#243;&#240;&#225;), homestead in Olafsv&#237;k, near the end of Sn&#230;fellsnes, Western Iceland, a haunted house, <i>Eyrbyggja Saga</i>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Froda">Froda</a> (Frotho in Saxo Grammaticus), his story alluded to in <i>Beowulf</i>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a> n, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_373">373</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+Froissart and the courteous ideal, <a href="#Page_328">328</a><br />
+<br />
+Fromont, the adversary in the story of <i><a href="#Garin">Garin le Loherain</a></i>, <i>q.v.</i><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Galopin the Prodigal, in the story of <i>Garin le Loherain</i>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Gareth</i>, in Malory's <i>Morte d'Arthur</i>, original of the Red Cross Knight in the <i>Faery Queene</i>, <a href="#Page_343">343</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Garin">Garin</a> le Loherain</i> (<i>chanson de geste</i>), <a href="#Page_53">53</a> n, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>-309<br />
+<br />
+Gawain killed dragons, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>: see <i><a href="#Walewein">Walewein</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Gawain and the Green Knight</i>, alliterative poem, <a href="#Page_180">180</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Gay Goshawk</i>, ballad of the, <a href="#Page_357">357</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Genesis</i>, old English poem of, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Geraint</i>, Welsh story, <a href="#Page_355">355</a><br />
+<br />
+Gerd: see <i><a href="#Frey">Frey</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Germania</i> of Tacitus, <a href="#Page_46">46</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>G&#237;sla Saga</i>, the story of Gisli the Outlaw, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its relations to the heroic poetry, <a href="#Page_210">210</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Giuki (Lat. Gibicho, O.E. Gifica), father of <a href="#Gunnar">Gunnar</a>,
+<a href="#Hogni">Hogni</a>, <a href="#Gothorm">Gothorm</a>, and
+<a href="#Gudrun">Gudrun</a>, <i>q.v.</i><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Gizur">Gizur</a> Thorvaldsson, the earl, at Flugumyri, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>-264<br />
+<br />
+Glam (<i>Grettis Saga</i>), <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Glum">Glum</a> (<i>V&#237;ga-Gl&#250;ms Saga</i>), <a href="#Page_193">193</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and <i>Raoul de Cambrai</i>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Gollancz, Mr., <a href="#Page_135">135</a> (see <i>Academy</i>, Dec. 23, 1893, p. 572)<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Gothorm">Gothorm</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a><br />
+<br />
+Gray, his translations from the Icelandic, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a> n<br />
+<br />
+Gregory (St.) the Great, <i>de Cura Pastorali</i>, studied in Iceland, <a href="#Page_59">59</a><br />
+<br />
+Grendel, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>: see <i><a href="#Beowulf">Beowulf</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span><i>Grettis Saga</i>, the story of Grettir the Strong, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a> n, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_226">226</a><br />
+<br />
+Grimhild, mother of Gudrun, <a href="#Page_110">110</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Grimild's Revenge</i>, Danish ballad (<i>Grimilds H&#230;vn</i>), <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a><br />
+<br />
+Grimm, <a href="#Page_136">136</a> n;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">story of the <i>Golden Bird</i>, <a href="#Page_340">340</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Wilhelm, <i>Deutsche Heldensage</i>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Gr&#237;mnism&#225;l</i>, in 'Elder Edda,' <a href="#Page_112">112</a><br />
+<br />
+Gripir, Prophecy of (<i>Gr&#237;pissp&#225;</i>) in the 'Elder Edda,' a summary of the Volsung story, <a href="#Page_94">94</a><br />
+<br />
+Groa, wife of Earl <a href="#Gizur">Gizur</a>, <i>q.v.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Gr&#243;galdr</i>: see <i><a href="#Svipdag">Svipdag</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Grottas&#246;ngr</i> (Song of the Magic Mill), <a href="#Page_90">90</a><br />
+<br />
+Gudmund Arason, Bishop of H&#243;lar, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>, <a href="#Page_381">381</a><br />
+<br />
+Gudmund, son of Granmar: see <i><a href="#Sinfiotli">Sinfiotli</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Gudmund the Mighty (Gu&#240;mundr inn Riki), in <i>Lj&#243;svetninga</i> and other Sagas, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a><br />
+<br />
+Gudny, wife of <a href="#Sturla">Sturla of Hvamm</a>, <i>q.v.</i><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Gudrun">Gudrun</a> (O.N. Gu&#240;r&#250;n), daughter of Giuki, sister of Gunnar and Hogni, wife of Sigurd, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Theodoric, the <i>Old Lay of Gudrun</i> (<i>Gu&#240;r&#250;narkvi&#240;a in forna</i>), <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Lay of</i> (<i>Gu&#240;r&#250;narkvi&#240;a</i>), <a href="#Page_111">111</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Lament of</i>, or <i>Chain of Woe</i> (<i>Tregrof Gu&#240;r&#250;nar</i>), <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Ordeal of</i>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">daughter of Osvifr (<i>Laxd&#230;la Saga</i>), <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>-224</span><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Guingamor">Guingamor</a>, Lay of</i>, by Marie de France, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>-340<br />
+<br />
+<i>Guinglain</i>, romance, by Renaud de Beaujeu: see <i><a href="#Libeaux">Libeaux Desconus</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Gundaharius">Gundaharius</a> (Gundicarius), the Burgundian (O.E. G&#250;&#240;here, O.N. Gunnarr; Gunther in the <i>Nibelungenlied</i>, etc.), <a href="#Page_22">22</a>: see <i>
+<a href="#Gunnar">Gunnar</a></i>, <i><a href="#Gunther">Gunther</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Gunnar of Lithend (Hl&#237;&#240;arendi), in <i>Nj&#225;ls Saga</i>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his death, <a href="#Page_214">214</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Gunnar">Gunnar</a>, son of Giuki, brother of Gudrun, <a href="#Page_101">101</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a> <i>sq.</i>: see <i>
+<a href="#Gundaharius">Gundaharius</a></i>, <i><a href="#Gunther">Gunther</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Gunnlaug">Gunnlaug</a> the Poet, called Wormtongue, his story (<i>Gunnlaugs Saga Ormstungu</i>), <a href="#Page_207">207</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Gunther">Gunther</a> (Guntharius, son of Gibicho) in <i>Waltharius</i>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a> <i>sq.</i>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in <i>Waldere</i>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>: see <i>
+<a href="#Gundaharius">Gundaharius</a></i>, <i><a href="#Gunnar">Gunnar</a></i></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Hacon, King of Norway (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1217-1263): see <i>
+<a href="#Hakonar">H&#225;konar Saga</a></i>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his taste for French romances, <a href="#Page_278">278</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Hadubrand, son of Hildebrand, <a href="#Page_81">81</a><br />
+<br />
+Hagen (Hagano), in <i>Waltharius</i>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Hagen">Hagen</a>, in <i>Waldere</i> (Hagena), <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in <i><a href="#Sivard">Sivard</a></i>, <i>q.v.</i>: see <i>
+<a href="#Hogni">Hogni</a></i></span><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Hakonar">H&#225;konar</a> Saga</i>, the <i>Life</i> of Hacon, Hacon's son, King of Norway (<i>ob.</i> 1263), written by Sturla, contrasted with his history of Iceland, <a href="#Page_267">267</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Halfs Saga</i>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a><br />
+<br />
+Hall, son of Earl Gizur, <a href="#Page_259">259</a><br />
+<br />
+Hama, <a href="#Page_163">163</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Hamlet</i> in Saxo, <a href="#Page_70">70</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Hamthismal">Ham&#240;ism&#225;l</a></i> ('Poetic Edda'), Lay of the death of Ermanaric, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>-71, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a><br />
+<br />
+Harald, king of Norway (Fairhair), <a href="#Page_58">58</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">in <i>Egils Saga</i>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">king of Norway (Hardrada), killed dragons, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">his Saga referred to (story of Hreidar the Simple), <a href="#Page_310">310</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">(Varangian custom), <a href="#Page_329">329</a> n</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Harbarzli&#243;&#240;</i>: see <i><a href="#Thor">Thor</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Har&#240;ar Saga ok Holmverja</i>, the story of Hord and the men of the island, <a href="#Page_212">212</a> n<br />
+<br />
+Hauk's Book, an Icelandic gentleman's select library in the fourteenth century, <a href="#Page_47">47</a> <i>sq.</i> (<i>Hauksb&#243;k</i>, ed. Finnur J&#243;nsson, 1892-1896)<br />
+<br />
+<i>H&#225;vam&#225;l</i> in 'Poetic Edda,' a gnomic miscellany, <a href="#Page_77">77</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Havarthar">H&#225;var&#240;ar</a> Saga Isfir&#240;ings</i>, the story of Howard of Icefirth, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a><br />
+<br />
+Hearne, Thomas, <a href="#Page_78">78</a><br />
+<br />
+Hedin, brother of Helgi, Hiorvard's son, <a href="#Page_99">99</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Heitharviga">Hei&#240;arv&#237;ga</a> Saga</i>, the story of the battle on the Heath (connected with <i>Eyrbyggja Saga</i>), <a href="#Page_209">209</a>: see <i>
+<a href="#Viga-Styrr">V&#237;ga-Styrr</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Hei&#240;reks Saga</i>: see <i><a href="#Hervarar">Hervarar Saga</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Heimskringla</i>, Snorri's <i>Lives of the Kings of Norway</i>, abridged, <a href="#Page_248">248</a><br />
+<br />
+Helgi and Kara, <a href="#Page_98">98</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Helgi">Helgi</a>, Hiorvard's son, and Swava, <a href="#Page_97">97</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a><br />
