Nos. I., II., III. of “The Saxons” complete. From “History of English Literature.”
I. ENVIRONMENT AND CHARACTER
AS you coast the North Sea from the Scheldt to Jutland, you will mark, in the first place, that the characteristic feature is the want of slope; marsh, waste, shoal; the rivers hardly drag themselves along, swollen and sluggish, with long, black-looking waves; the flooding stream oozes over the banks, and appears further on in stagnant pools. In Holland the soil is but a sediment of mud; here and there only does the earth cover it with a crust, shallow and brittle, the mere alluvium of the river, which the river seems ever about to destroy. Thick clouds hover above, being fed by ceaseless exhalations. They lazily turn their violet flanks, grow black, suddenly descend in heavy showers; the vapor like a furnace smoke, crawls forever on the horizon. Thus watered, plants multiply; in the angle between Jutland and the continent, in a fat, muddy soil, “the verdure is as fresh as that of England.” Immense forests covered the land even after the eleventh century. The sap of this humid country, thick and potent, circulates in man as in the plants; man’s respiration, nutrition, sensations, and habits affect also his faculties and his frame.
The land produced after this fashion has one enemy, to wit, the sea. Holland maintains its existence only by virtue of its dikes. In 1654 those in Jutland burst, and fifteen thousand of the inhabitants were swallowed up. One need only see the blast of the North swirl down upon the low level of the soil, wan and ominous: the vast yellow sea dashes against the narrow belt of flat coast which seems incapable of a moment’s resistance; the wind howls and bellows; the sea mews cry; the poor little ships flee as fast as they can, bending almost to the gunwale, and endeavor to find a refuge in the mouth of the river, which seems as hostile as the sea. A sad and precarious existence, as it were, face to face with a beast of prey. The Frisians, in their ancient laws, speak already of the league they have made against “the ferocious ocean.” Even in a calm this sea is unsafe. “Before me rolleth a waste of water … and above me go rolling the storm clouds, the formless dark-gray daughters of air, which from the sea, in cloudy buckets scoop up the water, ever wearied lifting and lifting, and then pour it again in the sea, a mournful wearisome business. Over the sea, flat on his face, lies the monstrous, terrible North Wind, sighing and sinking his voice as in secret, like an old grumbler; for once in good humor, unto the ocean he talks, and he tells her wonderful stories.” Rain, wind, and surge leave room for naught but gloomy and melancholy thoughts. The very joy of the billows has in it an inexplicable restlessness and harshness. From Holland to Jutland, a string of small, deluged islands bears witness to their ravages; the shifting sands which the tide drifts up obstruct and impede the banks and entrance of the rivers. The first Roman fleet, a thousand sail, perished there; to this day ships wait a month or more in sight of port, tossed upon the great white waves, not daring to risk themselves in the shifting, winding channel, notorious for its wrecks. In winter a breastplate of ice covers the two streams; the sea drives back the frozen masses as they descend; they pile themselves with a crash upon the sandbanks, and sway to and fro; now and then you may see a vessel, seized as in a vice, split in two beneath their violence. Picture in this foggy clime amid hoar frost and storm, in these marshes and forests, half-naked savages, a kind of wild beasts, fishers and hunters, but especially hunters of men; these are they, Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Frisians; later on, Danes, who during the fifth and the ninth centuries, with their swords and battle axes, took and kept the island of Britain.
