United States or Trinidad and Tobago ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


And the old man took up his little lute, or as he would probably have called it, 'fidel, and began chanting to his own accompaniment. Over the camp fires Drank I with heroes, Under the Donau bank Warm in the snow-trench, Sagamen heard I there, Men of the Longbeards, Cunning and ancient, Honey-sweet-voiced.

Runes, the primitive rudely-shaped letters of the Gothic race, appear never to have been used to record their literature, which was committed to the Scalds and Sagamen, but they were reserved for inscriptions on rocks or memorial stones, or they were cut in staves of wood, as a rude calendar to assist the memory.

Morris's own; all the rest are of the dateless heritage of our race, fairy tales coming to us, now "softly breathed through the flutes of the Grecians," now told by Sagamen of Iceland. The whole performance is astonishingly equable; we move on a high tableland, where no tall peaks of Parnassus are to be climbed.

Then I thought that never before could have been one more like a king. Hereafter, when sagamen will sing of a king in some fancied story, they will surely make him like King Harald of Norway. I myself have little skill to say what he was like beyond this that never had I seen a more handsome man, nor bigger, nor stronger.

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.

Ereuthalion "was the tallest and strongest of men that I have slain!" and Nestor, being what he is, offers copious and interesting details about the armour of Ereuthalion and about its former owners. The passage is like those in which the Icelandic sagamen dwelt lovingly on the history of a good sword, or the Maoris on the old possessors of an ancient jade patu.