+<br />
+Helgi Hundingsbane and Sigrun, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a> n, <a href="#Page_95">95</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>H&#234;liand</i>, old Saxon poem on the Gospel history, using the forms of German heroic poetry, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a><br />
+<br />
+Hengest: see <i><a href="#Finnesburh">Finnesburh</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Heremod, <a href="#Page_162">162</a><br />
+<br />
+Herkja, <a href="#Page_111">111</a><br />
+<br />
+Hermes, in the Homeric hymn, <a href="#Page_43">43</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Hervarar">Hervarar</a> Saga ok Hei&#240;reks Konungs</i> (<i>Hei&#240;reks Saga</i>), one of the romantic mythical Sagas in Hauk's book, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>;<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">contains the poems of the cycle of Angantyr, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Hervor, daughter of Angantyr, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a><br />
+<br />
+Heusler, Dr. Andreas, Professor in Berlin, <a href="#Page_100">100</a> n<br />
+<br />
+Hialli, <a href="#Page_151">151</a><br />
+<br />
+Hickes, George, D.D., <a href="#Page_73">73</a> n, <a href="#Page_78">78</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Hildebrand, Lay of</i>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a> n, <a href="#Page_91">91</a><br />
+<br />
+Hildeburg: see <i><a href="#Finnesburh">Finnesburh</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Hildegund (Hildegyth), <a href="#Page_84">84</a> <i>sq.</i>: see <i>
+<a href="#Walter">Walter</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Hn&#230;f: see <i><a href="#Finnesburh">Finnesburh</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Hobs, Mr. (<i>i.e.</i> Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury), <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br />
+<br />
+Hodbrodd, in story of Helgi and Sigrun, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a><br />
+<br />
+Hogni, father of Sigrun, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Hogni">Hogni</a>, son of Giuki, brother of Gunnar, Gothorm, and Gudrun, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a> <i>sq.</i>: see <i>
+<a href="#Hagen">Hagen</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Homeric analogies in medieval literature, <a href="#Page_9">9</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson, a friend of Bishop Gudmund, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Hrafns Saga</i> quoted, <a href="#Page_38">38</a> n</span><br />
+<br />
+Hrafn: see <i><a href="#Gunnlaug">Gunnlaug</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Hrafnkels Saga Freysgo&#240;a</i>, the story of Hrafnkel, Frey's Priest, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a><br />
+<br />
+Hrefna, Kjartan's wife, <a href="#Page_223">223</a><br />
+<br />
+Hreidar the Simple, an unpromising hero, in <i>Haralds Saga Har&#240;r&#225;&#240;a</i>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a><br />
+<br />
+Hrolf Kraki (Hro&#240;ulf in <i>Beowulf</i>), <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Hromund Greipsson</i>, Saga of, <a href="#Page_99">99</a><br />
+<br />
+Hrothgar, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hunding, <a href="#Page_95">95</a><br />
+<br />
+Hunferth, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Huon">Huon</a> de Bordeaux</i> (<i>chanson de geste</i>), epic and romance combined inartistically in, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>-317<br />
+<br />
+Hurd's <i>Letters on Chivalry and Romance</i>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a><br />
+<br />
+Hygelac, <a href="#Page_161">161</a> <i>sq.</i>: see <i><a href="#Beowulf">Beowulf</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Hymiskvi&#240;a</i>: see <i><a href="#Thor">Thor</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Ibsen, Henrik, his <i>H&#230;rm&#230;ndene paa Helgeland</i> (<i>Warriors in Helgeland</i>), a drama founded on the Volsung story, its relation to <i>Laxd&#230;la Saga</i>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his <i>Kongsemnerne</i> (<i>Rival Kings</i>, Hacon and Skule), <a href="#Page_268">268</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Ider</i>, romance, <a href="#Page_331">331</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_347">347</a> n<br />
+<br />
+<i>Iliad</i>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>, <a href="#Page_352">352</a> n<br />
+<br />
+Ingeld: see <i><a href="#Froda">Froda</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Ingibjorg, daughter of Sturla, her wedding at Flugumyri, <a href="#Page_259">259</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Intelligenza, L'</i>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a> n<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Jehoram, son of Ahab, in the famine of Samaria, <a href="#Page_239">239</a><br />
+<br />
+Johnson, Dr., <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Joinville">Joinville</a>, Jean de, Seneschal of Champagne, his <i>Life of St. Louis</i> compared with Icelandic prose history, <a href="#Page_269">269</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+J&#243;n Arason the poet, Bishop of H&#243;lar, the last Catholic Bishop in Iceland, beheaded by Reformers, 7th November 1550, a notable character, <a href="#Page_268">268</a><br />
+<br />
+Jordanes, historian of the Goths, his version of the story of <i>Ermanaric</i>, its relation to <i>Ham&#240;ism&#225;l</i>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Judith</i>, old English poem of, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a><br />
+<br />
+Julian, the Emperor, his opinion of German songs, <a href="#Page_65">65</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Kara, <a href="#Page_98">98</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+Kari, in <i>Nj&#225;la</i>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Bjorn, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>-229</span><br />
+<br />
+Karl J&#243;nsson, Abbot of Thingeyri in Iceland, author of <i>Sverris Saga</i>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a><br />
+<br />
+Kjartan, son of Olaf the Peacock (<i>Laxd&#230;la Saga</i>), <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his death, <a href="#Page_240">240</a> <i>sq.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+<i>K&#246;nigskinder, die</i>, German ballad, <a href="#Page_327">327</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Kormaks Saga</i>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a> n, <a href="#Page_281">281</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>Lancelot</i>, the French prose romance, <a href="#Page_335">335</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Landn&#225;mab&#243;k</i>, in Hauk's book, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br />
+<br />
+Laurence, Bishop of H&#243;lar (<i>ob.</i> 1331), his <i>Life</i> (<i>Laurentius Saga</i>), <a href="#Page_268">268</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Laxdaela">Laxd&#230;la</a> Saga</i>, the story of Laxdale (<i>the Lovers of the Gudrun</i>), <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">a new version of the Niblung story, <a href="#Page_209">209</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Leconte de Lisle, <i>L'Ep&#233;e d'Angantyr</i>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a> n<br />
+<br />
+Lessing's <i>Laocoon</i>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Libeaux">Libeaux</a> Desconus</i>, romance in different versions&#8212;French, by Renaud de Beaujeu (<i>Guinglain</i>), <a href="#Page_337">337</a>, <a href="#Page_343">343</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">English, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>, <a href="#Page_343">343</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Italian (<i>Carduino</i>), <a href="#Page_337">337</a>, <a href="#Page_343">343</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Lj&#243;svetninga Saga</i>, story of the House of Lj&#243;savatn, <a href="#Page_188">188</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Lokasenna</i> (the Railing of Loki), <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a><br />
+<br />
+Longnon, Auguste, <a href="#Page_314">314</a> n<br />
+<br />
+Louis IX., king of France (St. Louis): see <i><a href="#Joinville">Joinville</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Lusiad</i>, the, a patriotic epic, unlike the poetry of the 'heroic age,' <a href="#Page_22">22</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Macrobius, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_333">333</a><br />
+<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span><i><a name="Maldon">Maldon</a></i>, poem of the battle of (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 991), <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a> n, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">compared with the <i>Iliad</i>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">compared with <i>Roland</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Malory">Malory</a>, Sir Thomas, his <i>Morte d'Arthur</i>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Mantrible, Bridge of the</i>, <a href="#Page_388">388</a><br />
+<br />
+Marie de France, her <i>Lays</i> translated into Norwegian (<i>Strengleikar</i>), <a href="#Page_278">278</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Guingamor</i> criticised, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>-340</span><br />
+<br />
+Marino, <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br />
+<br />
+Martianus Capella, <i>de Nuptiis Philologiae</i>, studied in the Middle Ages, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br />
+<br />
+Medea, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>, <a href="#Page_347">347</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Menglad, Rescue of</i>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>: see <i>
+<a href="#Svipdag">Svipdag</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Mephistopheles in Thessaly, <a href="#Page_10">10</a><br />
+<br />
+Meyer, Paul, <a href="#Page_290">290</a> n, <a href="#Page_359">359</a> n, <a href="#Page_386">386</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Milan, Siege of</i>, <a href="#Page_388">388</a><br />
+<br />
+Mimming, the sword of Weland, <a href="#Page_86">86</a><br />
+<br />
+Morris, William, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Mort Arthure</i>, alliterative poem, <a href="#Page_180">180</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Mort Artus</i>, French prose romance, <a href="#Page_335">335</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Morte d'Arthur</i>: see <i><a href="#Malory">Malory</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>Nibelungenlied</i>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a><br />
