The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway/Volume 1/Memoir of Snorro Sturleson
MEMOIR OF SNORRO STURLESON.
Snorro Sturleson was born in the year 1178, at Hvam, in the present bailiwick of Dale, in the western province of Iceland. His father, Stnrla Thordarson, was a man of consequence, descended from the royal stock of Odin to which the Northern kings, and all the great families among the Northmen, traced their lineage; and he held by hereditary right the dignity of a Godar, which in the times of the Odin worship was hereditary in certain families descended from the twelve Diars, Drottars, or Godars, who accompanied Odin from Asagard. The office of Godar appears to have combined the functions of priest and judge originally; and long after the sacerdotal function had ceased the judicial remained, and was exercised as an hereditary jurisdiction over the locality or godard, even long after the establishment of Christianity. Snorro was sent in his infancy to John Loptson, of Odda, to be fostered. It was the custom of the age for people of consequence to send their children to be fostered by others, sometimes of higher and sometimes of lower station; but always of a station, connection, or influence that would be of use afterwards to the foster-child. This fostering was not merely nursing the child until he was weaned, but implied bringing him up to the age of manhood; and the ties of foster-father, foster-son, and foster-brother, appear to have been as strong and influential as the natural ties of blood relationship. The custom has arisen in turbulent times, from the policy of not giving an opportunity to hereditary enemies to cut off an entire family at one swoop, leaving no heir and avenger, and of strengthening the family by collateral alliances through the new ties. We read of many instances of the kings sending their infants to influential bonders to be fostered; by which, no doubt, a great local interest and connection was secured to the foster-child. In the social state of those ages each family was a distinct dynasty, beholden for its security to its own strength in friends and followers, and its own power to avenge its wrongs, rather than to the guardianship and force of law. The system of fosterage was a consequence of this social state; and the custom lingered in England for a long time in the form of sending children to be brought up as pages in the families of distinguished personages. John Loptson appears to have been a person of more distinction than Snorro's own father. His grandfather was Sæmund him Erode, the contemporary of Are who first committed the historical sagas to writing; and Saemund himself was the compiler of the older Edda. John Loptson's mother, Thora, was an illegitimate daughter of King Magnus Barefoot. In such a family, we may presume the literature of the country would be cultivated, and the sagas of the historical events in Norway, and of the transactions of her race of kings, would be studied with great interest.
One would like to know how people of distinction in that age lived and were lodged in Iceland? What kind of house and housekeeping the daughter of a king would have there? We have no positive data to judge from; but we may infer from various circumstances that this class would be at least as well off as in Norway; that comparatively the comforts, luxuries, and splendour of life in the poor countries, would not be so much inferior to those of the rich countries as in our own days. Sugar, coffee, tea, silks, cotton, and all foreign articles, were almost equally out of reach and enjoyment in all the countries of the North. From the natural products, or crops of the land, all that was enjoyed had to be obtained. Iceland enjoyed the advantage of more security of property and person; and the natural products of Iceland,—fish, oil, skins, butter, wool, and before the introduction of cotton as a clothing material, the wadmal, or coarse woollen cloth manufactured in Iceland, in which rent and taxes were paid, and which circulated as money through all the North, and in which even other goods were valued as a medium of exchange,—would all be of much higher comparative value than in after ages, when commerce and manufactures gave people a greater supply of better and cheaper articles for the same uses. The market for wood of Norway being confined to such islands as produced none for building purposes, the houses would probably be much the same in size and conveniences as those common among all classes in Norway, and little more expensive. The trade of bartering their products for those of other countries would probably be much more extensive than now, because their kind of products were much more generally used in other countries. In Drontheim, Bergen, and Tunsberg, several merchant vessels at the same time are often spoken of in the sagas; and Torfæus, in his "Vinlandia," page 69., mentions a Hrafnus Limiricepeta, so called from his frequent voyages to Limeric in Ireland—a Limeric trader,—who had related to Thorfinn, Earl of Orkney, some accounts of a Great Ireland in the Western Ocean. In the Færeyinga Saga, we read of merchants frequenting the Feroe Isles to purchase the products of the country, and of the people sending off cargoes of their wool to Norway. The commercial intercourse of those times has probably been greater than we suppose, although dealings were only in the rude products of one land bartered against those of another. Matthew Paris tells us of his being at Bergen in the year 1248, and of there being more than 200 vessels in that port at the same time. The poorer lands and countries of Europe, and the employment of their inhabitants, have in fact undergone a great depreciation in value, and which is still going on, by the introduction and general diffusion of better articles for food, clothing, and enjoyment, from better climes, and by the diffusion of more refined tastes and habits than the products of their soil and industry can gratify. When wadmal, or coarse woollen cloth, was the ordinary wear; stock-fish, or salt fish, in great use even in royal households; fish oil the only means in the North for lighting rooms,—the poorest countries, such as Iceland, Greenland, or the north of Norway, which produced these, must have been much more on a par with better countries, such as Denmark or England, which did not produce them, and must have been comparatively much better to live in, and the inhabitants nearer to the general condition of the people of other countries, than they are now. The daughter of King Magnus Barefoot would probably be as well lodged, fed, clothed, and attended, as she would have been in Scotland in that age.
