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Wilhelm Grimm, in the comparative notes which he added to successive editions of the Mährchen up to 1859, drew attention to many of these parallels and especially emphasized the resemblances of different incidents to similar ones in the Teutonic myths and sagas which he and his brother were investigating.
"The wife scolded all the time, and her brow was like a storm sweeping down from the Northwest. There was no peace to be had in the house. The children might not repeat to each other the sagas their mother had taught them, nor try their part singing, nor make little doll cradles of rushes. Always they had to work, always they were scolded, always their clothes grew thinner.
"These artists, especially, became imbued with the new ideas, and instead of continuing to create for art's sake only, as had been the custom of their fathers, embellishing their houses and articles of use with their artistic creations, or spreading their poetry and music and national sagas abroad after the manner of the Minnesingers of old, they, with the others who had become affected, began to adopt new customs to build churches and temples in which to worship and preserve their arts, and sought to introduce money and taxation and all that they entail among the people in order that the new institutions might be maintained.
I could not think Political Economy 'the most exciting thing in the world, as he used to call it. Nor could I without yawning listen to more than a few lines of Mr. William Morris' interminable smooth Icelandic Sagas, which my friend, pious young socialist that he was, thought 'glorious. He had begun to write an Icelandic Saga himself, and had already achieved some hundreds of verses.
The first account of this lava-cavern is given by Olafsen, who visited it in 1750 and 1753. Ebenezer Henderson explored it in 1815, and Captain Forbes gives some account of it in his recent book on Iceland. It is mentioned in some of the Sagas, and appears to have been a refuge for robbers in the tenth century, and Sturla Sigvatson, with a large band of followers, spent some time here.
He went up into the old Bruneswald, hunted all day long through the glades where he and his merry men had done their doughty deeds, and came home in the evening to get drunk. Then he lost his sleep. He sent down to Crowland, to Leofric the priest, that he might come to him, and sing his sagas of the old heroes, that he might get rest. But Leofric sent back for answer that he would not come.
Stories are told in the Icelandic sagas of the way such persons were entrapped and put to death by the chiefs they served when they became too troublesome. It is the same "motif" as Guy of Warwick and the Saracen lady, and one of the regular Giant and Knight stories. Beside men-warriors there were "women-warriors" in the North, as Saxo explains.
Some of these stories are very similar to the older Norse Sagas, and must have sprung from traditions of a very rude and early generation. LATIN LITERATURE. The Latin learning of the Dark Ages formed a point of contact between instructed men of all countries.
The stories comprised under this and the foregoing type are nearly all märchen; but when we come to other types where sagas become more numerous, we find other animals favoured, well-nigh to the exclusion of birds. In the latter types there is no recovery of the wife when she has once abandoned her husband.
Every effort to identify him in the records of his native land has hitherto failed so that we are forced to conclude that he must have been one of those wandering sea-kings, whose fame was won abroad, and whose story, ending in defeat, yet entailing no dynastic consequences on his native land, possessed no national interest for the authors of the old Norse Sagas.
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