A rude and foggy land, like their own, except in the depth of its sea and the safety of its coasts, which one day will call up real fleets and mighty vessels; green England—the word rises to the lips and expresses all. Here also moisture pervades everything, even in summer the mist rises; even on clear days you perceive it fresh from the great sea girdle, or rising from vast but ever-slushy meadows, undulating with hill and dale, intersected with hedges to the limit of the horizon. Here and there a sunbeam strikes on the higher grasses with burning flash and the splendor of the verdure dazzles and almost blinds you. The overflowing water straightens the flabby stems; they grow up, rank, weak and filled with sap; a sap ever renewed, for the gray mists creep under a stratum of motionless vapor, and at distant intervals the rim of heaven is drenched by heavy showers. “There are yet commons as at the time of the Conquest, deserted, abandoned, wild, covered with furze and thorny plants, with here and there a horse grazing in solitude. Joyless scene, unproductive soil! What a labor it has been to humanize it! What impression it must have made on the men of the South, the Romans of Cæsar! I thought, when I saw it, of the ancient Saxons, wanderers from West and North, who came to settle in this land of marsh and fogs, on the border of primeval forests, on the banks of these great muddy streams, which roll down their slime to meet the waves. They must have lived as hunters and swineherds, growing, as before, brawny, fierce, gloomy. Take civilization from this soil, and there will remain to the inhabitants only war, the chase, gluttony, drunkenness. Smiling love, sweet poetic dreams, art, refined and nimble thought, are for the happy shores of the Mediterranean. Here the barbarian, ill housed in his mud hovel, who hears the rain pattering whole days among the oak leaves—what dreams can he have, gazing upon his mud pools and his sombre sky?”
HUGE white bodies, cool blooded, with fierce blue eyes, reddish flaxen hair; ravenous stomachs, filled with meat and cheese, heated by strong drinks; of a cold temperament, slow to love, home stayers, prone to brutal drunkenness: these are to this day the features which descent and climate preserve in the race, and these are what the Roman historians discovered in their former country. There is no living, in these lands, without abundance of solid food; bad weather keeps people at home; strong drinks are necessary to cheer them; the senses become blunted, the muscles are braced, the will vigorous. In every country the body of man is rooted deep into the soil of nature; and in this instance still deeper, because, being uncultivated, he is less removed from nature. In Germany, storm-beaten, in wretched boats of hide, amid the hardships and dangers of seafaring life, they were pre-eminently adapted for endurance and enterprise, inured to misfortune, scorners of danger. Pirates at first,—of all kinds of hunting the man-hunt is most profitable and most noble,—they left the care of the land and flocks to the women and slaves; seafaring, war, and pillage was their whole idea of a freeman’s work. They dashed to sea in their two-sailed barks, landed anywhere, killed everything; and having sacrificed in honor of their gods the tithe of their prisoners, and leaving behind them the red light of their burnings, went further on to begin again. “Lord,” says a certain litany, “deliver us from the fury of the Jutes.” “Of all barbarians these are strongest of body and heart, the most formidable,”—we may add, the most cruelly ferocious. When murder becomes a trade, it becomes a pleasure. About the eighth century, the final decay of the great Roman corpse which Charlemagne had tried to revive, and which was settling down into corruption called them like vultures to the prey. Those who had remained in Denmark with their brothers of Norway, fanatical pagans, incensed against the Christians, made a descent on all the surrounding coasts. Their sea-kings, “who had never slept under the smoky rafters of a roof, who had never drained the ale horn by an inhabited hearth,” laughed at wind and storms, and sang: “The blast of the tempest aids our oars; the bellowing of heaven, the howling of the thunder, hurt us not; the hurricane is our servant, and drives us whither we wish to go.” “We hewed with our swords,” says a song attributed to Ragnar Lodbrog, “was it not like that hour when my bright bride I seated by me on the couch?” One of them, at the monastery of Peterborough, kills with his own hand all the monks, to the number of eighty-four; others, having taken King Ælla, divided his ribs from the spine, drew his lungs out, and threw salt into his wounds. Harold Harefoot, having seized his rival Alfred, with six hundred men, had them maimed, blinded, hamstrung, scalped, or emboweled. Torture and carnage, greed of danger, fury of destruction, obstinate and frenzied bravery of an over-strong temperament, the unchaining of the butcherly instincts,—such traits meet us at every step in the old Sagas. The daughter of the Danish Jarl, seeing Egil taking his seat near her, repels him with scorn, reproaching him with “seldom having provided the wolves with hot meat, with never having seen for the whole autumn a raven croaking over the carnage.” But Egil seized her and pacified her by singing: “I have marched with my bloody sword, and the raven has followed me. Furiously we fought, the fire passed over the dwellings of men; we have sent to sleep in blood those who kept the gates.” From such table talk, and such maidenly tastes, we may judge of the rest.