John Loptson died when Snorro was nineteen years of age. Snorro continued to live with his foster-brothers, his own father being dead, and his patrimony inconsiderable and much wasted by his mother. At twenty-one years of age he married Herdisa, the daughter of a wealthy priest called Berse, who lived at Berg, in the bailiwick of Myre, where he also took up his abode. He got a considerable fortune with his wife[1], by whom he had several children, but only two who grew up; a son called John Murt, and a daughter called Halbera. He had also several illegitimate children; a son called Urækia, and a daughter called Ingeborg. After being twenty-five years married to Herdisa, he married, sometime about 1224, she being still alive, another wife, Halveig, a rich widow, with whom he got also a large fortune. He quarrelled with the children of his first wife about their fortunes to which they were entitled when he parted from their mother. He was in enmity also with the husbands of both his daughters, each of whom had been divorced, or had had two husbands; and these sons-inlaw, and his own brother Sighvat, were the parties 'who finally murdered him in their family feud. What is known of Snorro Sturleson is derived from an account of the Sturle family, called the "Sturlunga Saga," composed evidently by one of the descendants of the kinsmen with whom he had been in enmity. His bad actions are probably exaggerated, and his good concealed. With every allowance, however, for the false colouring which hatred and envy may have given to the picture, Snorro appears from it to have been a man of violent disposition,—greedy, selfish, ambitious, and under no restraint of principle in gratifying his avarice and evil passions. He is accused of amassing great wealth by unjust litigation with his nearest kindred, and by retaining unjustly the property which of right belonged to them on his parting with his first wife; and of appearing at the Things with an armed body of 600 or 800 men, and obtaining by force the legal decisions he desired. He is accused also of having, on his visits to Norway, betrayed the independence of his country, and contributed to reduce Iceland to the state of a province of Norway. It is probable that much of the vices of the age, and of the inevitable events in history prepared by causes of remote origin, is heaped up by the saga-writer on Snorro's head. He was clearly guilty of the two greatest charges which, in a poor country and ignorant age, can be brought against a man—he was comparatively rich, and comparatively learned. Of his wealth we are told that he possessed six considerable farms, on which his stock of cattle was so great that in one year, in which fodder was scarce, he lost 120 head of oxen, without being seriously affected by it in his circumstances. lie employed much of his wealth in improving and fortifying his main residence at Reikholt, to which he had removed from Berg. At Reikholt he constructed a bathing room of cut freestone, into which the water from a warm spring in the neighbourhood was conducted by a covered drain or pipe. Stone buildings in the North being rare, this structure was considered magnificent, and is spoken of as a proof at once of Snorro's wealth and extravagance. In this age it will rather be considered a proof that Snorro was a man of habits far more refined than those of the people around him; that, trifling as the structure may have been, it shows a mind of great energy and activity to have executed it, and of some refinement and improved habits to have felt the want of accommodations, for personal cleanliness in his house. Snorro's first journey to Norway appears to have been about the year 1221, when he was forty-three years of age, and was still married to his first wife Herdisa. He appears to have come to Norway on a visit to Earl Hakon Galin, who was married to Lady Christina, the daughter of King Sigurd the Crusader. We are told in the Sturlunga Saga, that Snorro had composed a poem in honour of the earl, who in return had sent him a sword and a suit of armour. On his arrival he found that the earl was dead, and his widow was married again to Askel, the Lagman of Gotland. He remained the first winter at the court of