Jón Bjarnason Academy - 01.05.1936, Page 13

page, sometimes being ordered and embellished and transmuted
in the process by writers whose ability places them in the very
front rank of authors of all time. One such was the anonymous
but consummate artist who gave its final form to the Saga of
Burnt Njal.
So the Saga Literature blossomed and flowered and died,
efflorescent in a vanishing period of time, for it was the child
of certain heroic conditions which occurred once in the history
of the Northern Race and can never occur again. As the poems
of Homer would only arise in the early age of Greek history;
as ancient Tragedy needed for its birth the glorious and the
world-outlook of Periclean Athens; as our own Shakespearian
Drama could only come into being in the spacious days of
great Elizabeth, so it was also with the literary activity of
Iceland. The Saga was a child of its period. There never had
been before, and there never would be after, a similar product
of human genius in the history of the world.
It is not our intention in this article to describe the special
form and rules which governed this genre of literature. It is
our purpose in this article to devote our attention to one theme
only—a theme running like a thread of gold through the whole
Saga literature—the characterization, not through psychological
analysis but by record of word and deed, of what we have al-
ready called the Norse Heroic Ideal. Let us endeavor to ex-
plain the elements of the most splendid attitude of soul in
presence of the changes and chances of this mortal life.
It was a deeply rooted conviction of the northern mind
that all things moved to an ultimate tragedy. One of the great-
est of the Eddaic poems, the Voluspa or Prophesy of the Sibyl,
tells the doom of the gods themselves. A day was coming, so
the prophetess foreknew, when the primitive forces of chaos
and of disorder would again be let loose against the higher
powers which stood for the ordered universe of man. Odin
and Thor and the other divinities of the Asgard circle, sup-
ported by the fallen warriors who had been carried by the
Valkyries to the halls of Valhalla, would meet the opposite
forces of evil in the last great battle of time and would go down
to defeat in the day of Ragnarok, the Gotterdammerung, or
Twilight of the Gods. For men likewise there awaited the
inevitable end. In the solemn w'ords of Havamal, another of
the Eddaic poems:
“Cattle die, kindred die;
So a man dies himself.”
For even if spears give quarter, old age does not. In the long
run the material forces of the universe will crush the boldest
and the bravest and the best. How then may a man conquer
in this battle in which his ultimate defeat is inevitable? He
may conquer, said the Norsemen of old, by the freedom of his
will and by his indomitable spirit which meets the blows of
11