Behold them now in England, more settled and wealthier: do you expect to find them much changed? Changed it may be, but for the worse, like the Franks, like all barbarians who pass from action to enjoyment. They are more gluttonous, carving their hogs, filling themselves with flesh, swallowing down deep draughts of mead, ale, spiced wines, all the strong, coarse drinks which they can procure, and so they are cheered and stimulated. Add to this the pleasure of the fight. Not easily with such instincts can they attain to culture; to find a natural and ready culture, we must look amongst the sober and sprightly populations of the South. Here the sluggish and heavy temperament remains long buried in a brutal life; people of the Latin race never at a first glance see in them aught but large gross beasts, clumsy and ridiculous when not dangerous and enraged. Up to the sixteenth century, says an old historian, the great body of the nation were little else than herdsmen, keepers of cattle and sheep; up to the end of the eighteenth drunkenness was the recreation of the higher ranks; it is still that of the lower; and all the refinement and softening influence of civilization have not abolished amongst them the use of the rod and the fist. If the carnivorous, warlike, drinking savage, proof against the climate, still shows beneath the conventions of our modern society and the softness of our modern polish, imagine what he must have been when, landing with his band upon a wasted or desert country, and becoming for the first time a settler, he saw extending to the horizon the common pastures of the border country, and the great primitive forests which furnished stags for the chase and acorns for his pigs. The ancient histories tell us that they had a great and a coarse appetite. Even at the time of the Conquest the custom of drinking to excess was a common vice with men of the highest rank, and they passed in this way whole days and nights without intermission. Henry of Huntingdon, in the twelfth century, lamenting the ancient hospitality, says that the Norman kings provided their courtiers with only one meal a day, while the Saxon kings used to provide four. One day, when Athelstan went with his nobles to visit his relative Ethelfleda, the provision of mead was exhausted at the first salutation, owing to the copiousness of the draughts; but Dunstan, forecasting the extent of the royal appetite, had furnished the house, so that the cupbearers, as is the custom at royal feasts, were able the whole day to serve it out in horns and other vessels, and the liquor was not found to be deficient. When the guests were satisfied, the harp passed from hand to hand, and the rude harmony of their deep voices swelled under the vaulted roof. The monasteries themselves in Edgard’s time kept up games, songs, and dances till midnight. To shout, to drink, to gesticulate, to feel their veins heated and swollen with wine, to hear and see around them the riotous orgies, this was the first need of the barbarians. The heavy human brute gluts himself with sensations and with noise.
