The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1982, Síða 16

14
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
SUMMER, 1982
Iceland adopted Christianity by decree of
the Althing in 1000. Christianity was
carried by the sword to many less favoured
peoples. The Vikings in Iceland accepted it
because of their deep faith in the process of
democracy. Christianity brought about
some immediate modifications in their way
of life, but it did not penetrate to the roots
of their being immediately. Let me allow
Vilhjalmur Stefansson to explain: “When
the Norsemen accepted Jehovah, they did
not cease to believe in Thor and Odin, but
they renounced them in favour of the
higher New God and the preferred new
religion. Thor and Odin continued to exist,
becoming in the minds of the people the
enemies of the new faith and of all who
professed it.”
Christianity was not in harmony with the
Viking’s pagan philosophy. It did not
glorify the heroic virtues. It was too tame a
creed. There would be fewer cakes and less
ale for him under the new religion. One can
imagine a battle scarred old Viking, sitting
in his home at the close of day; drinking his
mead, perhaps, from the skull of some
enemy he had killed; and relating to a crony
or two how he got his battle scars, antici-
pating these words of Swinburne:
“Thou has conquered. Oh pale
Galilean;
The world has grown grey from thy
breath. ’ ’
In Norse Mythology, Odin, father of the
gods, risked his life to steal the Mead of
Inspiration from the Giants. The Giants
symbolized ‘Evil’ and the Gods ‘Good’. It
was foretold from the beginning that Evil
would triumph over Good, thus bringing
about the twilight of the gods.
Whoever drank the Mead of Inspiration
became a poet. Odin must have arranged to
give the Icelanders a double portion of this
magic potion for they were a race of poets.
Skuli Johnson once wrote: “Indeed it is a
commonly held belief in Iceland that
everybody is capable of achieving an
average quatrain.”
Speaking of the Northmen who settled in
Iceland, Carlyle said “They were poetic
these, men who had deep thoughts in them
and uttered musically their thoughts.”
They uttered their thoughts in a literature
which is generally divided into three
branches — the Eddas, Scaldic poetry and
the Sagas. There were giants in the earth in
those days. The poetic Eddas deal with the
achievements of some of these giants,
blending history and legend into great
verse. That remarkable woman, and ripe
classical scholar. Edith Hamilton, in
speaking of the Elder Edda, has this to say:
“The material for a great epic is there, as
great as the Iliad, perhaps even greater, but
no poet came to work it over as Homer did
the early stories which preceded the Iliad. ”
The Scaldic poets were professional
poets who were patronized by the kings and
great chieftains of Norway, Denmark,
Sweden, England, the Orkneys and Ire-
land. He who paid the piper called the tune.
Snorri Sturlason, Iceland’s sovereign man
of letters, both a speaker of words and a
doer of deeds, writes of the acknowledged
proclivity of the skalds, “to make much of
the valour and prowess of the king in
whose service they were, for none would
have had the temerity to ascribe to the king
deeds which he himself and other auditors
recognized as inventions and piffle.”
Much scaldic poetry is fulsome panegyric,
rosy-hued eulogy, written in exotic, highly
complicated and detailed patterns of verse.
Hear the verdict of an expert, the late Pro-
fessor Peter Foote, who visited Winnipeg,
in 1975, to address the Icelandic-Canadian
community: “The study of scaldic verse is
beset with many difficulties. Its meter is
complex, its word-order free, its diction
and imagery often obscure.”
The Sagas are the crowning glory of
Icelandic literature. They are prose tales.