LITMIR.BIZ

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Hermann Keyserling has said, with profound insight, that the belief in predestination is always grandiose in effect where its disciples possess proud souls. And he speaks of the fatalism of Islam in words that might have been spoken of the Northmen: “The fatalism of the Moslem, like that of the original Calvinist, and in contradiction to that of the Russian, is the expression not of weakness but of strength. He neither trembles before the terrible God in whom he believes, nor does he hope for His particular benevolence, nor does he suffer himself to be driven at will by fate: he stands there, proud and inwardly free, opposite to the Superior Power, facing eternity with the same equanimity as he faces death”.* Such a mind we see everywhere in the sagas: in the terrible Skarphedinn when, before the burning of Bergthorsknoll, he chooses the hazard of defending the house rather than fight in the open in disobedience to his aged father: “I may well humour my father in this, by being burnt indoors along with him, for I am not afraid of my death” (Nj. 127); in Kiartan, sending back his company and riding with but two followers on his last ride southward towards Laxriverdale (Ld. 48); and, in our own saga, in old Kveldulf watching the fate he from the first foreboded step by step draw nearer to his son.

      Of the sense of fellowship with the Gods I have already quoted instances. The nobility of this attitude of mind is well caught by Stevenson in one of his little febles, of the priest, the virtuous person, and the old rover with his axe: “At last one came running, and told them all was lost: that the powers of darkness had besieged the Heavenly Mansions, that Odin was to die, and evil triumph.

      “‘I have been grossly deceived’, cried the virtuous person.

      “‘All is lost now’, said the priest.

      “‘I wonder if it is too late to make it up with the devil?’ said the virtuous person.

      “‘O, I hope not’, said the priest. ‘And at any rate we can but try.—But what are you doing with your axe?’ says he to the rover.

“‘I am off to die with Odin’, said the rover.”*

      This proud pagan spirit of fatalism and fellowship with, not subservience to, the ultimate Power, is implicit throughout the saga literature. It is, in my judgement, the deep underlying rock on which the greatness of that literature, as an expression of much that is finest and noblest in the human spirit, is founded and built.

* Ari, Libellus Islandorum, ch. 1. Cf. Landn.

* The Travel Diary of a Philosopher, Part III, ch. 26 (Jonathan Cape).

* The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson: Tales and Fantasies, vol. IV, p. 372, Edinburgh, 1897.

      THE SAGA

      So much for the foundations. The building itself is before our eyes in one of its most characteristic elevations, in the shape of Egil’s Saga. Here I will not waste time on trying to say more briefly what has been said, rightly and once and for all, by the late W. P. Ker in his masterpiece of inspired criticism, Epic and Romance. To complete our background, however, it may be useful to note a few of the salient features of that peculiar form of prose narrative which is Iceland’s contribution to the creative literature of the world.

      A saga may be roughly defined as a prose narrative which deals dramatically with historical material, and in which the interest is concentrated upon individual persons, their characters, actions, and destinies. Rough as it is, this definition will serve to indicate distinctions between the Icelandic prose epic and the products of other countries and other ages. A glance at some of these distinctions may be the readiest way towards an appreciation of what a saga essentially is.

      The saga is like Homer in that it is heroic in matter and in spirit: it is unlike, in that it is prose, not poetry; that its interest is more purely individual (the epic opposition of Trojan and Greek has no counterpart in the sagas: how far removed are the two attitudes is seen if we contrast the treatment of that opposition by Homer with the treatment in Egla of the opposition of the King and the great houses); that it eschews the supernatural and the marvellous, whereas the Gods in the Iliad are ever present, often as protagonists in the action, and the Odyssey is packed with magic, monsters, portents, and supernatural beings. Moreover, swift as is the movement of Homer, the action pauses continually for the introduction of poetic ornament, simile or description. The action of the saga never pauses except for the introduction of genealogical information.

      The historical books of the Old Testament are, save in the single circumstance of their being prose and not poetry, still further removed from the saga. Their outlook is national and theocratic in a far higher degree than Homer’s. French Romance, again, is epically national (Christendom against the Paynim), and abounds in miracles and marvels; besides this, it presents other qualities which distinguish it sharply from the saga: its historical basis is generally flimsy, and, which is more important, history is to it not an end in itself but a framework for fancy’s most rich and unrestrained embroidery; its characters are types, not individuals; its main interest, wild and strange adventure in a dreamland of chivalry and romantic love; its method, formless and luxuriantly meandering. The heroic tales of Keltic tradition, apart from the varying but always large part played in them by the mythical element, differ from the sagas more fundamentally than do even the Romances of chivalry. This is because the old Keltic heroic story is in its processes the direct opposite of the Icelandic; the instinctive idiom and figure of the one is rhetoric and hyperbole; of the other restraint and meiosis. Thus words and phrases to the Kelt, in his great scenes, are material to be poured out in a spate of eloquent emotion; in the saga, on the contrary, the expression becomes more tense and curbed as the situation heightens, until words and phrases have effect individually and apocalyptically like lightning flashes, each trailing behind it (for in this method the effect often depends less on what is said than on what is left unsaid) a turmoil of associations like rolling thunders.

There are two more masterpieces of prose narrative which we may profitably contrast with the sagas: the Arabian Nights, in which the action is slowed down to give leisure for the luxurious contemplation of every form of sensuous beauty; and Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which, on the whole, plot and situation outweigh character. By the beauty of nature* the Northman (if we may judge from the sagas) set little store: by physical beauty in man and woman he set much, but was content to note it in his terse objective way, “the fairest of men to look on”, seldom going into detail and never permitting it to interrupt the stride of his story. The sagas abound in dramatic situations, but they rarely excel in plot. But the briefest consideration of, for example, Njála or the little saga of Hrafnkel Frey’s-priest, both of which are masterpieces of plot-construction, is enough to show that the plot depends for its whole life and power upon the personalities of its actors: upon Njal, Skarphedinn, Flosi and Kari and a host of living, if minor, characters in the one case, and upon Hrafnkel and Sam in the other. And we need but call to mind any great scene, such as Njal’s burning or (in our own saga) the Höfuðlausn scene in York, to see how the whole art of dramatic situation, suspension, irony, clash of motives and of wills, and every circumstance of tragic grandeur is bent to the singlepurpose of conjuring up in living reality individual men and women without whom the situation would be left meaningless or commonplace: Eric and Arinbiorn, Egil and Gunnhild.

      We have not yet looked at the modern novel, nor, for that matter, at the Elizabethan drama. Here at least is to be found that preoccupation with individual character for which we have so far found no parallel outside the sagas: Squire Western, Becky Sharp, Victor Radnor, Diana of the Crossways, Nevil Beauchamp; Beatrice in Much Ado, Falstaff, Othello, Hamlet, Cleopatra, Vittoria Corombona, Bosola, Flamineo, Brachiano. On the whole, Shakespeare and Webster are closer to the saga in their treatment of character than are the novelists. The novel, through its protean variations from Proust to the detective

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