For such appetites there was a stronger food,—I mean blows and battle. In vain they attached themselves to the soil, became tillers of the ground, in distinct communities and distinct regions, shut up in their march with their kindred and comrades, bound together, separated from the mass, inclosed by sacred landmarks, by primeval oaks on which they cut the figures of birds and beasts, by poles set up in the midst of the marsh, which whosoever removed was punished with cruel tortures. In vain these marches and gaus were grouped into states, and finally formed a half-regulated society, with assemblies and laws, under the lead of a single king; its very structure indicates the necessities to supply which it was created. They united in order to maintain peace; treaties of peace occupy their parliaments; provisions for peace are the matter of their laws. War was waged daily and everywhere; the aim of life was, not to be slain, ransomed, mutilated, pillaged, hung, and of course, if it was a woman, violated. Everywhere man was obliged to appear armed, and to be ready, with his burgh or his township, to repel marauders, who went about in bands. The animal was yet too powerful, too impetuous, too untamed. Anger and covetousness in the first place brought him upon his prey. Their history, I mean that of the Heptarchy, is like a history of “kites and crows.” They slew the Britons, or reduced them to slavery, fought the remnant of the Welsh, Irish, and Picts, massacred one another, were hewn down and cut to pieces by the Danes. In a hundred years, out of fourteen kings of Northumbria, seven were slain and six deposed. Penda of Mercia killed five kings, and, in order to take the town of Bamborough, demolished all the neighboring villages, heaped their ruins into an immense pile, sufficient to burn all the inhabitants, undertook to exterminate the Northumbrians, and perished himself by the sword at the age of eighty. Many amongst them were put to death by the thanes; one thane was burned alive; brothers slew one another treacherously. With us civilization has interposed between the desire and its fulfillment, the counteracting and softening preventive of reflection and calculation; here, the impulse is sudden, and murder and every kind of excess spring from it instantaneously. King Edwy having married Elgiva, his relation within the prohibited degrees, quitted the hall where he was drinking on the very day of his coronation, to be with her. The nobles thought themselves insulted, and immediately abbot Dunstan went himself to seek the young man. “He found the adulteress,” says the monk Osbern, “her mother, and the king together on the bed of debauch. He dragged the king thence violently, and, setting the crown upon his head, brought him back to the nobles.” Afterwards Elgiva sent men to put out Dunstan’s eyes, and then, in a revolt, saved herself and the king by hiding in the country; but the men of the North having seized her, “hamstrung her, and then subjected her to the death which she deserved.” Barbarity follows barbarity. At Bristol, at the time of the Conquest, as we are told by a historian of the time, it was the custom to buy men and women in all parts of England, and to carry them to Ireland for sale in order to make money. The buyers usually made the young women pregnant, and took them to market in that condition, in order to insure a better price. “You might have seen with sorrow long files of young people of both sexes and of the greatest beauty, bound with ropes, and daily exposed for sale…. They sold in this manner as slaves their nearest relatives, and even their own children.” And the chronicler adds that, having abandoned this practice, they “thus set an example to all the rest of England.” Would you know the manners of the highest ranks, in the family of the last king? At a feast in the king’s hall, Harold was serving Edward the Confessor with wine, when Tostig, his brother, moved by envy, seized him by the hair. They were separated. Tostig went to Hereford, where Harold had ordered a royal banquet to be prepared. There he seized his brother’s attendants, and cutting off their heads and limbs, he placed them in the vessels of wine, ale, mead, and cider, and sent a message to the king: “If you go to your farm, you will find there plenty of salt meat, but you will do well to carry some more with you.” Harold’s other brother, Sweyn, had violated the abbess Elgiva, assassinated Beorn the thane, and, being banished from the country, had turned pirate. When we regard their deeds of violence, their ferocity, their cannibal jests, we see that they were not far removed from the sea kings, or from the followers of Odin, who ate raw flesh, hung men as victims on the sacred trees of Upsala, and killed themselves to make sure of dying as they had lived, in blood. A score of times the old ferocious instinct reappears beneath the thin crust of Christianity. In the eleventh century, Siward, the great Earl of Northumberland, was afflicted with a dysentery; and feeling his death near, exclaimed, “What a shame for me not to have been permitted to die in so many battles, and to end thus by a cow’s death! At least put on my breastplate, gird on my sword, set my helmet on my head, my shield in my left hand, my battle-ax in my right, so that a stout warrior, like myself, may die as a warrior.” They did as he bade, and thus died he honorably in his armor. They had made one step, and only one, from barbarism.
