The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1956, Blaðsíða 21

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
19
ICE A\NII» IFIRE
By PROFESSOR GILBERT HIGHET
Gilbert Highet was born in Scotland. In his
university training he specialized in the Clas-
sics, Greek and Latin, and since 1938 has been
Anthon Professor of Latin Language and
Literature at Columbia University. For some
years he has given weekly radio talks on
literature and is now regarded as one of the
top radio lecturers in the United States. In
1953 his first collection of published radio
talks “People, Places and Books” became a
best seller. The essay below is from his 1954
book which he entitled “A Clerk of Oxen-
ford”. In his preface to this book he expressed
the hope that the volume would be considered
“as a book of essays, and not a mere tran-
scription of radio talks”. The essay on “Ice
and Fire”, as well as the other excellent essays
in that volume, is ample fulfillment of that
hope.
The Icelandic Canadian acknowledges its
indebtedness to the author, Gilbert Hio-het,
and to the publishers, the Oxford University
Press, New York, for their permission to
publish this essay. This is one of the ways in
which the fundamentals of the Icelandic heri-
tage can be transmitted to the English read-
ing public. —Ed.
It takes courage to settle a new
land: to abandon one’s home, to risk
poverty, and starvation, to struggle
with a strange climate, to fight the
natives, or, if there are none, to
wrestle with other incomers desperate
and ruthless. As well as courage, it
takes wisdom. New institutions have
to be devised, if the land is to be perm-
anently settled. Laws and schools, social
and intellectual structures have to be
created. It is not enough for such a
settler to be a farmer or a fisherman:
he must also become something of a
statesman, his wife something of a
doctor and a teacher, and both of them
inventors. Not all settlements are fully
successful. Some new countries still re-
main empty, or half peopled. But it is
always moving and uplifting to read
the story of a successful settlement,
and see how the new country created
new people to inhabit it.
Such were the Pilgrims, and the Vir-
ginia settlers. Yet there is an earlier
tale of such adventure which is less
famous through the world, but has
produced better literature. This is the
history of Iceland. A remote place it
is—a lava island, larger than Ireland,
full of volcanoes, far in the northern
Atlantic. The Noresmen discovered it
about 850. (That was the beginning
of their great period, when they roam-
ed as far as Constantinople in the east
and Massachusetts in the west, con-
quered Ireland, harried Scotland, set-
tled down in England, and took over
Normandy). Just about a thousand
years ago, Iceland was well populated
and was growing into one of the earl-
iest Western republics. The main
stream of immigrants was Norwegian;
but there were Celts, too, from the
Scottish islands and from Ireland. It
was a hard life; but it was uncommon-
ly interesting. It produced some tough
men; some brave women; some fine
books.
There are many kinds of Icelandic
books—poetry, myth, history. The best
of them all, the rarest and most mem-
orable, are the sagas. A saga is simply
a tale—not a piece of fiction, but a
true story about a famous man, or a
powerful family, or a dramatic event.
Soon after the death of a hero, the
Icelandic storytellers began to collect
the chief incidents of his career and
to weave them into a continuous story;
then they would tell it from memory
at parties, just like the Gaelic tale-
smiths and the Homeric poets. About
A.D. 1200 these stories began to be
written down. Thirty or forty of them
have been preserved to our time. They