+<br />
+Niblung story, its relation to historical fact, <a href="#Page_22">22</a> <i>sq.</i>: see <i>
+<a href="#Gunnar">Gunnar</a></i>, <i><a href="#Hogni">Hogni</a></i>, <i>
+<a href="#Gudrun">Gudrun</a></i>, <i><a href="#Laxdaela">Laxd&#230;la Saga</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Nidad, <a href="#Page_95">95</a><br />
+<br />
+Njal, story of (<i>Nj&#225;la</i>), <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>-221<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Oberon; see <i><a href="#Huon">Huon de Bordeaux</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Odd, Arrow (&#214;rvar-Oddr), <a href="#Page_73">73</a><br />
+<br />
+Oddrun, sister of Brynhild and Attila, <a href="#Page_102">102</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Lament of</i> (<i>Oddr&#250;nargr&#225;tr</i>), in the 'Elder Edda,' <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a> <i>sq.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+Odd Ufeigsson: see <i><a href="#Bandamanna">Bandamanna Saga</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Odoacer, referred to in <i>Lay of Hildebrand</i>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a><br />
+<br />
+Odysseus, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Odyssey</i>, the, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Aristotle's summary of, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">romance in, <a href="#Page_32">32</a> <i>sq.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+Olaf Tryggvason, king of Norway, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Olkofra &#222;&#225;ttr</i>, the story of Alecap, related to <i>Bandamanna Saga</i>, <a href="#Page_226">226</a><br />
+<br />
+Ossian, in the land of youth: see <i><a href="#Guingamor">Guingamor</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Ovid in the Middle Ages, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>, <span title="Transcriber's Note: No page 412 in original.">412</span>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Ovidius Epistolarum</i> studied in Iceland, <a href="#Page_59">59</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Ovid's story of Medea, translated in the <i>Roman de Troie</i>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_348">348</a> <i>sq.</i>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Heroides</i> became the 'Saints' Legend of Cupid,' <a href="#Page_347">347</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Paris, Gaston, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>, <a href="#Page_343">343</a>, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>, <a href="#Page_348">348</a> n, <a href="#Page_387">387</a><br />
+<br />
+Paulus Diaconus, heroic stories in the Lombard history, <a href="#Page_66">66</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+Peer Gynt, <a href="#Page_170">170</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Pelerinage">P&#232;lerinage</a> de Charlemagne</i> (<i>chanson de geste</i>), <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a><br />
+<br />
+Percy, Thomas, D.D., <i>Five Pieces of Runic Poetry</i>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a> n, <a href="#Page_141">141</a> n<br />
+<br />
+Phaeacia, Odysseus in, Bossu's criticism, <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br />
+<br />
+Pindar, his treatment of myths, <a href="#Page_43">43</a><br />
+<br />
+Poitiers, William IX., Count of, his poem on setting out for the Crusade, <a href="#Page_317">317</a><br />
+<br />
+Powell, F. York, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>: see <i><a href="#Aage">Aage</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Prise">Prise</a> d'Orange</i>, <i>chanson de geste</i> of the cycle of William of Orange, in substance a romance of adventure, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>Queste del St. Graal</i>, French prose romance, a contrast to the style of Chrestien de Troyes, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Ragnar Lodbrok, his Death-Song (<i>Kr&#225;kum&#225;l</i>), <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Rainouart">Rainouart</a>, the gigantic ally of William of Orange, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">their names associated by Dante (<i>Par.</i> xviii. 46), <i>ibid.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Raoul">Raoul</a> de Cambrai</i> (<i>chanson de geste</i>), <a href="#Page_291">291</a> n, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>-300, <a href="#Page_309">309</a><br />
+<br />
+Rastignac, Eug&#232;ne de, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Reykdaela">Reykd&#230;la</a> Saga</i>, the story of Vemund, Askel, and Skuta son of Askel, connected with the story of Glum, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a><br />
+<br />
+Rigaut, son of Hervi the Villain, in the story of <i>Garin le Loherain</i>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a><br />
+<br />
+Rimgerd the Giantess: see <i><a href="#Atli">Atli</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>R&#237;mur</i>, Icelandic rhyming romances, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Roland, Chanson de</i>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>-295, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">compared with <i>Byrhtnoth</i> (<i>Maldon</i>), <a href="#Page_54">54</a> <i>sq.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">with an incident in <i>Nj&#225;la</i>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Roman de la Rose</i>, of Guillaume de Lorris, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Rood, Dream of the</i>, old English poem, <a href="#Page_134">134</a><br />
+<br />
+Rosamund and Alboin in the Lombard history, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Rosmunda</i>, a tragedy, by Rucellai, <a href="#Page_67">67</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Rou, Roman de</i>, the author's visit to Broceliande, <a href="#Page_26">26</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Sam (S&#225;mr), Gunnar's dog, <a href="#Page_214">214</a><br />
+<br />
+Sarpedon's address to Glaucus, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a><br />
+<br />
+Sarus and Ammius (Sorli and Hamther), brothers of Suanihilda (Jordanes), <a href="#Page_66">66</a>: see <i>
+<a href="#Hamthismal">Ham&#240;ism&#225;l</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span>Saxo Grammaticus, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Scotland, Complaynt of</i>, romances named in, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>-389<br />
+<br />
+<i>Scottish Field</i>, alliterative poem on Flodden, <a href="#Page_179">179</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+Shakespeare, his treatment of popular tales, <a href="#Page_36">36</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Sibyl's Prophecy</i>: see <i><a href="#Volospa">Volosp&#225;</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Sidney, Sir Philip, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a><br />
+<br />
+Sievers, Dr. Eduard, Professor in Leipzig, <a href="#Page_136">136</a> n, <a href="#Page_169">169</a> n<br />
+<br />
+Sigmund Brestisson, in <i>F&#230;reyinga Saga</i>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a><br />
+<br />
+Sigmund, father of Sinfiotli, Helgi, and Sigurd, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a><br />
+<br />
+Signild: see <i><a href="#Sivard">Sivard</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Sigrdrifa, <a href="#Page_115">115</a><br />
+<br />
+Sigrun: see <i><a href="#Helgi">Helgi</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Sigurd, the Volsung (O.N. Sigur&#240;r), <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">fragmentary <i>Lay of</i> (<i>Brot af Sigur&#240;arkvi&#240;u</i>), <a href="#Page_103">103</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Lay of</i>: see <i><a href="#Brynhild">Brynhild</a></i></span><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Sinfiotli">Sinfiotli</a>, debate of, and Gudmund, <a href="#Page_96">96</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Sivard">Sivard</a> og Brynild</i>, Danish ballad, translated, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>-129<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Skallagrim">Skallagrim</a>, how he told the truth to King Harald, <a href="#Page_192">192</a><br />
+<br />
+Skarphedinn, son of Njal, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a><br />
+<br />
+Skirnir: see <i><a href="#Frey">Frey</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Skule, Duke, the rival of Hacon, <a href="#Page_267">267</a><br />
+<br />
+Skuta: see <i><a href="#Reykdaela">Reykd&#230;la Saga</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Snorri Sturluson (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1178-1241), author of the <i>Edda</i>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and of the <i>Lives of the Kings of Norway</i>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his murder avenged at Flugumyri, <a href="#Page_263">263</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Snorri the Priest (Snorri Go&#240;i), in <i>Eyrbyggja</i> and other Sagas, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Sonatorrek</i> (the Sons' Loss), poem by Egil Skallagrimsson, <a href="#Page_215">215</a><br />
+<br />
+Sorli: see <i><a href="#Hamthismal">Ham&#240;ism&#225;l</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Spenser, <a href="#Page_343">343</a><br />
+<br />
+Starkad, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a><br />
+<br />
+Stephens, George, sometime Professor in Copenhagen, <a href="#Page_78">78</a><br />
+<br />
+Stevenson, R.L., <i>Catriona</i>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a> n<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Sturla">Sturla</a> of Hvamm (Hvamm-Sturla), founder of the house of the Sturlungs, his life (<i>Sturlu Saga</i>) <a href="#Page_253">253</a>-256<br />
+<br />
+Sturla (<i>c.</i> <span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1214-1284), son of Thord, and grandson of Hvamm-Sturla, nephew of Snorri, author of <i>
+<a href="#Sturlunga">Sturlunga Saga</a></i> (<i>q.v.</i>) and of <i>
+<a href="#Hakonar">H&#225;konar Saga</a></i> (<i>q.v.</i>) <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_259">259</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Sturlunga">Sturlunga</a> Saga</i> (more accurately <i>Islendinga Saga</i>), of Sturla, Thord's son, a history of the author's own times, using the forms of the heroic Sagas, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+Suanihilda: see <i><a href="#Swanhild">Swanhild</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Svarfd&#230;la Saga</i>, the story of the men of Swarfdale (<i>Svarfa&#240;ardalr</i>), <a href="#Page_219">219</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Sveidal">Sveidal</a>, Ungen</i>, Danish ballad, on the story of Svipdag and Menglad, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a><br />