UNDER this native barbarism there were noble dispositions unknown to the Roman world, which were destined to produce a better people out of its ruins. In the first place, “a certain earnestness, which leads them out of frivolous sentiments to noble ones.” From their origin in Germany this is what we find them, severe in manners, with grave inclinations and a manly dignity. They live solitary, each one near the spring or the wood which has taken his fancy. Even in villages the cottages were detached; they must have independence and free air. They had no taste for voluptuousness; love was tardy, education severe, their food simple; all the recreation they indulged in was the hunting of the aurochs, and a dance amongst naked swords. Violent intoxication and perilous wagers were their weakest points; they sought in preference not mild pleasures, but strong excitement. In everything, even in their rude and masculine instincts, they were men. Each in his own home, on his land and in his hut, was his own master, upright and free, in no wise restrained or shackled. If the commonweal received anything from him, it was because he gave it. He gave his vote in arms in all great conferences, passed judgment in the assembly, made alliances and wars on his own account, moved from place to place, showed activity and daring. The modern Englishman existed entire in this Saxon. If he bends, it is because he is quite willing to bend; he is no less capable of self-denial than of independence; self-sacrifice is not uncommon, a man cares not for his blood or his life. In Homer the warrior often gives way, and is not blamed if he flees. In the Sagas, in the Edda, he must be over-brave; in Germany the coward is drowned in the mud under a hurdle. Through all outbreaks of primitive brutality gleams obscurely the grand idea of duty, which is, the self-constraint exercised in view of some noble end. Marriage was pure amongst them, chastity instinctive. Amongst the Saxons the adulterer was punished by death; the adulteress was obliged to hang herself, or was stabbed by the knives of her companions. The wives of the Cimbrians, when they could not obtain from Marius assurance of their chastity, slew themselves with their own hands. They thought there was something sacred in a woman; they married but one, and kept faith with her. In fifteen centuries the idea of marriage is unchanged amongst them. The wife on entering her husband’s home is aware that she gives herself altogether; “that she will have but one body, one life with him; that she will have no thought, no desire beyond; that she will be the companion of his perils and labors; that she will suffer and dare as much as he, both in peace and war.” And he, like her, knows that he gives himself. Having chosen his chief, he forgets himself in him, assigns to him his own glory, serves him to the death. “He is infamous as long as he lives, who returns from the field of battle without his chief.” It was on this voluntary subordination that feudal society was based. Man in this race can accept a superior, can be capable of devotion and respect. Thrown back upon himself by the gloom and severity of his climate, he has discovered moral beauty, while others discover sensuous beauty. This kind of naked brute, who lies all day by his fireside, sluggish and dirty, always eating and drinking, whose rusty faculties cannot follow the clear and fine outlines of happily created poetic forms, catches a glimpse of the sublime in his troubled dreams. He does not see it, but simply feels it; his religion is already within, as it will be in the sixteenth century, when he will cast off the sensuous worship imported from Rome, and hallow the faith of the heart. His gods are not inclosed in walls; he has no idols. What he designates by divine names is something invisible and grand, which floats through nature, and is conceived beyond nature, a mysterious infinity which the sense cannot touch, but which “reverence alone can feel”; and when, later on, the legends define and alter this vague divination of natural powers, one idea remains at the bottom of this chaos of giant dreams, namely, that the world is a warfare, and heroism the highest good.
In the beginning, say the old Icelandic legends, there were two worlds, Niflheim the frozen, and Muspell the burning. From the falling snowflakes was born the giant Ymir. “There was in times of old, where Ymir dwelt, nor sand nor sea, nor gelid waves; earth existed not, nor heaven above; ’twas a chaotic chasm, and grass nowhere.” There was but Ymir, the horrible frozen Ocean, with his children sprung from his feet and his armpits; then their shapeless progeny, Terrors of the abyss, barren Mountains, Whirlwinds of the North, and other malevolent beings, enemies of the sun and of life; then the cow Andhumbla, born also of melting snow, brings to light, whilst licking the hoarfrost from the rocks, a man Bur, whose grandsons kill the giant Ymir. “From his flesh the earth was formed, and from his bones the hills, the heaven from the skull of that ice-cold giant, and from his blood the sea; but of his brains the heavy clouds are all created.” Then arose war between the monsters of winter and the luminous fertile gods, Odin the founder, Baldur the mild and benevolent, Thor the summer thunder, who purifies the air, and nourishes the earth with showers. Long fought the gods against the frozen Jötuna, against the dark bestial powers, the Wolf Fenrir, the great Serpent whom they drown in the sea, the treacherous Loki whom they bind to the rocks, beneath a viper whose venom drops continually on his face. Long will the heroes, who by a bloody death deserve to be placed “in the halls of Odin, and there wage a combat every day,” assist the gods in their mighty war. A day will, however, arrive when gods and men will be conquered. Then:—
| “Trembles Yggdrasill’s ash yet standing; groans that ancient tree, and the Jötun Loki is loosed. The shadows groan on the ways of Hel, until the fire of Surt has consumed the tree. Hrym steers from the east, the waters rise, the mundane snake is coiled in jötun rage. The worm beats the water, and the eagle screams; the pale of beak tears carcasses; (the ship) Naglfar is loosed. Surt from the South comes with flickering flame; shines from his sword the Val-god’s sun. The stony hills are dashed together, the giantesses totter; men tread the path of Hel, and heaven is cloven. The sun darkens, earth in ocean sinks, fall from heaven the bright stars, fire’s breath assails the all-nourishing tree, towering fire plays against heaven itself.” |
The gods perish, devoured one by one by the monsters; and the celestial legend, sad and grand, now like the life of man, bears witness to the hearts of warriors and heroes.
