The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1956, Blaðsíða 22

20
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Summer 1956
give us a rich, a fascinating, picture
of the settlers' life, with its violent
passions, its savage cruelties, its tremen-
dous gallantry and determination, and
(most interesting of all) its gradual
progress into culture, from anarchy to
order, from brute force to law, from
paganism to Christianity, from the
boyish bravado of rovers and pirates
into the steady energy of thoughtful
men: indeed, one might almost say
from the sheer lunacy of primitive
savages into the sanity of the civilized.
The Icelandic sagas fill two large
bookshelves. I have not read them all:
few have, except specialists, such as
the charming old Cambridge professor
in C. P. Snow’s The Masters, who has
them all in his head and has built a
huge relief map of Iceland on which
to trace their heroes’ exploits. But I
have read some of them, including the
best, and I like rereading them. They
are usually well translated, for their
language (apart from the esoteric bits
of poetry) is simple and quite close to
ours, and their stories are straightfor-
ward. My two favorites are the story
of a formidable outlaw, Grettir the
Strong, and the story of a wise and
gentle statesman, Burnt Nial—so called
because he was burned to death in his
own house by an enemy.
Nothing gives a better idea of
the style of the sagas, and of the
straight-spoken courage of the men
and women who inspired them, than
a quotation of one of their greatest
scenes. Nial and his family have been
surrounded in his lonely farmhouse.
Failing to break in, his enemies have
set fire to the doors and the roof. Flosi,
their chief, allows the women and
children and servants to escape, and
then calls to Nial himself.
Flosi said, ‘I will offer thee, master
Nial, leave to go out, for it is un-
worthy that thou shouldst burn in-
doors.’
‘I will not go out,’ said Nial, ‘for I
am an old man, and little fitted to
avenge my sons, but I will not live in
shame.’
Then Flosi said to (Nial's wife) Berg-
thora, ‘Come thou out, housewife, for
I will for no sake burn thee indoors.’
‘I was given away to Nial young,’ said
Bergthora, ‘and I have promised him
this, that we would both share the
same fate.’
After that they both went back into
the house.
‘What counsel shall we now take?’
said Bergthora.
‘We will go to our bed,’ says Nial,
‘and lay us down; I have long been
eager for rest.’
Then she said to the boy Thord,
‘Thee will I take out, and thou shalt
not burn in here.’
‘Thou hast promised me this grand-
mother’, says the boy, ‘that we should
never part so long as I wished to be
with thee; but methinks it is much
better to die with thee and Nial than
to live after you.’
Then she bore the boy to her bed,
and Nial spoke to his Stewart and said,
‘Now thou shalt see where we lay us
down, and how I lay us out, for I mean
not to stir an inch thence, whether
reek or burning smart me, and so thou
wilt be able to guess where to look for
our bones.’ ....
Skarphedinn saw how his father laid
him down, and how he laid himself
out, and then he said, ‘Our father goes
early to bed, and that is what was to
be looked for, for he is an old man.”
When you read any of the sagas for
the first time, one thing is likely to
disconcert you a little—and, oddly
enough, it is a quality in them that
the Icelanders themselves love. This