+<br />
+Sverre, king of Norway (<i>ob.</i> 1202), his <i>Life</i> (<i>Sverris Saga</i>) written by Abbot Karl J&#243;nsson at the king's dictation, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">quotes a Volsung poem, <a href="#Page_278">278</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Svipdag">Svipdag</a> and Menglad</i>, old Northern poems of, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a> <i>sq.</i>: see <i>
+<a href="#Sveidal">Sveidal</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Swanhild">Swanhild</a> (O.N. Svanhildr), daughter of Sigurd and Gudrun, her cruel death; the vengeance on Ermanaric known to Jordanes in the sixth century, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>: see <i>
+<a href="#Hamthismal">Ham&#240;ism&#225;l</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Tasso, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his critical essays on heroic poetry, <a href="#Page_30">30</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Tegn&#233;r, Esaias, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his <i>Frithiofs Saga</i>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Tennyson, <i>Enid</i>, <a href="#Page_355">355</a><br />
+<br />
+Theodoric (O.N. &#222;i&#243;&#240;rekr), a hero of Teutonic epic in different dialects, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">fragment of Swedish poem on, inscription on stone at R&#246;k, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>: see <i>
+<a href="#Gudrun">Gudrun</a></i></span><br />
+<br />
+Thersites, <a href="#Page_243">243</a><br />
+<br />
+Thidrandi, whom the goddesses slew, <a href="#Page_208">208</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>&#222;idreks Saga</i> (thirteenth century), a Norwegian compilation from North German ballads on heroic subjects, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a><br />
+<br />
+Thomas: see <i><a href="#Tristram">Tristram</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Thor">Thor</a>, in old Northern literature, his Fishing for the World Serpent (<i>Hymiskvi&#240;a</i>), <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">the Winning of the Hammer (<i>&#222;rymskvi&#240;a</i>), <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Danish ballad of, <a href="#Page_125">125</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the contention of, and Odin (<i>Harbarzli&#243;&#240;</i>), <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Thorarin, in <i>Eyrbyggja</i>, the quiet man, <a href="#Page_227">227</a><br />
+<br />
+Thorgils and Haflidi (<i>&#222;orgils Saga ok Hafli&#240;a</i>), <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+Thorkell Hake, in <i>Lj&#243;svetinga Saga</i>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a><br />
+<br />
+Thorolf B&#230;gifot: see <i><a href="#Eyrbyggja">Eyrbyggja</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Thorolf, Kveldulf's son: see <i><a href="#Skallagrim">Skallagrim</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>&#222;orsteins Saga Hv&#237;ta</i>, the story of Thorstein the White, points of resemblance to <i>Laxd&#230;la</i> and <i>Gunnlaugs Saga</i>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a><br />
+<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span><i>&#222;orsteins Saga Stangarh&#246;ggs</i> (Thorstein Staffsmitten), a short story, <a href="#Page_282">282</a><br />
+<br />
+Thrond of Gata (<i>F&#230;reyinga Saga</i>), <a href="#Page_245">245</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>&#222;rymskvi&#240;a</i>: see <i><a href="#Thor">Thor</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Thrytho, <a href="#Page_162">162</a><br />
+<br />
+Thurismund, son of Thurisvend, king of the Gepidae, killed by Alboin, <a href="#Page_67">67</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Tirant lo Blanch</i> (Tirant the White, Romance of), <a href="#Page_38">38</a> n;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">a moral work, <a href="#Page_222">222</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Trissino, author of <i>Italia liberata dai Goti</i>, a correct epic poem, <a href="#Page_30">30</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Tristram">Tristram</a> and Iseult</i>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>, Anglo-Norman poems, by B&#233;roul and Thomas, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Chrestien (lost), <i>ibid.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+Troilus, <a href="#Page_368">368</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Troy, Destruction of</i>, alliterative poem, <a href="#Page_180">180</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Ufeig: see <i><a href="#Bandamanna">Bandamanna Saga</a></i><br />
+<br />
+Uistean Mor mac Ghille Phadrig, <a href="#Page_170">170</a><br />
+<br />
+Uspak: see <i><a href="#Bandamanna">Bandamanna Saga</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>Vaf&#254;r&#250;&#240;nism&#225;l</i>, mythological poem in 'Elder Edda,' <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a><br />
+<br />
+Vali: see <i><a href="#Bandamanna">Bandamanna Saga</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>V&#225;pnfir&#240;inga Saga</i>, the story of Vopnafjord, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_226">226</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Vatnsd&#230;la Saga</i>, story of the House of Vatnsdal, <a href="#Page_189">189</a><br />
+<br />
+Vemund: see <i><a href="#Reykdaela">Reykd&#230;la Saga</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Vergi, la Chastelaine de</i>, a short tragic story, <a href="#Page_362">362</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>V&#237;ga-Gl&#250;ms Saga</i>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>: see <i>
+<a href="#Glum">Glum</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Viga-Styrr">V&#237;ga-Styrr</a>: see <i><a href="#Heitharviga">Hei&#240;arv&#237;ga Saga</a></i><br />
+</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>N.B.</i>&#8212;The story referred to in the text is preserved in
+J&#243;n Olafsson's recollection of the leaves of the MS. which
+were lost in the fire of 1728 (<i>Islendinga S&#246;gur</i>, 1847, ii.
+p. 296). It is not given in Mr. William Morris's translation
+of the extant portion of the Saga, appended to his
+<i>Eyrbyggja</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p>
+Vigfusson, Gudbrand, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a> n, <a href="#Page_283">283</a> n<br />
+<br />
+<i>Viglund, Story of</i>, a romantic Saga, <a href="#Page_278">278</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+Villehardouin, a contemporary of Snorri, <a href="#Page_269">269</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Volospa">Volosp&#225;</a></i> (the Sibyl's Song of the Doom of the Gods), in the 'Poetic Edda,' <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">another copy in Hauk's book, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Volsunga Saga</i>, a prose paraphrase of old Northern poems, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Volsungs, Old Lay of the</i>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>Wade, Song of</i>, fragment recently discovered, <a href="#Page_180">180</a> (see <i>Academy</i>, Feb. 15, 1896)<br />
+<br />
+<i>Waldere</i>, old English poem (fragment), <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>: see <i>
+<a href="#Walter">Walter of Aquitaine</a></i><br />
+<br />
+<i><a name="Walewein">Walewein</a>, Roman van</i>, Dutch romance of Sir Gawain; the plot compared with the Gaelic story of Mac Iain Direach, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>-343<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Walter">Walter</a> of Aquitaine, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a> <i>sq.</i>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Waltharius</i>, Latin poem by Ekkehard, on the story of <a href="#Walter">Walter of Aquitaine</a>, <i>q.v.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Wanderer, the</i>, old English poem, <a href="#Page_134">134</a><br />
+<br />
+Ward, H.L.D., his Catalogue of MS. Romances in the British Museum, <a href="#Page_282">282</a><br />
+<br />
+Wealhtheo, <a href="#Page_166">166</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Weland</i>, <a href="#Page_338">338</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">represented on the Franks casket in the British Museum, <a href="#Page_48">48</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned in <i>Waldere</i>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Lay of</i>, in 'Poetic Edda,' <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Well at the World's End</i>, <a href="#Page_387">387</a><br />
+<br />
+Widia, Weland's son, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Widsith</i> (the Traveller's Song), old English poem, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a><br />
+<br />
+Wiglaf, the 'loyal servitor' in <i>Beowulf</i>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a><br />
+<br />
+William of Orange, old French epic hero, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>: see <i>
+<a href="#Coronemenz">Coronemenz Loo&#239;s</a></i>, <i><a href="#Charroi">Charroi de Nismes</a></i>, <i>
+<a href="#Prise">Prise d'Orange</a></i>, <i><a href="#Aliscans">Aliscans</a></i>, <i>
+<a href="#Rainouart">Rainouart</a></i>; cf. J. B&#233;dier, <i>Les L&#233;gendes &#233;piques</i> (1908)</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 35%;" />
+
+<h3>THE END</h3>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<span class="small"><i>Printed in Great Britain by</i> <span class="smcap">R. &amp; R. Clark, Limited</span>, <i>Edinburgh</i>.</span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Johnson on the Epic Poem (<i>Life of Milton</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>Il.</i> xii. 328.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Il.</i> xi. 462.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> <i>Od.</i> viii. 165.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> <i>Il.</i> xix. 420.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a>
+&#927;&#956;&#951;&#961;&#959;&#962; &#948;&#949; &#945;&#955;&#955;&#945; &#964;&#949; &#960;&#959;&#955;&#955;&#945; &#945;&#958;&#953;&#959;&#962; &#949;&#960;&#945;&#953;&#957;&#949;&#953;&#963;&#952;&#945;&#953; &#954;&#945;&#953;
+&#948;&#951; &#954;&#945;&#953; &#959;&#964;&#953; &#956;&#959;&#957;&#959;&#962; &#964;&#969;&#957; &#960;&#959;&#953;&#951;&#964;&#969;&#957; &#959;&#965;&#954; &#945;&#947;&#957;&#959;&#949;&#953; &#959; &#948;&#949;&#953; &#960;&#959;&#953;&#949;&#953;&#957; &#945;&#965;&#964;&#959;&#957;. &#945;&#965;&#964;&#959;&#957;
+&#947;&#945;&#961; &#948;&#949;&#953; &#964;&#959;&#957; &#960;&#959;&#953;&#951;&#964;&#951;&#957; &#949;&#955;&#945;&#967;&#953;&#963;&#964;&#945; &#955;&#949;&#947;&#949;&#953;&#957;: &#959;&#965; &#947;&#945;&#961; &#949;&#963;&#964;&#953; &#954;&#945;&#964;&#945; &#964;&#945;&#965;&#964;&#945; &#956;&#953;&#956;&#951;&#964;&#951;&#962;.
