Fritofs Saga | Page 6

of Helge's wife, who was warming an image of Balder by the fire.
He seized the ring on her hand, but it stuck fast and so he dragged her
along the floor toward the door and then the image fell into the fire.
The wife of Halfdan tried to come to her assistance, only to let the
image she was warming by the fire fall into the flames. As the image
had previously been anointed, the flames shot up at once and soon the

whole house was wrapped in fire. Fritiof, however, got the ring before
he went away. But as he walked out of the temple, said the people, he
flung a firebrand at the roof, so that all the house was wrapped in
flames. Of the violent feeling that, according to Tegnér, racked Fritiof's
soul as he went into exile or of the deep sense of guilt that latter hung
as a pall over his life there is no mention in the original. Here we touch
upon the most thoroughgoing change that Tegnér made in the character
of his hero. He invested him with a sentimentality, a disposition
towards melancholy, an accusing voice of conscience that torments his
soul until full atonement has been won, that are modern and Christian
in essence and entirely foreign to the pagan story. On this point Tegnér:
"Another peculiarity common to the people of the North is a certain
disposition for melancholy and heaviness of spirit common to all
deeper characters. Like some elegiac key-note, its sound pervades all
our old national melodies, and generally whatever is expressive in our
annals, for it is found in the depths of the nation's heart. I have
somewhere or other said of Bellman, the most national of our poets:
'And work the touch of gloom his brow o'shading, A Northern
minstrel-look, a grief in rosy red!'
For this melancholy, so far from opposing the fresh liveliness and
cheering vigor common to the nation, only gives them yet more
strength and elasticity. There is a certain kind of life-enjoying gladness
(and of this, public opinion has accused the French) which finally
reposes on frivolity; that of the North is built on seriousness. And
therefore I have also endeavored to develop in Fritiof somewhat of this
meditative gloom. His repentant regret at the unwilling temple fire, his
scrupulous fear of Balder (Canto 15) who--
'Sits in the sky, cloudy thoughts sending down, Ever veiling my spirit
in gloom',
and his longing for the final reconciliation and for calm within him, are
proofs not only of a religious craving, but also and still more of a
national tendency to sorrowfulness common to every serious mind, at
least in the North of Europe." [Tegnér, Samlade Skrifter, II, p. 394.]

Tegnér thus found it easy to justify the sentimentality that characterizes
Fritiof's love for Ingeborg, an element in Fritiofs Saga that has been
most severely condemned by the critics. To the criticism that this love
is too modern and Platonic, Tegnér correctly answers that reverence for
the sex was from the earliest times a characteristic of the German
people so that the light and coarse view that prevailed among the most
cultivated nations of antiquity was a thing quite foreign to the habits of
the North.
Ingeborg like Fritiof is idealized by the poet although here the
departure from the original is not as wide. That delicacy of sentiment
which is inseparable from Ingeborg and guides her right in the great
crisis is not, he maintains, a trait merely of the woman of ancient
Scandinavia but is inherent in each noble female, no matter when or
where she lives. And Tegnér, who surely was no realist after the
fashion of Strindberg, chooses to picture woman as she appears in her
loveliest forms.
The brooding and melancholy spirit that Tegnér had infused into the
soul of Fritiof had in a large measure come from his own life. The
depression of mind that had cast its shadows over him in the years that
saw the creation of Fritiofs Saga grew steadily worse. The period that
followed immediately upon the completion of this work was filled with
doubt and despair. The explanation for this must be found partly in the
insidious progress of a physical disease, partly to a change of place and
environment. Certain hereditary tendencies, which caused him to fear
that the light of reason would desert him, also played a part in this.
In 1824 he gave up the Greek professorship at Lund to become bishop
of the diocese of Växiö in the province of Småland, but the duties of
the new position were not congenial to him. The spiritual and
intellectual life of the diocese was on a low plane and Tegnér threw
himself with tremendous earnestness into the work of