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Moreover, the Sagas are undoubtedly difficult reading. The archaic nature of the work, even in a translation; the multitude of its actors; the Norse sagaman's habit of interweaving endless side-plots, and the persistence with which he introduces the genealogy and adventures of the ancestors of every unimportant character, are none of them to the taste of the modern reader.
I propose, therefore, to deal with a few of the most interesting sagas relative to the Fairy Mythology strictly so called.
The ancient sagas tell us that there was little love between Knud and Harald; and that Gorm, fearing ill results from this, swore an oath that he would put to death any one who attempted to kill his first-born son, or who should even tell him that Knud had died.
Tylor's Primitive Culture is itself a store-house of other examples, to which more may easily be added. For example, there is the old and savage belief in a 'sending'. The medicine-man, or medium, or witch, can despatch a conscious, visible, and intelligent agent, non-normal, to do his bidding at a distance. This belief is often illustrated in the Scandinavian sagas.
Thou knows a good dinner deserves a pipe, and a bad one demands it." Then they went into the garden and talked of the flowers and the young vegetables, and said not a word of Edinburgh and the Sagas that the winds could catch and carry round to human folk for clash and gossip. And when the pipe was out, Adam said: "Now I am going into the town.
Thus there sprang up a great number of narratives of spiritual beings and events, and the national treasures of legends and sagas had their origin in spiritual experiences of this kind. For the dim clairvoyance lasted on, in many people, into times not far removed from the present.
For not only have we the complete totemistic form, as among the Dyaks and the tribes of the Gold Coast; but we find the superstition fading through the goddess Derceto into modern sagas of the supernatural mother of a family, who to her sometimes owe extraordinary powers, and over whose fate she continually watches. Here, then, our study of this beautiful myth must close.
The robbers in "Gil Blas" had their lair also in one. One of the finest and most pathetic of Icelandic Sagas is the history of Grettir the Outlaw, who was born in 997, and killed by his enemies in 1031. He spent nineteen years in outlawry in Iceland, and outlawry there in that terrible climate, with no house to cover his head, would seem an ordeal impossible for human endurance.
After that the children slept warm and were at peace; for now, when they told the sagas their mother had taught them, or tried their part songs as they sat together on their bench, the stepmother was silent. For she feared to chide, lest she should wake at night, not knowing why, and see the mother's wraith."
At every turn, Odin is at hand to help him, which tends to efface the older and truer picture of the hero with all the fates against him; such heroes, found again and again in the historic sagas, more truly represent the heathen heroic age and that belief in the selfishness and caprice of the Gods on which the whole idea of sacrifice rests.
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