+&#959;&#953; &#956;&#949;&#957; &#959;&#965;&#957; &#945;&#955;&#955;&#959;&#953; &#945;&#965;&#964;&#959;&#953; &#956;&#949;&#957; &#948;&#953;' &#959;&#955;&#959;&#965; &#945;&#947;&#969;&#957;&#953;&#950;&#959;&#957;&#964;&#945;&#953;, &#956;&#953;&#956;&#959;&#965;&#957;&#964;&#945;&#953; &#948;&#949; &#959;&#955;&#953;&#947;&#945;
+&#954;&#945;&#953; &#959;&#955;&#953;&#947;&#945;&#954;&#953;&#962;: &#959; &#948;&#949; &#959;&#955;&#953;&#947;&#945; &#966;&#961;&#959;&#953;&#956;&#953;&#945;&#963;&#945;&#956;&#949;&#957;&#959;&#962; &#949;&#965;&#952;&#965;&#962; &#949;&#953;&#963;&#945;&#947;&#949;&#953; &#945;&#957;&#948;&#961;&#945; &#951;
+&#947;&#965;&#957;&#945;&#953;&#954;&#945; &#951; &#945;&#955;&#955;&#959; &#964;&#953; &#951;&#952;&#959;&#962; &#954;&#945;&#953; &#959;&#965;&#948;&#949;&#957;' &#945;&#951;&#952;&#951; &#945;&#955;&#955;' &#949;&#967;&#959;&#957;&#964;&#945; &#951;&#952;&#951;.&#8212;<span class="smcap">Arist.</span>
+<i>Poet.</i> 1460 a 5.</p>
+<p>[<i>Transliteration:</i> Hom&#234;ros de alla te polla axios epaineisthai kai
+d&#234; kai hoti monos t&#244;n poi&#234;t&#244;n ouk agnoei ho dei poiein auton. auton
+gar dei ton poi&#234;t&#234;n elachista legein: ou gar esti kata tauta mim&#234;t&#234;s.
+hoi men oun alloi autoi men di' holou ag&#244;nizontai, mimountai de oliga
+kai oligakis: ho de oliga phroimiasamenos euthys eisagei andra &#234;
+gynaika &#234; allo ti &#234;thos kai ouden' a&#234;th&#234; all' echonta &#234;th&#234;.]
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> <i>Trait&#233; du Po&#235;me &#201;pique</i>, par le R.P. Le Bossu, Chanoine
+R&#233;gulier de Sainte Genevi&#232;ve; MDCLXXV (t. ii. p. 166).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a>
+</p>
+<p><span style="margin-left: 10em;">&#945;&#965;&#964;&#945;&#961;' &#927;&#948;&#965;&#963;&#963;&#949;&#965;&#962;</span><br />
+&#952;&#965;&#956;&#969;&#953; &#956;&#949;&#957; &#947;&#959;&#959;&#969;&#963;&#945;&#957; &#949;&#951;&#957; &#949;&#955;&#949;&#945;&#953;&#961;&#949; &#947;&#965;&#957;&#945;&#953;&#954;&#945;,<br />
+&#959;&#966;&#952;&#945;&#955;&#956;&#959;&#953; &#948;' &#969;&#962; &#949;&#953; &#954;&#949;&#961;&#945; &#949;&#963;&#964;&#945;&#963;&#945;&#957; &#951;&#949; &#963;&#953;&#948;&#951;&#961;&#959;&#962;<br />
+&#945;&#964;&#961;&#949;&#956;&#945;&#962; &#949;&#957; &#946;&#955;&#949;&#966;&#945;&#961;&#959;&#953;&#963;&#953;; &#948;&#959;&#955;&#969;&#953; &#948;' &#959; &#947;&#949; &#948;&#945;&#954;&#961;&#965;&#945; &#954;&#949;&#965;&#952;&#949;&#957;.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em"><i>Od.</i> xix. 209.</span>
+</p>
+<p>[<i>Transliteration:</i></p>
+<p><span style="margin-left: 10em;">autar' Odysseus</span><br />
+thym&#244;i men goo&#244;san he&#234;n eleaire gynaika,<br />
+ophthalmoi d' h&#244;s ei kera hestasan &#234;e sid&#234;ros<br />
+atremas en blepharoisi; dol&#244;i d' ho ge dakrya keuthen.]
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a>
+</p>
+<p><span title="Greek: nun de tois allois agathois aphanizei h&#234;dun&#244;n to atopon">&#957;&#965;&#957; &#948;&#949; &#964;&#959;&#953;&#962; &#945;&#955;&#955;&#959;&#953;&#962; &#945;&#947;&#945;&#952;&#959;&#953;&#962; &#945;&#966;&#945;&#957;&#953;&#950;&#949;&#953; &#951;&#948;&#965;&#957;&#969;&#957; &#964;&#959; &#945;&#964;&#959;&#960;&#959;&#957;</span>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em"><span class="smcap">Aristot.</span> <i>Poet.</i> 1460 b.</span>
+</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> &quot;In the events of this history may be proved the great
+long-suffering of God Almighty towards us every day; and the freedom
+of will which He has given to every man, that each may do what he
+will, good or evil.&quot;&#8212;<i>Hrafns Saga</i>, Prologue (<i>Sturlunga Saga</i>
+Oxford, 1878, II. p. 275).
+</p><p>
+&quot;As all good things are the work of God, so valour is made by Him and
+placed in the heart of stout champions, and freedom therewithal to use
+it as they will, for good or evil.&quot;&#8212;<i>F&#243;stbr&#230;&#240;ra Saga</i> (1852), p. 12:
+one of the sophistical additions to the story: see below <a href="#Page_275">p. 275</a>.
+</p><p>
+The moral is different in the following passage:&#8212;
+</p><p>
+&quot;And inasmuch as the Providence of God hath ordained, and it is His
+pleasure, that the seven planets should have influence on the world,
+and bear dominion over man's nature, giving him divers inclinations to
+sin and naughtiness of life: nevertheless the Universal Creator has
+not taken from him the free will, which, as it is well governed, may
+subdue and abolish these temptations by virtuous living, if men will
+use discretion.&quot;&#8212;<i>Tirant lo Blanch</i> (1460), c. i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> <i>Il.</i> xii. 241.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> <i>Il.</i> xvii. 227.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> The censure is not wanting:&#8212;
+</p><p>
+&quot;L'on doit consid&#233;rer que ce n'est ni le Po&#235;te, ni son H&#233;ros, ni un
+honn&#234;te homme qui fait ce r&#233;cit: mais que les Ph&#233;aques, peuples mols
+et effeminez, se le font chanter pendant leur festin.&quot;&#8212;<span class="smcap">Bossu</span>, <i>op.