King Hakon and Earl Skule, who then ruled over Norway, and proceeded in summer to visit Lady Christina, by whom he was well received; and it may be supposed that on this journey he collected the information relative to former transactions in Sweden and Denmark, as well as in Norway, that he gives in his Chronicle. The Lady Christina was a daughter of King Sigurd the Crusader, by Malmfrid, a daughter of King Harald of Novogorod, whose mother was Gyde, a daughter of the English King Harald, the son of Earl Godwin, who fell at the battle of Hastings. This Lady Christina appears to have been married first to Erling Skakke, by whom she had a son, who was king of Norway, Magnus Erlingsson, in the middle of whose reign Snorro's Chronicle ends. She was then married to Earl Hakon Galin, after whom she married the Lagman Askel. On his return from this visit Snorro remained two years with Earl Skule in Norway. It is evident that, as a chronicler, Snorro Sturleson had thus enjoyed opportunities of collecting or correcting the accounts of transactions of former times, which few contemporary writers possessed. He was made a cup-bearer, or dish-bearer, equivalent to the modern dignity of chamberlain, by King Hakon; and is accused by his enemies of having entered into a private agreement with the king and Earl Skule that he should use his influence to subvert the independence which Iceland had hitherto enjoyed, and to persuade the Thing to submit to the government of the King of Norway; and that he should be made the king's lenderman, or even earl over the country, in reward of this service. Whatever may have been Snorro Sturleson's ambition or want of principle, no grounds for this charge appear in his life. The subjection of Iceland to the crown of Norway was, on the contrary, carried into effect two years after his murder by his personal enemies; and the event may rather be considered the inevitable result of the changes which had taken place in the social condition, military spirit, and arrangements and relative importance of different countries, about the middle of the 13th century, than the consequence of any conspiracy or treachery. Snorro returned to Reikholt, and, divorcing his first wife, married his second wife, for the sake, it is alleged, of her large fortune, and became the richest, and probably the most unhappy man of his day, in Iceland. He was involved in disputes and lawsuits with his sons and his wife's family, who appear to have had just and legal claims to their shares of the properties which he continued to keep in his own possession. He appears to have visited Norway once, if not twice again, before or about the year 1237, and to have attached himself to the party of Duke Skule, who had claims on the succession to the crown of Norway. In 1237, Snorro returned to Iceland, and Duke Skule assumed the title of king at Drontheim, in opposition to his son-in-law, King Hakon Hakonson; but in the following year he and his son were slain. Snorro Sturleson, as a friend or adherent of Duke Skule, was declared a traitor by King Hakon. As the king's chamberlain, he might in that age, although not a Norwegian subject, be considered a traitor. Letters from the king were issued to his enemies to bring him prisoner to Norway, or to put him to death; and on this authority his relations, with whom he was in enmity in a family feud,—his three sons-in-law, Gissur, Kolbein, and Arne,—came by night, in September 1241, to his residence at Keikholt, and murdered him in the 63rd year of his age. The same party, two years afterwards, brought Iceland under subjection to the crown of Norway. It seems unjust to throw upon the memory of Snorro Sturleson, as far as the circumstances can be made out, the imputation of having sought to betray the independence of his country, when no overt act of his appears to have tended to that result, and when his enemies, who assassinated him, and from whom alone any account of his life proceeds, were avowedly the parties who brought it about. But it cannot be denied that their accounts, and even their enmity, prove that Snorro has been a man unjust to and hated by his family,— selfish, rapacious, and without restraint from principle or natural affection.
