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Among the most celebrated Sagas of the remaining divisions are the "Sagas of Erik the Wanderer," who went in search of the Island of Immortality; "Frithiof's Saga," made the subject of Tegner's great poem; the Saga of Ragnor Lodbrok, of Dietrich of Bern, and the Volsunga Saga, relating to the ancestors of Sigurd or Siegfried, the hero of the Nibelungen Lied.
The words of these ancient sagas went singing and swinging through his brain and heart, and life seemed so wonderful and bewildering, its sorrows so great and certain, its needs so urgent and present, and heaven, alas! so far off. There came to him also, as he slowly trod the lonely moor, the most awful of all conceptions of eternity the revelation of a repentance that could undo nothing.
Being sent to the University of Copenhagen, he chose to study Icelandic in order to read the ancient sagas, English to read Shakespeare, and German to read Goethe. This studious youth was most patriotic, and the poetry of his country appealed to him especially. Grundtvig's poems were for the people, the beloved Jutland moors and Nature generally his theme.
Had they been otherwise she would not have needed our help in her tribal fights, notwithstanding the rubbish she talked about the chief, Rezu, who according to her account of him, must resemble one of the fabulous "trolls," half-human and half-ghostly evil creatures, of whom I have read in the Norse Sagas, who could only be slain by some particular hero armed with a particular weapon.
"Lor', brother! how learned in lils you are!" "Many words of Norse are to be found in our vulgar sayings, Jasper; for example in that particularly vulgar saying of ours, 'Your mother is up, there's a noble Norse word; mother, there, meaning not the female who bore us, but rage and choler, as I discovered by reading the Sagas, Jasper." "Lor', brother! how book-learned you be."
The battle sagas of the race, which have all but disappeared or have survived only as legends worked up in a later age; the few rude laws which were needed to regulate personal relationships, this was hardly civilization in the Roman sense.
Such speeches do not belong to the novice of the preceding drama, but to the original Siegfried's Tod, with its leading characters sketched on the ordinary romantic lines from the old Sagas, and not yet reminted as the original creations of Wagner's genius whose acquaintance we have made on the two previous evenings.
Valuable as the early Christian poetry of England is, we look in vain there for the humour, the large-minded simplicity of motive, the suggestive character-drawing, the swift dramatic action, which are as conspicuous in many poems in the Edda as in many of the Sagas.
Now was the meeting with Harald the King in Rogaland, in that firth which is called Hafrsfirth; and both sides had many men. This was the greatest battle that has ever been fought in Norway, and hereof most Sagas tell; for of those is ever most told, of whom the Sagas are made; and thereto came folk from all the land, and many from other lands and swarms of vikings.
Thou future poet, thou wilt call forth the vanished forms from the Sagas, thou wilt people these islands, and let us glide past these reminiscences of the olden time with the mind full of them; clearly and truly wilt thou let us glide, as we now with the power of steam fly past that firmly standing scenery, the swelling sea, rocks and reefs, the main land, and wood-grown islands.
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