+cit.</i> p. 152.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> <i>Od.</i> vi. 151.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a>
+</p>
+<p>
+Lor autres mors ont toz en terre mis:<br />
+Crois font sor aus, qu'il erent droit martir:<br />
+Por lor seignor orent est&#233; ocis.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em"><i>Garin le Loherain</i>, tom. ii. p. 88.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> <i>C.P.B.</i>, Introduction, p. lii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> This poem has been followed by M. Leconte de Lisle in
+<i>L'&#201;p&#233;e d'Angantyr (Po&#232;mes Barbares)</i>. It was among the first of the
+Northern poems to be translated into English, in Hickes's <i>Thesaurus</i>
+(1705), i. p. 193. It is also included in Percy's <i>Five Pieces of
+Runic Poetry</i> (1763).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> Cf. G. Vigfusson, Prolegomena to <i>Sturlunga</i> (Oxford,
+1878); (<i>Corpus Poeticum Boreale</i> (<i>ibid.</i> 1883); <i>Grimm Centenary
+Papers</i> 1886); Sophus Bugge, <i>Helgedigtene</i> (1896; trans. Schofield,
+1899).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> Compare <i>Cynewulf and Cyneheard</i> in the Chronicle (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span>
+755); also the outbreak of enmity, through recollection of old wrongs,
+in the stories of Alboin, and of the vengeance for Froda (<i>supra</i>, pp.
+ <a href="#Page_68">68</a>-70).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> Hildegyth, her English name, is unfortunately not
+preserved in either of the fragmentary leaves. It is found (Hildigi&#240;)
+in the <i>Liber Vitae</i> (Sweet, <i>Oldest English Texts</i>, p. 155).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> The resemblance to Hildebrand, l. 58, is pointed out by
+Sophus Bugge: &quot;Doh maht du nu aodlihho, ibu dir din ellen taoc, In sus
+heremo man hrusti giwinnan.&quot; (Hildebrand speaks): &quot;Easily now mayest
+thou win the spoils of so old a man, if thy strength avail thee.&quot; It
+is remarkable as evidence of the strong conventional character of the
+Teutonic poetry, and of the community of the different nations in the
+poetical convention, that two short passages like <i>Hildebrand</i> and
+<i>Waldere</i> should present so many points of likeness to other poems, in
+details of style. Thus the two lines quoted from <i>Hildebrand</i> as a
+parallel to <i>Waldere</i> contain also the equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon
+phrase, <i>&#222;onne his ellen deah</i>, a familiar part of the Teutonic
+<i>Gradus</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> Cf. <i>C.P.B.</i>, i. p. 375, for double versions of part of
+<i>Ham&#240;ism&#225;l</i>, and of the <i>Lay of Helgi</i>. On pp. 377-379, parts of the
+two texts of <i>Volosp&#225;</i>&#8212;R and H&#8212;are printed side by side for
+comparison.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> Cf. <i>Maldon</i>, l. 45 <i>sq.</i>, &quot;Hearest thou what this
+people answer? They will pay you, for tribute, spears, the deadly
+point, the old swords, the weapons of war that profit you not,&quot; etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> <i>C.P.B.</i>, i. p. 130.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> <i>C.P.B.</i>, Introduction, p. lxxviii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> The &quot;Long Lay of Sigurd&quot; has disappeared. Cf. Heusler,
+<i>Die Lieder der L&#252;cke im Codex Regius der Edda</i>, 1902.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> From <i>C.P.B.</i>, i. pp. 293, 294, with some
+modifications.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> From <i>C.P.B.</i>, i. p. 307, with some changes.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> See pp.
+ <a href="#Page_150">150</a>-156 below.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> Grundtvig, <i>Danmarks gamle Folkeviser</i>, No. 70. See
+above, <a href="#Page_114">p. 114</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> Compare the warning of Angantyr to Hervor when he gives
+her the sword Tyrfing&#8212;&quot;Keep the sword sheathed, the slayer of
+Hialmar; touch not the edges, there is venom upon them&quot;&#8212;and the magic
+sword Skofnung in <i>Kormaks Saga</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> Examples in
+ <a href="#APPENDIX">Appendix</a>, <a href="#NOTE_A">Note A</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> Compare the index to Sievers's edition of the <i>H&#234;liand</i>
+for illustrations of this community of poetical diction in old Saxon,
+English, Norse, and High German; and J. Grimm, <i>Andreas und Elene</i>
+(1840), pp. xxv.-xliv.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> See <i>Bidrag til den &#230;ldste Skaldedigtnings Historie</i>, by
+Dr. Sophus Bugge (1894).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> Compare <i>C.P.B.</i>, ii. 447, Excursus on the Figures and
+Metaphors of old Northern Poetry.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> These may be found in the second volume of the <i>Corpus
+Poeticum Boreale</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> <i>C.P.B.</i>, ii. 339.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> Translated in Percy's <i>Runic Poetry</i> (1763), p. 27, and
+often since.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> There is a natural affinity to Gray's poetry in the
+Icelandic poetry that he translated&#8212;compressed, emphatic, incapable
+of laxity.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> <i>Poet.</i> 1451 a.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a>
+&#964;&#959;&#953;&#947;&#945;&#961;&#959;&#965;&#957; &#949;&#954; &#956;&#949;&#957; &#921;&#955;&#953;&#945;&#948;&#959;&#962; &#954;&#945;&#953; &#927;&#948;&#965;&#963;&#963;&#949;&#953;&#945;&#962; &#956;&#953;&#945;
+&#964;&#961;&#945;&#947;&#969;&#953;&#948;&#953;&#945; &#960;&#959;&#953;&#949;&#953;&#964;&#945;&#953; &#949;&#954;&#945;&#964;&#949;&#961;&#945;&#962; &#951; &#948;&#965;&#959; &#956;&#959;&#957;&#945;&#953;, &#949;&#954; &#948;&#949; &#922;&#965;&#960;&#961;&#953;&#969;&#957; &#960;&#959;&#955;&#955;&#945;&#953; &#954;&#945;&#953; &#964;&#951;&#962;
+&#956;&#953;&#954;&#961;&#945;&#962; &#921;&#955;&#953;&#945;&#948;&#959;&#962; &#960;&#955;&#949;&#959;&#957; &#959;&#954;&#964;&#969;, &#959;&#953;&#959;&#957; &#959;&#960;&#955;&#969;&#957; &#954;&#961;&#953;&#963;&#953;&#962;, &#934;&#953;&#955;&#959;&#954;&#964;&#951;&#964;&#951;&#962;,
+&#925;&#949;&#959;&#960;&#964;&#959;&#955;&#949;&#956;&#959;&#962;, &#917;&#965;&#961;&#965;&#960;&#965;&#955;&#959;&#962;, &#960;&#964;&#969;&#967;&#949;&#953;&#945;, &#923;&#945;&#954;&#945;&#953;&#957;&#945;&#953;, &#921;&#955;&#953;&#959;&#965; &#960;&#949;&#961;&#963;&#953;&#962;, &#954;&#945;&#953; &#945;&#960;&#959;&#960;&#955;&#959;&#965;&#962;
+&#954;&#945;&#953; &#931;&#953;&#957;&#969;&#957; &#954;&#945;&#953; &#932;&#961;&#969;&#953;&#945;&#948;&#949;&#962; (1459 b).
+</p>
+<p>[<i>Transliteration:</i> toigaroun ek men Iliados kai Odysseias mia
+trag&#244;idia poieitai hekateras &#234; duo monai, ek de Kypri&#244;n pollai kai t&#234;s
+mikras Iliados pleon okt&#244;, hoion hopl&#244;n krisis, Philokt&#234;t&#234;s,
+Neoptolemos, Eurypylos, pt&#244;cheia, Lakainai, Iliou persis, kai apoplous
+kai Sin&#244;n kai Tr&#244;iades.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> It has been shown recently by Dr. Edward Sievers that
+Beowulf's dragon corresponds in many points to the dragon killed by
+Frotho, father of Haldanus, in Saxo, Book II. The dragon is not wholly
+commonplace, but has some particular distinctive traits. See <i>Berichte
+der K&#246;nigl. S&#228;chs. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften</i>, 6 Juli 1895.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> Asbj&#246;rnsen, <i>Norske Huldre-Eventyr og Folkesagn</i>. <i>At
+renske Huset</i> is the phrase&#8212;&quot;to cleanse the house.&quot; Cf. <i>Heorot is
+gef&#230;lsod</i>, &quot;Heorot is cleansed,&quot; in <i>Beowulf</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> J.F. Campbell, <i>Tales of the West Highlands</i>, ii. p. 99.
