Chapter I

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[189] It is not known when Teutons first entered Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula. Although non-Teutonic populations may have preceded them, the archaeological remains do not point clearly to a succession of races, while they do indicate ages of stone, bronze, and iron (Sophus Müller, _Nordische Altertumskunde_). The bronze ages began in the Northlands a thousand years or more before Christ. In course of time, beautiful bronze weapons show what skill the race acquired in working metals not found in Scandinavia, but perhaps brought there in exchange for the amber of the Baltic shores. The use of iron (native to Scandinavia) begins about 500 B.C. A progressive facility in its treatment is evinced down to the Christian Era. Then a foreign influence appears--Rome. For Roman wares entered these countries where the legionaries never set foot, and native handicraft copied Roman models until the fourth century, when northern styles reassert themselves. The Scandinavians themselves were unaffected by Roman wares; but after the fifth century they began to profit from their intercourse with Anglo-Saxons and Irish.

[190] It is said that some twenty-five thousand Arabian coins, mostly of the Viking periods, have been found in Sweden.

[191] See Vigfusson and Powell, _Corpus poeticum Boreale_, i. 238.

[192] There is much controversy as to the date (the Viking Age?) and place of origin (Norway, the Western Isles, or Iceland?) of the older Eddic poems; also as to the presence of Christian elements. The last are denied by Müllenhoff (_Deutsche Altertumskunde_, Bd. v., 1891) and others; while Bugge finds them throughout the whole Viking mythology (_Home of the Eddic Poems_, London, D. Nutt, 1899), and Chr. Bang has endeavoured to prove that the _Voluspa_, the chief Eddic mythological poem, was an imitation of the Christian Sibyl’s oracles (_Christiania Videnskabsselskabs Forhanlinger_, 1879, No. 9; Müllenhoff, _o.c._ Bd. v. p. 3 _sqq._). Similar views are held in Vigfusson and Powell’s _Corpus poeticum Boreale_ (i. ci.-cvii. and 427). These scholars find Celtic influences in the Eddic poems. The whole controversy is still far from settlement.

As for English translations of the _Edda_, that by B. Thorpe (_Edda Samundar_) is difficult to obtain. Those of the _Corpus poeticum Boreale_ are literal; but the phraseology of the renderings of the mythological poems is shaped to the theory of Christian influence. A recent translation (1909) is that of Olive Bray (Viking Club), _The Elder or Poetic Edda_,

## Part I. The Mythological Poems.

[193] The best account of the Sagas, in English, is the Prolegomena to Vigfusson’s edition of the Sturlunga Saga (Clarendon Press, 1878). Dasent’s Introduction to his translation of the Njáls Saga (Edinburgh, 1861) is instructive as to the conditions of life in Iceland in the early times. W. P. Ker’s _Epic and Romance_ (Macmillan & Co., 1897) has elaborate literary criticism upon the Sagas. The following is Vigfusson’s: “The Saga proper is a kind of prose Epic. It has its fixed laws, its set phrases, its regular epithets and terms of expression, and though there is, as in all high literary form, an endless diversity of interest and style, yet there are also bounds which are never over-stepped, confining the Saga as closely as the employment and restrictions of verse could do. It will be best to take as the type the smaller Icelandic Saga, from which indeed all the later forms of composition have sprung. This is, in its original form, the story of the life of an Icelandic gentleman, living some time in the tenth or eleventh centuries. It will tell first of his kin, going back to the settler from whom he sprung, then of his youth and early promise before he left his father’s house to set forth on that foreign career which was the fitting education of the young Northern chief. These _wanderjahre_ passed in trading voyages and pirate cruises, or in the service of one of the Scandinavian kings, as poet or henchman, the hero returns to Iceland a proved man, and the main part of the story thus preluded begins. It recounts in fuller detail and in order of time his friendships and his enmities, his exploits and renown, and finally his death; usually concluding with the revenge taken for him by his kinsmen, which fitly winds up the whole. This tale is told in an earnest, straightforward way, as by a man talking, in short simple sentences, changing when the interest grows into the historic present, with here and there an ‘aside’ of explanation put in.... The whole composition, grouped around a single man and a single place, is so well balanced and so naturally unfolded piece by piece, that the great art shown therein often at first escapes the reader.”

[194] The Story of Burnt Njal (Njáls Saga or Njála), trans. by Dasent (2 vols. Edinburgh, 1861). A prose narrative interspersed with occasional lyric verses is the form which the Icelandic Sagas have in common with the Irish. In view of the mutual intercourse and undoubted mingling of Norse and Celtic blood both in Ireland and Iceland, it is probable that the Norse Saga-form was taken from the Irish. But, except in the Laxdæla Saga (trans. by Mrs. Press in the Temple Classics, Dent, 1899), one seems to find no Celtic strain. The Sagas are the prose complement of the poetic _Edda_. Both are Norse absolutely: fruit of one spirit, part of one literature, a possession of one people. As to racial purity of blood in their authors and fashioners, or in the men of whom the tales are told, that is another matter. Who shall say that Celtic blood and inherited Celtic gifts of expression were not the leaven of this Norse literature? But whatever entered into it and helped to create it, became Norse just as vitally as, ages before, every foreign suggestion adopted by a certain gifted Mediterranean race was Hellenized, and became Greek. In Iceland, in the Orkneys and the Faroes, Viking conditions, the Viking spirit, and Norse blood, dominated, assimilating, transforming and doubtless using whatever talents and capacities came within the vortex of Viking life.

It may be added that there is merely an accidental likeness between the Saga and the Cantafable. In the Saga the verses are the utterances of the heroes when specially moved. One may make a verse as a short death-song when his death is imminent, or as a gibe on an enemy, whom he is about to attack. In the Cantafable--_Aucassin and Nicolette_, for example--the verses are a lyric summary of the parts of the narrative following them, and are not spoken by the _dramatis personae_. The Cantafable (but not the Sagas) perhaps may be traced back to such a work as Boëthius’s _De consolatione_, which at least is identical in form, or Capella’s _De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii_. The _De planctu naturae_ of Alanus de Insulis (_post_,