The judgment for posterity to come to probably is, that Snorro Sturleson, and even his relations who murdered him, were rather a type of the age in which they lived, than individuals particularly prominent for wickedness in that age. The moral influences of Christianity had not yet taken root among the Northmen, while the rude virtues of their barbarous pagan forefathers were extinct. The island of Iceland had never contained above sixty-three or sixty-four thousand inhabitants—the population of an ordinary town. The providing of food, fuel, and of winter provender for their cattle, and such employments, have necessarily at all times occupied a much greater proportion of the population than in more favoured climes. The enterprising, energetic, and restless spirits found occupation abroad in the roving viking expeditions of the Norwegians, for the Icelanders themselves fitted out no viking expeditions; while the equally ambitious, but more peaceful and cultivated, appear to have acquired property and honour, as scalds, in no inconsiderable number. But the rise of the Hanseatic League, and the advance of the south and west of Europe in civilisation, trade, and naval power, had extinguished the vikings on the sea. They were no longer, in public estimation, exercising an allowable or honourable profession 5 but were treated as common robbers, and punished. The diffusion of Christianity, and of a lettered clergy over the Scandinavian peninsula, had in the same age superseded the scalds, even as recorders of law or history. The scald, with his saga and his traditional verses, gave way at once before the clerk, with his paper, pen, and ink. Both occupations— that of the viking and of the scald—fell as it were at once, and in one generation,—in the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th century; and the wild, unquiet, ambitious spirits, in the small Icelandic population, which were formerly absorbed by them, were thrown back into their native island, and there, like tigers shut up together in a den, they preyed on or worried each other. In Scandinavia itself the same causes produced in that age the same effects. The Birkebeiners and the Baglers, who, from the middle of Magnus Erlingsson's reign, raised their leaders alternately to the Norwegian crown, were in reality the vikings, driven from the seas to the forests,—were the daring, the idle, the active of society, who could find no living or employment in the ordinary occupations of husbandry, which were preoccupied by the ordinary agricultural population, nor in the few branches of manufacture or commerce then exercised as means of subsistence; and whose former occupations of piracy at sea, or marauding expeditions on land under foreign vikings, was cut off by the progress of Christian influences on conduct,—of the power of law, and of the naval, military, and commercial arrangements in all other countries. The employments and means of living peaceably were not increased so rapidly, as the employment given by private warfare on sea and land had been put down; and in all Europe there was an overpopulation, in proportion to the means of earning a peaceful livelihood, which produced the most dreadful disorders in society. This was probably the main cause of the unquiet, unsettled state of every country, from the 11th century to the 15th. The Crusades even appear to have been fed not more by fanaticism, than by this want of employment at home in every country. Law and social order were beginning to prevail, and to put down private wars, and the claim of every petty baron to garrison his robber nest and pillage the weak; but this growing security had not advanced so far that trade and manufacture could absorb, and give a living to, the men not wanted in agricultural and thrown out of military employment. It takes a long time, apparently, before those tastes and habits of a nation on which manufactures and commerce are founded, can be raised. Society was in a transition state. The countries which took but little part in the Crusades,—such as Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and this little population of Iceland,—and which had no outlet for the unquiet spirits reared in private wars or piracy, present a deplorable state of society for many generations. A bad, unquiet, cut-throat spirit, was transmitted to succeeding generations, and kept those countries in a half-barbarous state to a much later period than the other countries which had got rid of a prior turbulent generation in the Crusades. The Sturlunga Saga, or account of Snorro and his family, contains little else but a recital of private feuds in Iceland,—of murders, burning of houses, treachery, and a social disorganisation among this handful of people, which might well excuse Snorro Sturleson if he had wished and attempted to obtain the common benefit of all social union—the security of life and property—by the surrender of a nominal independence, but a real anarchy, into the hands of a government strong enough to make laws respected.
Snorro Sturleson must be measured, not by our scale of moral and social worth, but by the scale of his own times. Measured by that scale, he will be judged to have been a man of great but rough energy of mind,—of strong selfishness, rapacity, and passions unrestrained by any moral, religious, or social consideration,—a bold, bad, unprincipled man, of intellectual powers and cultivation far above any of his contemporaries whose literary productions have reached us,—a specimen of the best and worst in the characters of men in that transition-ave from barbarism to civilisation,—a type of the times,—a man rough, wild, vigorous in thought and deed, like the men he describes in his Chronicle.
