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Updated: June 11, 2025
There he was, waiting for us, and splashing into the foam to help Cuthbert beach the boat he for whom a thousand years ago the skalds would have made a saga The b. y. hailed him cheerfully as we sprang out upon the sand. But the Scotchman was unsmiling. "Make haste after your tools, lad," he ordered. "We'll have fine work now to get inside the cave before the turn."
It was early used as a general term for the rules and materials for versemaking, and applied in this sense to Snorri's work. From its application to this collection, the word derives a more extended use, as a general term for Norse mythology; as a convenient name to distinguish the simpler style of these anonymous narrative poems from the elaborate formality of the Skalds.
Other musicians, having found life still a grim brief welter of bloody combats and the straining of high, unyielding hearts and the falling of sure inalienable doom, have fancied themselves the successors of the Skalds, and dreamt themselves within the gray primeval North. But, in the presence of Sibelius, they seem only too evidently men of a gentler, later generation.
The Skalds were the bards and poets of the nation, a very important class of men in all communities in an early stage of civilization.
Many years ago there lived in the island of Fuhnen a noble knight, called Froda, the friend of the Skalds, who was so named because he not only offered free hospitality in his fair castle to every renowned and noble bard, but likewise strove with all his might to discover those ancient songs, and tales, and legends which, in Runic writings or elsewhere, were still to be found; he had even made some voyages to Iceland in search of them, and had fought many a hard battle with the pirates of those seas for he was also a right valiant knight, and he followed his great ancestors not only in their love of song, but also in their bold deeds of arms.
Thus, in the Norse romance now offered to the reader, the tale of Eric and his deeds would be true; but the dream of Asmund, the witchcraft of Swanhild, the incident of the speaking head, and the visions of Eric and Skallagrim, would owe their origin to the imagination of successive generations of skalds; and, finally, in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, the story would have been written down with all its supernatural additions.
"If a longer life be granted me," he said, "I will go out of this land to Christian men, and do penance for what I have committed against God. But if I die in the country of the heathen, let me have such burial as you yourselves think fittest." These are his last recorded words. And in heathen fashion he was buried, and besung by Eyvind and the Skalds, though himself a zealously Christian king.
The other Northmen from the ships joined them, and the fight raged with more fury than ever in the "death-ring," as the Skalds termed it, round the banner Land-Waster.
The cry "Deus vult!" at Clermont marks for the whole Teutonic race the final transition from the type of Alaric and Chlodovech, of Cerdic and Hrolf, to that of Godfrey and Tancred, Richard Lion-heart and Saint Louis, from the sagas and the war-songs of the northern skalds to the chivalrous verse of the troubadours, a Bertrand or a Rudel, to the epic narrative of the crusades which transfigures at moments the prose of William of Tyre or of Orderic, of Geoffrey de Vinsauf or of Joinville.
There is much in the Norse Skalds which seems to support this mythological aspect of the tale. The name of Siegfried's murderer, Hagen who is one-eyed, even as Hödur, the God of Night, who kills Baldur, the God of Light, is blind has also been adduced for this interpretation. Odin stings Brynhild into her trance with a sleeping-thorn.
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