There is no fear of pain, no care for life; they count it as dross when the idea has seized upon them. The trembling of the nerves, the repugnance of animal instinct which starts back before wounds and death, are all lost in an irresistible determination. See how in their epic the sublime springs up amid the horrible, like a bright purple flower amid a pool of blood. Sigurd has plunged his sword into the dragon Fafnir, and at that very moment they looked on one another; and Fafnir asks, as he dies, “Who art thou? and who is thy father? and what thy kin, that thou wert so hardy as to bear weapons against me?” “A hardy heart urged me on thereto, and a strong hand and this sharp sword…. Seldom hath hardy eld a faint-heart youth.” After this triumphant eagle’s cry Sigurd cuts out the worm’s heart; but Regin, brother of Fafnir drinks blood from the wound, and falls asleep. Sigurd, who was roasting the heart, raises his finger thoughtlessly to his lips. Forthwith he understands the language of the birds. The eagles scream above him in the branches. They warn him to mistrust Regin. Sigurd cuts off the latter’s head, eats of Fafnir’s heart, drinks his blood and his brother’s. Amongst all these murders their courage and poetry grew. Sigurd has subdued Brynhild, the untamed maiden, by passing through the flaming fire; they share one couch for three nights, his naked sword betwixt them. “Nor the damsel did he kiss, nor did the Hunnish king to his arm lift her. He the blooming maid to Giuki’s son delivered,” because, according to his oath, he must send her to her betrothed Gunnar. She, setting her love upon him, “Alone she sat without, at eve of day, began aloud with herself to speak: ‘Sigurd must be mine; I must die, or that blooming youth clasp in my arms.’” But seeing him married, she brings about his death. “Laughed then Brynhild Budli’s daughter, once only, from her whole soul, when in her bed she listened to the loud lament of Giuki’s daughter.” She put on her golden corslet, pierced herself with the sword’s point, and as a last request said:—
| “Let in the plain be raised a pile so spacious, that for us all like room may be; let them burn the Han (Sigurd) on the one side of me, on the other side my household slaves, with collars splendid, two at our heads, and two hawks; let also lie between us both the keen-edged sword, as when we both one couch ascended; also five female thralls, eight male slaves of gentle birth fostered with me.” |
All were burned together; yet Gudrun the widow continued motionless by the corpse, and could not weep. The wives of the jarls came to console her, and each of them told her own sorrows, all the calamities of great devastations and the old life of barbarism.