How, it may fairly be asked, could a work of such literary merit as the translator claims for Snorro Sturleson's Chronicle, have lain hid so long from English readers, and have been valued, even on the Continent, only by a few antiquaries in search of small facts connected with Danish history? The Heimskringla has been hardly used by the learned men of the period in which it was first published. It appeared first in the literary world in 1697, frozen into the Latin of the Swedish antiquary Peringskiold. A Swedish translation, indeed, as well as a Latin, accompanied the Icelandic text; but the Swedish language was then, and is now, scarcely more known than the Icelandic in the fields of European literature. Modern Latin, or Latin applied to subjects beyond its own classical range, is a very imperfect medium for conveying realities to the mind, and, like algebra, presents only equivalents for things or words,—not the living words and impressions themselves. It may be an advantage in science, law, metaphysics, to work with the dead terms of a dead fixed language; but in all that addresses itself to the fancy, taste, or sympathy of men, the dead languages are dead indeed, and do not convey ideas vividly to the mind like the words of a living tongue belonging to existing realities. Conceive Shakspeare translated into Latin, or Schiller, or Sir Walter Scott! Would the scholar the most versed in that language have the slightest idea of those authors, or of their merits? About the time also when Peringskiold published the Heimskringla, antiquarian research was, and still continues to be, the principal literary occupation of the educated classes in Sweden and Denmark, and that which led, more than any other branch of literature, to distinction and substantial reward from government. Peringskiold, Torfæus, Arne Magnusen, Schoning, and many other antiquaries of great learning, research, and talent in their own antiquarian pursuits, dug for celebrity in this mine of the Heimskringla, and generally threw away the sterling ore to bring home the worthless pebble. Dates were determined, localities ascertained, royal genealogies put to rights,—the ancestor of the Danish dynasty proved, to the satisfaction of all men, to have been a descendant of Odin called Skiold, and not Dan,—and a great deal of such learned dust was raised, swept into a heap, and valued as dust of gold; but the historical interest, the social condition, the political institutions of the Northmen, as delineated in the Heimskringla, were not laid before the public by those great antiquaries: and possibly these were subjects of which they could not safely treat. These profound scholars, so laboriously and successfully occupied, appear to have forgotten altogether, in their zeal to do each other justice, and amidst the compliments they were interchanging on their own merits, that there was a Snorro Sturleson entitled to his share in the honours. His work was treated as some of the classics have been by their learned commentators—the text overwhelmed, buried, and forgotten, under annotations and unimportant explanations of it. It is pleasing to observe how the natural taste of a people selects what is good in their literature, what is adapted to the mind of all, with more just tact than even the educated classes among them. While the merit of Snorro was hid from the educated under a mass of learned rubbish, the people both in Norway and Denmark had a true feeling for it; and in 1594 a translation into Danish of parts of the Heimskringla[2] was published in Denmark by Mortenssen. In 1599 a priest, Peter Claussen,—himself as wild a man-slaying priest as the priest Thangbrand, or any other of the rough energetic personages in the work of Snorro,—translated the Heimskringla for the benefit of his countrymen in Norway, the language of Snorro having become obsolete, or at least obscure, even to the Norwegian peasantry. His translation was published in 1633 by Olaus Wormius, and it became a house-book among the Norwegian bonders. At the present day, in the dwellings of the remote valleys, especially of the Drontheim district,—such as Stordal, Værdal, Indal,—a well-used copy of some saga, generally that of King Olaf the Saint, reprinted from Peter Claussen's work, will be found along with the Bible, Prayer Book, Christian the Fourth's Law Book, and the Storthing's Transactions, to be the house-father's library. During a winter passed in one of those valleys, the translator, in the course of acquiring the language of the country, borrowed one of those books from his neighbour Arne of Ostgrunden, a bonder or peasant-proprietor of a farm so called. It was the saga of King Olaf the Saint. Beading it in the midst of the historical localities, and of the very houses and descendants of the very men presented to you in the stirring scenes of this saga at the battle of Stiklestad, he may very probably have imbibed an interest which he cannot impart to readers unacquainted with the country, the people, and their social state. He read with delight the account of old manners and ways of living given in the saga,—old, yet not without much resemblance to what still exists in ordinary family life among the bonders. He found, from knowing the localities, the charm of truth from internal evidence in the narratives of that saga. It is not unlikely that these favourable circumstances may have given the translator a higher impression of the literary merit of the Heimskringla, than others may receive from it. He was not aware at the time that the volume which delighted him was but a translation of a single saga from Snorro Sturleson's work into a Norse which itself was becoming obsolete, and like the Scotch of Lindsay of Fitscottie's Chronicle, was in some degree a forgotten language even among the peasantry. It has since been the occasional and agreeable occupation of his leisure hours to study the work of Snorro in the original. To much knowledge of, or familiarity with the Icelandic, he cannot lay any claim. To get at the meaning and spirit of the text, helping himself over the difficulties, which generally only lay in his own ignorance of the language, by collating every passage he was in doubt about with the meaning given to it in the translations of Peringskiold, Schöning, and Aal, and to give a plain faithful translation into English of the Heimskringla, unencumbered with antiquarian research, and suited to the plain English reader, has been his object.
