Eric Brighteyes | Page 4

foot that ended

only with the death by violence of a majority of the actors in the drama
and of large numbers of their adherents. In the course of the feud, men
of heroic strength and mould would come to the front and perform
deeds worthy of the iron age which bore them. Women also would help
to fashion the tale, for good or ill, according to their natural gifts and
characters. At last the tragedy was covered up by death and time,
leaving only a few dinted shields and haunted cairns to tell of those
who had played its leading parts.
But its fame lived on in the minds of men. From generation to
generation skalds wandered through the winter snows, much as Homer
may have wandered in his day across the Grecian vales and mountains,
to find a welcome at every stead, because of the old-time story they had
to tell. Here, night after night, they would sit in the ingle and while
away the weariness of the dayless dark with histories of the times when
men carried their lives in their hands, and thought them well lost if
there might be a song in the ears of folk to come. To alter the tale was
one of the greatest of crimes: the skald must repeat it as it came to him;
but by degrees undoubtedly the sagas did suffer alteration. The facts
remained the same indeed, but around them gathered a mist of
miraculous occurrences and legends. To take a single instance: the
account of the burning of Bergthorsknoll in the Njal Saga is not only a
piece of descriptive writing that for vivid, simple force and insight is
scarcely to be matched out of Homer and the Bible, it is also obviously
true. We feel as we read, that no man could have invented that story,
though some great skald threw it into shape. That the tale is true, the
writer of "Eric" can testify, for, saga in hand, he has followed every act
of the drama on its very site. There he who digs beneath the surface of
the lonely mound that looks across plain and sea to Westman Isles may
still find traces of the burning, and see what appears to be the black
sand with which the hands of Bergthora and her women strewed the
earthen floor some nine hundred years ago, and even the greasy and
clotted remains of the whey that they threw upon the flame to quench it.
He may discover the places where Fosi drew up his men, where
Skarphedinn died, singing while his legs were burnt from off him,
where Kari leapt from the flaming ruin, and the dell in which he laid
down to rest--at every step, in short, the truth of the narrative becomes

more obvious. And yet the tale has been added to, for, unless we may
believe that some human beings are gifted with second sight, we cannot
accept as true the prophetic vision that came to Runolf, Thorstein's son;
or that of Njal who, on the evening of the onslaught, like
Theoclymenus in the Odyssey, saw the whole board and the meats
upon it "one gore of blood."
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.
The tendency of the human mind--and more especially of the Norse
mind --is to supply uncommon and extraordinary reasons for actions
and facts that are to be amply accounted for by the working of natural
forces. Swanhild would have needed no "familiar" to instruct her in her
evil schemes; Eric would have wanted no love-draught to bring about
his overthrow. Our common experience of mankind as it is, in
opposition to mankind as we fable it to be, is sufficient to teach us that
the passion of one and the human weakness of the other would suffice
to these ends. The natural magic, the beauty and inherent power of such
a woman as Swanhild, are things more forceful than any spell
magicians have invented, or any demon they are supposed to have
summoned to their aid. But no saga would be complete without the
intervention of such extraneous forces: the need of them was always
felt, in order to throw up the acts of heroes and heroines, and to invest
their persons with an added importance. Even Homer felt this need, and
did not scruple to introduce not only second sight, but gods