The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1956, Blaðsíða 24

22
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Summer 1956
and then, with long-pent-up violence,
erupt.
Another good thing about the people
of the sagas is their bodily strength
and beauty. The stories are full of
tremendous physical energy, feats we
should hardly believe if we could not
parallel them from the lives of other
primitives like the Zulus and the Am-
erican Indians. The men were terrific
wrestlers, swimmers, runners, weight-
lifters. Both the men and the women
were notable for their good looks. A
wind of health blows from the sagas.
The stories themselves are long,
complex, episodic. Usually they not
only tell a tale but describe many dif-
ferent characters, pose a number of
problems for meditation, and vivify
a complete sector of social history.
They are not epics, because they are
in prose and lack the superb marching
rhythms and dazzling imagery of
Homer or Milton. They are closest to
the modern historical novel, the object-
ively told stories like Ivan,hoe and
Salammbo. They are solid books, full
of solid virtues and vices. If I were a
lonely man, or a despondent man,
believing this was a terrifying age of
hitherto unparalleled anxiety and
danger, or if I were a young man who
thought I lacked courage and wanted
to train for it, I should read half a
dozen of the Icelandic stories, begin-
ning with Grettir the Strong and Burnt
Nial.
They can still inspire living authors.
In the last generation or so, new
stories have been written in the man-
ner of the sagas, and some of them
are well worth reading. Two of their
authors are Scandinavian; both women,
and both Nobel Prize winners. The
other two are British—one English and
one Scots, both of Norse ancestry.
The Swedish writer, Selma Lagerlof,
in 1891 produced Gosta Berling’s Story,
a cycle of wildly romantic short stories
set in modern Sweden, rather re-
sembling Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic
Tales. They are handsomely told but
are scarcely saga-like, apart from their
arrangement and their occasional vio-
lence. The Norwegian Sigrid Undset
has two long, complex historical novels
about thirteenth-century Scandinavia:
The Master of Hestviken and Kristin
Lavrandsdatter. They seem to me to
have all the disadvantages of the saga
style without all its advantages, for
they are intricate without being energ-
etic; but the atmosphere is beautifully
sustained and separate incidents are
sometimes strong and memorable.
These two women really wrote ro-
mantic saga-novels. But two men tried
to produce tales which—if discovered
in manuscript—might be pronounced
genuine Icelandic works. Eric Link-
later, in The Men of Ness, re-created
the life of the vikings, centering on
the sea. It reminds us that in stirring
periods of history it is only safe and
quiet people who live in towns, While
the men who become the masters of
events inhabit plain and desert and sea.
His vikings look something like mod-
ern fighters of the air. I cannot recom-
mend his book wholeheartedly, be-
cause, like the salt fish the vikings ate,
it is a little too hard and crisp for
everyone’s taste; but it is full of vita-
mins.
The most exciting modern saga of
the old North is Eric Brighteyes, by
Henry Rider Haggard. Many readers
know King Solomon’s Mines and She,
and the Allan Quatermain books, but
Eric Brighteyes is neglected, partly be-
cause readers do not know how to ap-
proach it. It is a stirring Icelandic tale
combining elements from many of the
sagas, together with much Norse myth-
ology. Its hero Eric is brave and hand-
some, but unlucky. Two women love