The short pieces of scaldic poetry which Snorro intermixes with his narrative, and quotes as his authorities for the facts he is telling, are very difficult to deal with in a translation. They are not without a rude grandeur of imagery, and a truthfulness in description of battles and sea-fights; and they have a simplicity which, although often flat, is often natural and impressive. They have probably been originally delivered vivâ voce in recitative, so that the voice, adroitly managed, would form a measure. Icelandic poetry does not, like the Greek or Latin, differ from prose by certain measures or feet in a verse, but has a formation peculiar to itself. All Icelandic poems, or almost all, are divided into strophes consisting of eight lines. The strophe is further subdivided into two half-strophes, and each of these again into two parts. Each part is a fourth of the whole strophe, and contains two verses or lines. The first of these lines is called the fore line, and the second the back line; and the two are connected together, as verses, by rhyme-letters, or rhyme-syllables. This rhyme-letter, or alliteration, consists in having two words in the fore line beginning with the same initial letter; and a third word, that which is the most important in the meaning, in the second or back line, and beginning with the same letter. For example:—
Farvel fagnadar
Fold og heilla."Farewell, favoured
Fold (land) and holy."
The letter F in the word Fold is the head letter of the alliteration, and the same letter in Farvel and fagnadar are the two subsidiary alliterative sounds in the first line. In the use of this alliteration there are several subdivisions, from exceptions or limitations to the general principle. Besides this alliteration or letter-rhyme, there are syllable-rhymes, in which the first syllables of words, instead of the first letters only, form, by their collocation in the fore and back lines, the versification; and if the first syllables rhyme together, the last may be different sounds. Thus, merki and sterka, or gumar and sumir, are perfect syllable-rhymes in a line. End-rhymes, as in the other Gothic languages, are also used in Icelandic , connected also always with the alliterative and syllabic rhymes. Thus:—
"Nu er hersis hefnd,
Vid hilmi efnd.
Gengr ulfr ok ærn
Af ynglings bærn."
The two lines only rhyme together, in Icelandic versification, which are connected by the rules of alliterative verse,—viz. the first and second, and the third and fourth; but the first and third, or second and fourth, are never made to rhyme together. Longer verse-lines than of eight syllables are not used, and lines of three or six appear more common. A short measure, admitting of no pause or caesura in the middle of the line, appears to have been most agreeable to the Icelandic ear, or mode of recitative in which the scalds have chanted their verses. These observations are taken from Rash's a Yeiledning til det Islandske Sprog, 1811;" in which there is a valuable dissertation on the Icelandic versification, with examples of the different kinds of verses. Some later Icelandic scholars are of opinion that what Rask has treated as two lines, on the supposition that the Icelandic versification had no cæsura, had in reality been one line, with the caesura marked by a rhyme corre sponding to the end-rhyme of the fine, which middle rhyme is of common occurrence in old English verses. For example, in the following old English verses on the Bee, the line is not concluded at the rhyme in the middle, which marks a strong caesura or pause, not a total want of it:—
And also in the Latin rhymes of the monks in the middle ages, as, for instance in these, "In winter daies, when Phoæbus' raies
Are hid with misty cloud,
And stormy showers assault her bowers,
And cause her for to crowd."
Baret's Alvearia, 1580.
