Jón Bjarnason Academy - 01.05.1936, Blaðsíða 14

fate, bloody but unbowed. More than this, the completeness
of the victory of the human spirit is manifested by the grace,
the aesthetic beauty, the gladness with which a man marches
to meet his end. Odin himself was believed to have said:
“Every man should be cheerful and glad, even till he suffers
death.” This injunction of the great captain of their lives
was obeyed by countless Norsemen up to and in their last
hour. It is, however, to us of British origin a matter of
interest that the most remarkable statement in all Germanic
literature of this spirit of the Teutonic race is found in an
Anglo-Saxon poem, “The Battle of Maldon.” There Byrhtwald,
fighting to the end, calls to the little band of his men who still
surround him: “The mind must be the harder, the heart the
keener, the spirit the greater, as our strength grows less.”
So it was at Hastings in 1066 when Harold and his house-
carls died to a man under their Dragon Standard. In Iceland
something of this heroic spirit lingered on into Christian times.
Hallgrim Petursson, Iceland’s poet of the Passion who lived
in the seventeenth century, met his death through the dread
disease of leprosy, composing to the end hymns of triumphant
faith. The spirit was undefeated. When Einar .Tonsson, the
sculptor of modern Iceland, was commissioned to undertake
the erection of the national memorial to the great religious
poet of his people, he had to decide the method of representa-
tion. Should he picture the poet triumphant upon his bed
of leprosy, or should he represent him in the flower of his age
as the great Christian Psalmist of Iceland? The sculptor
decided, with true artistic instinct, to do both. The heroic
element could not be ignored. And so at the foot of the
pedestal he represented Hallgrim raising himself upon his
bed in the death agony, while on the summit of the pedestal
he placed a figure of the same Hallgrim in the bloom of man-
hood, bearing aloft in one hand the cross, in the other the
harp. Behind, on the lower steps of the monument, crowd
after him in ever growing numbers the children of his people,
following the great Christian poet as with incomparable song
he leads them by the way of the Cross towards the light.
Note further. This Norse heroic ideal is possessed of a
peculiar flavour, of a distinctive characteristic all its own.
It is true that there is a large element common to all bravery.
Brave men recognize each other everywhere. One recalls the
Arabian Lawrence’s splendid panegyric upon the courage of
the little groups of German soldiery who stood like rocks amid
the swirling ebb-tide of the Turkish rout, loading and firing,
though all was lost, with a precision learnt on some far-off
parade ground of the northern German Fatherland. Bravery
everywhere is bravery; heroism is heroism. And yet courage
may be of varied types. It may bear the characteristics of a
race. The Norse heroic ideal is distinctive.
The courage of both Greece and Rome in the historic