+The reference to this story in <i>Catriona</i> (p. 174) will be
+remembered.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> <i>Biskupa S&#246;gur</i>, i. p. 604.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> Ed. Robson, Chetham Society, 1855, from the Lyme MS.;
+ed. Furnivall and Hales, <i>Percy Folio Manuscript</i>, 1867.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> See below,
+ <a href="#Page_283">p. 283</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> &quot;Is it true, Thorgils, that you have entertained those
+three men this winter, that are held to be the most regardless and
+overbearing, and all of them outlaws, and you have handled them so
+that none has hurt another?&quot; Yes, it was true, said Thorgils. Skapti
+said: &quot;That is something for a man to be proud of; but what do you
+think of the three, and how are they each of them in courage?&quot;
+Thorgils said: &quot;They are all three bold men to the full; yet two of
+them, I think, may tell what fear is like. It is not in the same way
+with both; for Thormod fears God, and Grettir is so afraid of the dark
+that after dark he would never stir, if he had his own way; but I do
+not know that Thorgeir, my kinsman, is afraid of anything.&quot;&#8212;&quot;You have
+read them well,&quot; says Skapti; and so their talk ended (<i>Grettis Saga</i>,
+c. 51).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a> See below,
+ <a href="#Page_229">pp. 229</a> <i>sqq.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a>
+ <a href="#Page_216">p. 216</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> <i>Skapraun</i>, lit. <i>test of condition</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> Translated in
+ <a href="#APPENDIX">Appendix</a>, <a href="#NOTE_B">Note B</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> &quot;Tell me what faith you are of,&quot; said the earl. &quot;I
+believe in my own strength,&quot; said Sigmund (<i>F&#230;reyinga Saga</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">[54]</span></a> It is summarised in Dasent's <i>Njal</i>, i. p. xx., and
+translated in Sephton's <i>Olaf Tryggvason</i> (1895), pp. 339-341.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">[55]</span></a> <i>Har&#240;ar Saga</i>, c. xi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_56_56"><span class="label">[56]</span></a> The pathos of Asdis, Grettir's mother, comes nearest to
+the tone of the old English laments, or of the Northern elegiac
+poetry, and may be taken as a contrast to the demeanour of Bjargey in
+<i>H&#225;var&#240;ar Saga</i>, and an exception to the general rule of the Sagas in
+this respect.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_57_57"><span class="label">[57]</span></a> <i>Vide supra</i>,
+ <a href="#Page_140">p. 140</a>, and <i>infra</i>, <a href="#Page_295">p. 295</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_58_58"><span class="label">[58]</span></a> Pp.
+ <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, above.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_59_59" id="Footnote_59_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor_59_59"><span class="label">[59]</span></a> Then Brynhild laughed till the walls rang again: &quot;Good
+luck to your hands and swords that have felled the goodly prince&quot;
+(<i>Brot Sgkv.</i> 10; cf. <a href="#Page_103">p. 103</a> above).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_60_60" id="Footnote_60_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor_60_60"><span class="label">[60]</span></a> <i>Vide supra</i>,
+ <a href="#Page_193">p. 193</a> (the want of tragedy in <i>V&#237;ga-Gl&#250;ms
+Saga</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_61_61" id="Footnote_61_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor_61_61"><span class="label">[61]</span></a> Translated in
+ <a href="#APPENDIX">Appendix</a>, <a href="#NOTE_C">Note C</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_62_62" id="Footnote_62_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor_62_62"><span class="label">[62]</span></a> Arni Beiskr (the Bitter) in company with Gizur
+murdered Snorri Sturluson the historian at his house of
+Reykholt, 22nd September 1241.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_63_63" id="Footnote_63_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor_63_63"><span class="label">[63]</span></a> <i>F&#243;stbr.</i> (1852) p. 8: &quot;&#222;v&#237; at ekki var hjarta hans seen
+f&#243;arn &#237; fugli: ekki var &#254;at bl&#243;&#240;fullt sv&#225; at &#254;at skylfi af hr&#230;zlu,
+heldr var &#254;at herdt af enum h&#230;sta h&#246;fu&#240;smi&#240; &#237; &#246;llum hvatleik.&quot; (&quot;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.&quot;)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_64_64" id="Footnote_64_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor_64_64"><span class="label">[64]</span></a> &quot;The first romantic Sagas&quot;&#8212;<i>i.e.</i> Sagas derived from
+French romance&#8212;&quot;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&quot; (G. Vigfusson,
+Prol. &#167; 25).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_65_65" id="Footnote_65_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor_65_65"><span class="label">[65]</span></a> The Mythical Sagas are described and discussed by
+Vigfusson, Prol. &#167; 34.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_66_66" id="Footnote_66_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor_66_66"><span class="label">[66]</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i> &#167; 11, &quot;Spurious Icelandic Sagas&quot;
+(<i>Skr&#246;k-S&#246;gur</i>). For <i>Frithiof</i>, see &#167; 34.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_67_67" id="Footnote_67_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor_67_67"><span class="label">[67]</span></a> Translated by Mr. William Morris and Mr. E. Magn&#250;sson,
+in the same volume as <i>Gunnlaug</i>, <i>Frithiof</i>, and <i>Viglund</i> (<i>Three
+Northern Love Stories</i>, etc., 1875).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_68_68" id="Footnote_68_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor_68_68"><span class="label">[68]</span></a> Vigfusson, Prol. p. cxxxviii. <i>C.P.B.</i>, ii. 392. The
+forms of verse used in the <i>R&#237;mur</i> are analysed in the preface to
+<i>Riddara R&#237;mur</i>, by Theodor Wis&#233;n (1881).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_69_69" id="Footnote_69_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor_69_69"><span class="label">[69]</span></a> G. Paris, Preface to <i>Histoire de la litt&#233;rature
+fran&#231;aise</i>, edited by L. Petit de Julleville.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_70_70" id="Footnote_70_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor_70_70"><span class="label">[70]</span></a> See the preface to <i>Raoul de Cambrai</i>, ed. Paul Meyer
+(Anc. Textes), for examples of such <i>chevilles</i>; and also <i>Aimeri de
+Narbonne</i>, p. civ.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_71_71" id="Footnote_71_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor_71_71"><span class="label">[71]</span></a> <i>Historia Verdadera de Carlo Magno y los doce Pares de
+Francia</i>: Madrid, 4to (1891), a chap-book of thirty-two pages.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_72_72" id="Footnote_72_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor_72_72"><span class="label">[72]</span></a> Glum, like Raoul, is a widow's son deprived of his
+rights.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_73_73" id="Footnote_73_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor_73_73"><span class="label">[73]</span></a> <i>Garin le Loherain</i>, ed. Paulin Paris (1833-35), vol.
+ii. pp. 217-272.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_74_74" id="Footnote_74_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor_74_74"><span class="label">[74]</span></a> One of the frequent morals of French epic (repeated also
+by French romance) is the vanity of overmuch sorrow for the dead.
+</p>
+<p>&#945;&#955;&#955;&#945; &#967;&#961;&#951; &#964;&#959;&#957; &#956;&#949;&#957; &#954;&#945;&#964;&#945;&#952;&#945;&#960;&#964;&#949;&#953;&#957; &#959;&#962; &#954;&#949; &#952;&#945;&#957;&#951;&#963;&#953;&#957;<br />
+&#957;&#951;&#955;&#949;&#945; &#952;&#965;&#956;&#959;&#957; &#949;&#967;&#959;&#957;&#964;&#945;&#962;, &#949;&#960;' &#951;&#956;&#945;&#964;&#953; &#948;&#945;&#954;&#961;&#965;&#963;&#945;&#957;&#964;&#945;&#962;.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 7em">(Odysseus speaking) <i>Il.</i> xix. 228.</span>
+</p>
+<p>[<i>Transliteration:</i></p>
+<p>alla chr&#234; ton men katathaptein hos ke than&#234;sin<br />
+n&#234;lea thymon echontas, ep' &#234;mati dakrysantas.]
+</p>
+<p>
+&quot;Laissiez ester,&quot; li quens Guillaumes dit;<br />
+&quot;Tout avenra ce que doit avenir;<br />
+Li mort as mors, li vif voissent as vis;<br />
+Duel sor dolor et joie sor jo&#239;r<br />
+Ja nus frans hons nel devroit maintenir.&quot;<br />
+Les cors enportent, les out en terre mis.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em"><i>Garin</i>, i. p. 262.</span>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_75_75" id="Footnote_75_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor_75_75"><span class="label">[75]</span></a>
+</p>
+<p>
+Respont li reis: &quot;N'i&#233;s pas bien enseigniez,<br />
+Qui devant mei oses de Deu plaidier;<br />
+C'est l'om el mont qui plus m'a fait irier:<br />
+Mon pere ocist une foldre del ciel:<br />
+Tot i fu ars, ne li pot l'en aidier.<br />
+Quant Deus l'ot mort, si fist que enseigniez;<br />
+El ciel monta, &#231;a ne voit repairier;<br />
+Ge nel poeie sivre ne enchalcier,<br />
+Mais de ses omes me sui ge puis vengiez;<br />
+De cels qui furent lev&#233; et baptisi&#233;<br />
+Ai fait destruire plus de trente miliers,<br />
+Ardeir en feu et en eve neier;<br />
+Quant ge la sus ne puis Deu guerreier,<br />
+Nul de ses omes ne vueil &#231;a jus laissier,<br />
+Et mei et Deu n'avons mais que plaidier:<br />
+Meie est la terre et siens sera li ciels.&quot;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12.5em"><i>l.c.</i>, l. 522.</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The last verse expresses the same sentiment as the answer of the
+Emperor Henry when he was told to beware of God's vengeance: &quot;Celum
+celi Domino, terram autem dedit filiis hominum&quot; (Otton. Frising.