"Omnia terrena per vices sunt aliena,
Nunc mei nunc hujus, post mortem nescio cujus,"—
the rhyme by no means concludes the line. The mode of writing on parchment or paper has, for economy of the material, been in continuous lines, like prose, without any division, in the manuscripts of old date; so that nothing can be concluded from the writing concerning the length or forms of the verses. Whether the scalds adapted their verses to music, or tunes, seems not well ascertained. Little mention, if any, is made in any of the sagas of tunes, or musical instruments; yet they have had songs. All their pieces are called songs, and are said to be sung, and many of them evidently were intended to be sung. We find mention also of old songs; for instance, the "Biarkemal," was instantly recognised by the whole army at Stiklestad. They must have had tunes for these songs. We find also a refrain, or chorus to songs, mentioned. All, perhaps, that can be safely said of Icelandic versification is, that the system has been very artificial, and full of technical difficulties in the construction; and, independently of the beauties of poetic spirit and ideas, may have had the merit of technical difficulties in the verse adroitly overcome by the scald,—a merit which it would be going too far to contemn, because we, with minds and ears not trained in the same way, cannot feel it. How much of our own most esteemed poetry gives us pleasure from similar conventional sources distinct altogether from poetical imagery, or ideas which all men of all countries and ages would relish and feel pleasure from? There may also have been a harmony and measured cadence given by the voice in reciting or chanting such verses—and they were composed to be recited, not silently read—which are lost to us. All we can judge of them is, that if such verses could be constructed in the English language, they would be without harmony or other essential property of verse to us; as our minds, ears, and the genius of our language are formed in a different mould. Besides, the peculiarities of the construction of the verse, the poetical language, and the allusions to the Odin mythology, are so obscure, involved, and far-fetched, that volumes of explanation would be necessary almost for every line in any verbatim translation. Torfæus, who was himself an Icelander, and was unquestionably the first of northern antiquaries, declares that much of the scaldic poetry is so obscure, that no meaning at all can be twisted out of it by the most intense study. The older and younger Eddas were in fact hand-books composed expressly for explaining the mythological allusions and metaphors occurring in the poetry of the scalds; so that this obscurity and difficulty appear to have been felt even before the Odin worship was totally extinct, and its mythology forgotten. Examples will best illustrate the obscurity of allusion. In the verses composed by Berse, quoted in the 48th chapter of Olaf the Saint's Saga, in the sixth line, the literal translation of the text would be, "Giver of the fire of the ship's out-field." The "out-field" of the ship is the ocean which surrounds a ship, as the out-field surrounds a farm. The fire of the ocean is gold; because Ægir, when he received the gods into his hall in the depths of the ocean, lighted it with gold hung round instead of the sun's rays; and hence the ocean's rays is a common poetical term for gold in the scaldic poetry. Now "the giver of the fire of the ship's out-field" means the giver of gold, the generous king. Another example of the obscurity of allusion is in the first line of the verses quoted in the 21st chapter of Olaf Tryggvesson's Saga. In the original the expression is literally, "Hater of the bow-seat's fire." Now the bow-seat is the hand which carries the bow; its fire is the gold which adorns the hand in rings or bracelets; and tbe hater of this fire is the man who hates to keep it, who gives it away,—the generous man. Every piece ahnost of the scaldic poetry quoted in the Heimskringla has allusions of this obscure kind, which would be unintelligible without voluminous explanation; and yet the character of these short poetical pieces does not consist in these, which seem to be but expletives for filling out their artificial structure of verses, but in their rude simplicity and wild grandeur. The translator intended at first to have have left out these pieces of scaldic poetry altogether. They are not essential to Snorro's prose narrative of the events to which they refer. They are not even authorities for the facts he details, although he quotes them in that view; for they only give the summary or heads of events of which he gives the particular minute accounts. They appear to be catch-words, or preliminary verses, for aiding the memory in recurring to some long account or saga in prose of which they are the compendium or text. The oldest translator also of Snorro's work, Peter Claussen, who is supposed to have had, in 1599, a manuscript to translate from which is now lost, omits altogether the verses. The translator consulted a literary friend,— his son, Mr. S. Laing, late Fellow of St. John's College Cambridge, now of the Railroad Department of the Board of Trade,—and went over with him the translation of the prose narrative of Snorro, and translations into prose of the poetical pieces connected with it. They came to the conclusion that although these pieces of scaldic poetry are not essential to Snorro's prose narrative of the historical events to which they refer, they are essential to the spirit and character of Snorro's work. However obscure, unpoetical, monotonous in the ideas, or uninteresting and flat they may be, they show the mind, spirit, and intellectual state of the age and people,—show what it was they considered poetry; and the poorest of these compositions have, in this view, great historical interest. Many of them are, especially in the descriptions and imagery connected with the warfare of those