| “Then spoke Giaflang, Giuki’s sister: ‘Lo, upon earth I live most loveless, who of five mates must see the ending, of daughters twain and three sisters, of brethren eight, and abide behind lonely.’ Then spake Herborg, Queen of Hunland: ‘Crueller tale have I to tell of my seven sons, down in the Southlands, and the eighth man, my mate, felled in the death mead. Father and mother, and four brothers on the wide sea, the winds and death played with; the billows beat on the bulwark boards. Alone must I sing o’er them, alone must I array them, alone must my hands deal with their departing, and all this was in one season’s wearing, and none was left for love or solace. Then was I bound a prey of the battle when that same season wore to its ending; as a tiring maid must I bind the shoon of the duke’s high dame, every day at dawning. From her jealous hate gat I heavy mocking, cruel lashes she laid upon me.’” |
All was in vain; no word could draw tears from those dry eyes. They were obliged to lay the bloody corpse before her, ere her tears would come. Then tears flowed through the pillow; as “the geese withal that were in the home field, the fair fowls the may owned, fell a-screaming.” She would have died, like Sigrun, on the corpse of him whom alone she had loved, if they had not deprived her of memory by a magic potion. Thus affected, she departs in order to marry Atli, king of the Huns; and yet she goes against her will, with gloomy forebodings; for murder begets murder; and her brothers, the murderers of Sigurd, having been drawn to Atli’s court, fall in their turn into a snare like that which they had themselves laid. Then Gunnar was bound, and they tried to make him deliver up the treasure. He answers with a barbarian’s laugh:—
| “‘Högni’s heart in my hand shall lie, cut bloody from the breast of the valiant chief, the king’s son, with a dull-edged knife.’ They the heart cut out from Hialli’s breast; on a dish, bleeding, laid it, and it to Gunnar bare. Then said Gunnar, lord of men: ‘Here have I the heart of the timid Hialli, unlike the heart of the bold Högni; for much it trembles as in the dish it lies; it trembles more by half while in his breast it lay.’ Högni laughed when to his heart they cut the living crest-crasher; no lament uttered he. All bleeding on a dish they laid it, and it to Gunnar bare. Calmly said Gunnar, the warrior Niflung: ‘Here have I the heart of the bold Högni, unlike the heart of the timid Hialli; for it little trembles as in the dish it lies: it trembled less while in his breast it lay. So far shalt thou, Atli! be from the eyes of men as thou wilt from the treasures be. In my power alone is all the hidden Niflung’s gold, now that Högni lives not. Ever was I wavering while we both lived; now am I so no longer, as I alone survive.’” |
It was the last insult of the self-confident man, who values neither his own life nor that of another, so that he can satiate his vengeance. They cast him into the serpent’s den, and there he died, striking his harp with his foot. But the inextinguishable flame of vengeance passed from his heart to that of his sister. Corpse after corpse fall on each other; a mighty fury hurls them open eyed to death. She killed the children she had by Atli, and one day on his return from the carnage gave him their hearts to eat, served in honey, and laughed coldly as she told him on what he had fed. “Uproar was on the benches, portentous the cry of men, noise beneath the costly hangings. The children of the Huns wept; all wept save Gudrun, who never wept or for her bear-fierce brothers, or for her dear sons, young, simple.” Judge from this heap of ruin and carnage to what excess the will is strung. There were men amongst them, Berserkers, who in battle, seized with a sort of madness, showed a sudden and superhuman strength, and ceased to feel their wounds. This is the conception of a hero as engendered by this race in its infancy. Is it not strange to see them place their happiness in battle, their beauty in death? Is there any people, Hindoo, Persian, Greek, or Gallic, which has formed so tragic a conception of life? Is there any which has peopled its infantine mind with such gloomy dreams? Is there any which has so entirely banished from its dreams the sweetness of enjoyment and the softness of pleasure? Endeavors, tenacious and mournful endeavors, an ecstasy of endeavors—such was their chosen condition. Carlyle said well that in the sombre obstinacy of an English laborer still survives the tacit rage of the Scandinavian warrior. Strife for strife’s sake—such is their pleasure. With what sadness, madness, destruction, such a disposition breaks its bonds, we shall see in Shakespeare and Byron; with what vigor and purpose it can limit and employ itself when possessed by moral ideas, we shall see in the case of the Puritans.