+<i>Gesta Frid.</i> i. 11).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_76_76" id="Footnote_76_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor_76_76"><span class="label">[76]</span></a>
+</p>
+<p>
+Li cuens Guillaumes li comen&#231;a &#224; dire:<br />
+&#8212;Diva, vilain, par la loi dont tu vives<br />
+Fus-tu a Nymes, la fort cit&#233; garnie?<br />
+&#8212;O&#239;l, voir, sire, le paaige me quistrent;<br />
+Ge fui trop poures, si nel poi baillier mie.<br />
+Il me less&#232;rent por mes enfanz qu'il virent.<br />
+&#8212;Di moi, vilain, des estres de la vile.<br />
+Et cil respont:&#8212;Ce vos sai-ge bien dire<br />
+Por un denier .ii. granz pains i v&#233;ismes;<br />
+La dener&#233;e vaut .iii. en autre vile:<br />
+Moult par est bone, se puis n'est empirie.<br />
+&#8212;Fox, dist Guillaume, ce ne demant-je mie,<br />
+M&#232;s des paiens chevaliers de la vile,<br />
+Del rei Otrant et de sa compaignie.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11.5em"><i>l.c.</i>, ll. 903-916.</span>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_77_77" id="Footnote_77_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor_77_77"><span class="label">[77]</span></a> Cf. Auguste Longnon, &quot;L'&#233;l&#233;ment historique de Huon de
+Bordeaux,&quot; <i>Romania</i>, viii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_78_78" id="Footnote_78_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor_78_78"><span class="label">[78]</span></a> &quot;Pos de chantar m'es pres talens:&quot;&#8212;Raynouard, <i>Choix
+des po&#233;sies des Troubadours</i>, iv. p. 83; Bartsch, <i>Chrestomathie
+proven&#231;ale</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_79_79" id="Footnote_79_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor_79_79"><span class="label">[79]</span></a> See the account of the custom in the <i>Saga of Harald
+Hardrada</i>, c. 16. &quot;Harald entrusted to Jarizleif all the gold that he
+had sent from Micklegarth, and all sorts of precious things: so much
+wealth all together, as no man of the North Lands had ever seen before
+in one man's hands. Harald had thrice come in for the palace-sweeping
+(<i>Polotasvarf</i>) while he was in Micklegarth. It is the law there that
+when the Greek king dies, the Varangians shall have a sweep of the
+palace; they go over all the king's palaces where his treasures are,
+and every man shall have for his own what falls to his hand&quot;
+(<i>Fornmanna S&#246;gur</i>, vi. p. 171).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_80_80" id="Footnote_80_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor_80_80"><span class="label">[80]</span></a>
+</p>
+<p>
+Il ot o lui un saietaire<br />
+Qui molt fu fels et deputaire:<br />
+Des le nombril tot contreval<br />
+Ot cors en forme de cheval:<br />
+Il n'est riens nule s'il volsist<br />
+Que d'isnelece n'ateinsist:<br />
+Cors, chiere, braz, a noz semblanz<br />
+Avoit, mes n'ert pas avenanz.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em">l. 12,207.</span>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_81_81" id="Footnote_81_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor_81_81"><span class="label">[81]</span></a> Chaucer, who often yields to the temptations of
+&quot;Hyperbole&quot; in this sense of the word, lays down the law against
+impertinent decorations, in the rhetorical instruction of Pandarus to
+Troilus, about Troilus's letter to Cressida (B. ii. l. 1037):&#8212;
+</p>
+<p>
+Ne jompre eek no discordaunt thing yfere<br />
+As thus, to usen termes of phisyk;<br />
+In loves termes hold of thy matere<br />
+The forme alwey, and do that it be lyk;<br />
+For if a peyntour wolde peynte a pyk<br />
+With asses feet, and hede it as an ape,<br />
+It cordeth naught; so nere it but a jape.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_82_82" id="Footnote_82_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor_82_82"><span class="label">[82]</span></a> Not included in the editions of her works (Roquefort,
+Warnke); edited by M. Gaston Paris in the eighth volume of <i>Romania</i>
+along with the lays of <i>Doon</i>, <i>Tidorel</i>, and <i>Tiolet</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_83_83" id="Footnote_83_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor_83_83"><span class="label">[83]</span></a> Britomart in the House of Busirane has some resemblance
+to the conclusion of <i>Libius Disconius</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_84_84" id="Footnote_84_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor_84_84"><span class="label">[84]</span></a> Fr. Michel: <i>Tristan.</i> London, 1835. <i>Le Roman de
+Tristan</i> (Thomas) ed. B&#233;dier; (B&#233;roul) ed. Muret, <i>Anc. Textes</i>,
+1902-1905. Cf. Gaston Paris, <i>Po&#235;mes et L&#233;gendes</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_85_85" id="Footnote_85_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor_85_85"><span class="label">[85]</span></a> A fine passage is quoted from the romance of <i>Ider</i> in
+the essay cited above, where Guenlo&#239;e the queen finds Ider near death
+and thinks of killing herself, like Phyllis and other ladies of the
+old time, who will welcome her. It is the &quot;Saints' Legend of Cupid,&quot;
+many generations before Chaucer, in the form of an invocation to Love,
+the tyrant:&#8212;
+</p>
+<p>
+Bel semblant &#231;o quit me feront<br />
+Les cheitives qui a toi sont<br />
+Qui s'ocistrent par druerie<br />
+D'amor; mout voil lor compainie:<br />
+D'amor me recomfortera<br />
+La lasse De&#239;anira,<br />
+Qui s'encroast, et Canac&#233;,<br />
+Eco, Scilla, Fillis, Pronn&#233;,<br />
+Ero, Biblis, Dido, Mirra,<br />
+Tisb&#233;, la bele Hypermnestra,<br />
+Et des autres mil et cinc cenz.<br />
+Amor! por quoi ne te repenz<br />
+De ces simples lasses destruire?<br />
+Trop cruelment te voi deduire:<br />
+Pechi&#233; feiz que n'en as piti&#233;;<br />
+Nuls deus fors toi ne fait pechi&#233;!<br />
+De &#231;o est Tisb&#233; al dessus,<br />
+Que por li&#233; s'ocist Piramus;<br />
+Amors, de &#231;o te puet loer<br />
+Car a ta cort siet o son per;<br />
+Ero i est o Leander:<br />
+Si jo i fusse avec Ider,<br />
+Aise fusse, &#231;o m'est avis,<br />
+Com alme qu'est en para&#239;s.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_86_86" id="Footnote_86_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor_86_86"><span class="label">[86]</span></a> Blethericus, or Br&#233;ri, is the Welsh authority cited by
+Thomas in his <i>Tristan</i>. Cf. Gaston Paris, <i>Romania</i>, viii. p. 427.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_87_87" id="Footnote_87_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor_87_87"><span class="label">[87]</span></a> The Welsh version has the advantage here in noting more
+fully than Chrestien the beauty of age in Enid's mother: &quot;And he
+thought that there could be no woman fairer than she must have been in
+the prime of her youth.&quot; Chrestien says merely (at the end of his
+story, l. 6621):&#8212;
+</p>
+<p>
+Bele est Enide et bele doit<br />
+Estre par reison et par droit,<br />
+Que bele dame est mout sa mere<br />
+Bel chevalier a an son pere.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_88_88" id="Footnote_88_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor_88_88"><span class="label">[88]</span></a> Ed. Paul Meyer, 1865, and, again, 1901.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_89_89" id="Footnote_89_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor_89_89"><span class="label">[89]</span></a> Ed. G. Raynaud, <i>Romania</i>, xxi. p. 145.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_90_90" id="Footnote_90_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor_90_90"><span class="label">[90]</span></a> <i>i.e.</i> Diomede.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_91_91" id="Footnote_91_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor_91_91"><span class="label">[91]</span></a> In a somewhat similar list of romances, in the Italian
+poem of <i>L'Intelligenza</i>, ascribed to Dino Compagni (st. 75), Luneta
+is named Analida; possibly the origin of Chaucer's Anelida, a name
+which has not been clearly traced.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EPIC AND ROMANCE***</p>
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