times, highly poetical; and, under any forms of verse or language, the "Hakonarmal," chapter 33. of Hakon the Good's Saga, the "Biarkemal," chapter 220. of Saint Olaf's Saga, and many of the pieces of Sigvat the Scald and others, would he acknowledged as genuine poetry. On examining more closely these pieces of scaldic poetry, it appears, in general, that the second half of the strophe of eight lines, which their rules of versification required as the length of their poetical pieces, is but a repetition of the idea of the first half, and the second two lines hut an echo of the two first. The whole meaning—all that the scald has to say in the strophe, is very often comprehended within the two first lines, the fore line and hack line, which are connected together by the alliterative letters or syllables; and the one idea is expanded, only in other words, over the whole surface of the rest of the strophe of eight lines. The extraordinary metaphors and mythological allusions, the epithets so long-winded and obscure, the never-ending imagery of wolves glutted and ravens feasted hy the deeds of the warriors, arise evidently from the necessity imposed on the scald of finding alliteratives, and conforming to the other strict rules of their versification. The beauty of this artificial construction is lost even upon the best Icelandic scholars of our times; and it appears to have been the only beauty many of these pieces of poetry ever pretended to, for the ideas so expressed are often not in any way poetical. Grundtvig, in his translation into Danish of the Heimskringla, and some German translators of scaldic poems, have cut the loop of this difficulty. They have taken only the most poetical of the pieces of the scalds, and have freely translated, or freely paraphrased them into modern ballads, or songs, in modern measures. Grundtvig has done so with great poetic genius and spirit; and his translations have justly placed him in the first rank of Danish poets. Many of his translations might be placed by the side of the best pieces of Burger or of Scott in the ballad style; but then they are Grundtvig's, not the scalds'. They are no more a translation of the verses of the scalds quoted by Snorro Sturleson, than Shakspeare's Hamlet is a translation of the story of Hamlet in Saxo Grammaticus.
The translator and Mr. S. Laing have rendered into English verse these scaldic pieces of poetry, from prose translations of them laboriously made out. The ideas in each strophe, the allusions, and imagery, were first ascertained by collating the Norse translations of them in M. Jacob Aal's excellent translation of the Heimskringla published in 1838, and those in the folio edition of 1777, and the Latin prose translations of them by Thorlacius and "Werlauf, in the sixth volume of that edition, published in 1826, with the Icelandic text.[3] The ideas, allusions, and imagery are, much oftener than could be expected, obtained, and rendered line for line; and the meaning of each half strophe is always, it is believed, given in the corresponding four English verses. The English reader, it is hoped, will thus be better able to form an idea of the poetry of the scalds, than if the translators had been more ambitious, and had given a looser paraphrase of those pieces according to their own taste or fancy. Some of these pieces of scaldic poetry, it will be seen even by this dim reflection, have very considerable poetical merit; many, again, are extremely flat and prosaic, and are merely prose ideas cut into the shape of verse by the scald. These, it must be recollected, may have had their beauty and merit in the technical construction of the verse, and may have been very pleasing and harmonious, although such merits is lost upon us in a different language. The ideas are all we can get at; not the forms and technical beauties of the expression of those ideas. It will not escape the observation of the English reader that in the ideas there is a very tedious monotony, in the descriptions of battles and bloodshed, in the imagery of war, in the epithets applied to the warriors and kings; and in general there is a total want of sentiment or feeling. The spirit is altogether material. The scalds deal only in description of material objects, and mainly of those connected with warfare by sea or land. But this, no doubt, belongs to the spirit of the state of society and times; and it will be considered of some importance to know what the ideas were which were then considered poetical, and which pleased the cultivated classes for whom the scalds composed. The English public will be able, in some degree, from these translations, to judge what the poetry of the scalds was,—what may have been its real poetic merit: of the labour and difficulty of presenting these pieces to the public, even in this imperfect way, none can judge but those who will try the same task.
- ↑ Four thousand dollars it is reckoned to have been by antiquaries—a large fortune before silver became plentiful by the discovery of America
- ↑ The copy of the Heimskringla made in 1230 by Snorro's nephew, Sturla, is considered the ground text from which all the other manuscripts have been made; and copies in writing of his work have been made as late as 1567- The exact date of any of the manuscripts used by Mortenssen in 1594, or by Claussen in 1559? printed by Wormius in 1663, or by Peringskiold in 1697? is not ascertained. They appear to have all had different manuscripts before them; some better, apparently, in some parts, and in others not so perfect. The Heimskringla of Schoning, in folio,—the first volume published in 1777? the last in 1826,' in Icelandic, Latin, and Danish, at Copenhagen,—is the best.
- ↑ The versions of Jacob Aal and Thorlacius and Werlauf into the cognate Northern tongue are much more graphic than the Latin and more true to the spirit of the Icelandic. These versions have been referred to for the meaning of the scald in all cases in which the Icelandic was obscure.