Jón Bjarnason Academy - 01.05.1931, Page 33

Einar Benediktsson back to the poetic Edda, as well as the
incomparable prose narratives of the Saga age. And in these
we may discover elements of the highest importance in the
cultural growth of the individual.
The first is an almost unparalleled sense of form in poetry.
In a day when English poems all too often involve the form-
lessness of free verse or the flabbiness of simple metres lazily
employed, there is a bracing challenge in the rigors of Icelandic
prosody. The ancient alliterative measures were strict enough,
but the blending of Celtic and Teutonic modes by the court
poets made their poetic technique exacting to the point where
the trifling bungler was ruled out and even the most skilful
artist had to labor strenuously. Since the Middle Ages, a
similar blending of strict alliterative principles with the laxer
modes of Modern Europe has made it clear that the old spirit
of craftmanship lives on, that the Icelandic poet does not re-
gard his calling as an amusement for careless emotionality
but rather as a craft calling for consummate skill and tireless
industry. Such a tradition often suffers from the defects of
its own qualities, strangling itself with the bonds that it as-
sumes; but its very austerity is an inspiring and abiding re-
buke to every age of artistic laxity.
Even more important is the philosophy of life implicit in
the epic poetry and in the sagas. As Icelandic prosody might
put iron into our verses, so the Old Norse ideals might put
iron into our characters; for the old literature of Iceland is
the finest embodiment of the primitive ethos of the Nordic
peoples, the working faith of the great blond races of the
North.
It was a pagan creed, facing the evils of existence with
pessimistic eyes and magnificent courage. It envisaged a
universe in which the Great Gods of virtue and wisdom would
at last die in apocalyptic overthrow at the hands of the powers
of darkness; yet it prescribed as the brightest fate of heroic
souls in an afterlife the privilege of then perishing a second
time at the side of the defeated gods. Life might be tragic;
the very world, with all its values of the spirit, might be
doomed to ultimate extinction; but the way of a man was to
live manlike, to make no compromise with things evil or base,
to assert freedom of his soul against all the forces of pain and
death and destiny. At a time -when the solvents of science
have destroyed so much that once sustained us, there is today
no less a place for that calm integrity of spirit that will take
“a full look at the worst” and then fearlessly maintain its in-
most citadels unsurrendered in despite of time and fate.
Icelandic studies may be more than a mere cultural dis-
cipline; they may contribute to the positive exaltation of those
who pass through them into that stern high world where our
forefathers lived and died with fearless eyes and undefeated
hearts.
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