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But it is a natural development, and one which would inevitably take place as the popular opinion of the power of certain spirits grew, and these spirits attracted to themselves superstitions and sagas current among the people whose civilization was by the same slow movement growing too.
Among the most important were the sagas of the Norwegian kings and the family sagas. The latter tell us about the first generations of native Icelanders. They are all anonymous and the majority of them were written in the thirteenth century. Most of them contain a more or less historical core.
Though the Sagas are entrancing, both as examples of literature of which there is but little in the world and because of their living interest, they are scarcely known to the English-speaking public. This is easy to account for: it is hard to persuade the nineteenth century world to interest itself in people who lived and events that happened a thousand years ago.
There are, besides, Sagas of all imaginable fictions of heroes, saints, magicians, conquerors, and fair women. Almost every leading family of Iceland had its written saga. The Sagamen, like the Scalds, traveled over all Scandinavia, visited the courts and treasured up and transmitted to posterity the whole history of the North.
He developed and gave character to Danish literature, and is known as the "Goethe of the North." Some of his finest tragedies have been translated into English. These have a distinctly northern ring about them, dealing as they do with the legends and sagas of the Scandinavian people.
Charles Manners in 1903 for an English opera, and Mr. Nicholas Gatty's 'Greysteel, a very able and musicianly setting of an episode from one of the Norse sagas, which was produced at Sheffield in 1906. It is difficult to be sanguine as to the prospects of English opera.
Richard's eye kindled, and his words, as he spoke the old Norse language, flowed into the sort of wild verse in which the Sagas or legendary songs were composed, and which, perhaps, he was unconsciously repeating. Duke William looked grave.
Finn, you will remember, is the central figure of the Fenian Cycle of sagas; he was the father of Oisin and the leader of the Fenians; next to Cuculain, he is the chiefest hero of Irish legend. I quote this story from M. de Jubainville.* * But without word-for-word exactitude; hence the absence of inverted commas. The same remark applies to all the stories quoted, or nearly quoted, from Mr.
To many of the domestic sagas, or histories of ancient Icelandic families, from the character of the events which it describes and also from the manner in which it describes them, the "History of the Gwedir Family," by Sir John Wynne, bears a striking resemblance. After giving the woman sixpence I left the fall, and proceeded on my way.
Ling, who also belonged to this society, was a fervent admirer of the Eddas and Sagas, of the Scandinavian myths and folk-lore. Tegnér, despite his classical education and Hellenic turn of mind, was an ardent Norseman in feeling and instinct. "Go to Greece for beauty of form," he would say, "but to the North for depth of feeling and thought."
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