United States or South Korea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Of this branch of it alone is there a literature, for many of the sagas are the fruit of a literary movement in Iceland anterior to the establishment of Christianity; and the historian Ari, who wrote within a century after that event, gives careful information of the earlier state of affairs. The reader of Burnt Njal sees that among the Icelanders life was short and precarious.
In lieu of a missing literature of sagas and poetry, these provincial laws give a good insight into the character, morals, customs, and culture of the heathen and early Christian times of Sweden. From the point of philology they are also of great value, besides forming the solid basis of later Swedish law.
To such a land to such a mystery sailed forth Jacques Cartier, discoverer of Canada. The Icelandic sagas contain legends of a discovery of America before Columbus. Benjamin de Costa, in his 'Pre-Columbian Discovery of America', has given translations of a number of these legends.
A far more hazardous venture has been the indicating points of similarity between the myths or tales of the Algonquins and those of the Norsemen, as set forth in the Eddas, the Sagas, and popular tales of Scandinavia.
Thorkell Gellirson was a most learned man, and was said to be of all men the best stocked of lore. Here is the end of the Saga of the men of Salmon-river-Dale. The 'Laxdale Saga' one of the great Sagas of Iceland is herewith introduced for the first time to English readers. The translation has been made by Mrs. Muriel Press.
Only in the bards of Wales and in the Scalds of the Sagas did he seem to find his kindred spirits, though it has been suggested that his complex nature took this means of informing the world that he could read both Cymric and Norse. But we must not be unkind behind the magic door and yet to be charitable to the uncharitable is surely the crown of virtue.
This trend came like a fresh current to take its place side by side with Romanticism, without, however, ousting it from the literary scene. But owing to the realistic technique and the tragic endings of much in the ancient literature Eddaic poetry and sagas alike Realism was never the novel force it generally was felt to be elsewhere. Still, it brought social criticism into our literature.
Fifty years later, more or less, for we must treat the dates of the Icelandic sagas with some reservation, we learn that a wind-tossed vessel was thrown upon a coast far away, which was called Iceland the Great.
I was at last in the land of the Sagas the land of fire, and brimstone, and boiling fountains! the land which, as a child, I had been accustomed to look upon as the ultima Thule, where men, and fish, and fire, and water were pitted against each other in everlasting strife.
Thus the Greeks in their oldest faith were tethered to the idea that they were descended from the plane tree; in the Sagas and Eddas the human race is tethered to the world-ash. Among every people of antiquity this forest faith sprang up and flourished: every race was tethered to some ancestral tree.
Word Of The Day