The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature | Page 3

governed them." Were Warton writing his history to-day, he would have to account for later eras as well as for the Elizabethan, and the method would be the same. How far the Old Norse literature has helped to form these later eras it is not easy to say, but the contributions may be counted up, and their literary value noted. These are the commission of the present essay. When the record is finished, we shall be in possession of information that may account for certain considerable writers of our day, and certain tendencies of thought.

CONTENTS.
Prefatory Note
Introductory
I. The Body of Old Norse Literature
II. Through the Medium of Latin Thomas Gray The Sources of Gray's Knowledge Sir William Temple George Hickes Thomas Percy Thomas Warton Drake and Mathias Cottle and Herbert Walter Scott
III. From the Sources Themselves Richard Cleasby Thomas Carlyle Samuel Laing Longfellow and Lowell Matthew Arnold George Webbe Dasent Charles Kingsley Edmund Gosse
IV. By the Hand of the Master William Morris' works " " " 1 " " " 2 " " " 3 " " " 4 " " " 5 " " " 6 " " " 7 " " " 8
V. In the Latter Days Echoes of Iceland in Later Poets Recent Translations

I.
THE BODY OF OLD NORSE LITERATURE.
First, let us understand what the Old Norse literature was that has been sending out this constantly increasing influence into the world of poetry.
It was in the last four decades of the ninth century of our era that Norsemen began to leave their own country and set up new homes in Iceland. The sixty years ending with 930 A.D. were devoted to taking up the land, and the hundred years that ensued after that date were devoted to quarreling about that land. These quarrels were the origin of the Icelandic family sagas. The year 1000 brought Christianity to the island, and the period from 1030 to 1120 were years of peace in which stories of the former time passed from mouth to mouth. The next century saw these stories take written form, and the period from 1220 to 1260 was the golden age of this literature. In 1264, Iceland passed under the rule of Norway, and a decline of literature began, extending until 1400, the end of literary production in Iceland. In the main, the authors of Iceland are unknown[2].
There are several well-marked periods, therefore, in Icelandic literary production. The earliest was devoted to poetry, Icelandic being no different from most other languages in the precedence of that form. Before the settlement of Iceland, the Norse lands were acquainted with songs about gods and champions, written in a simple verse form. The first settlers wrote down some of these, and forgot others. In the _Codex Regius_, preserved in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, we have a collection of these songs. This material was published in the seventeenth century as the _S?mundar Edda_, and came to be known as the Elder or Poetic Edda. Both titles are misnomers, for S?mund had nothing to do with the making of the book, and Edda is a name belonging to a book of later date and different purpose.
This work--not a product of the soil as folk-songs are--is the fountain head of Old Norse mythology, and of Old Norse heroic legends. _V?lusp��_ and _H��vam��l_ are in this collection, and other songs that tell of Odin and Baldur and Loki. The Helgi poems and the V?lsung poems in their earliest forms are also here.
A second class of poetry in this ancient literature is that called "Skaldic." Some of this deals with mythical material, and some with historical material. A few of the skalds are known to us by name, because their lives were written down in later sagas. Egill Skallagr��msson, known to all readers of English and Scotch antiquities, Eyvind Sk��ldaspillir and Sigvat are of this group.
Poetic material that is very rich is found in Snorri Sturluson's work on Old Norse poetics, entitled _The Edda_, and often referred to as the Younger or Prose Edda.
More valuable than the poetry is the prose of this literature, especially the Sagas. The saga is a prose epic, characteristic of the Norse countries. It records the life of a hero, told according to fixed rules. As we have said, the sagas were based upon careers run in Iceland's stormy time. They are both mythical and historical. In the mythical group are, among others, the _V?lsunga Saga_, the _Hervarar Saga_, _Friethj��fs Saga_ and _Ragnar Loebr��ks Saga_. In the historical group, the flowering time of which was 1200-1270, we find, for example, _Egils Saga_, _Eyrbyggja Saga_, _Laxd?la Saga_, _Grettis Saga_, _Nj��ls Saga_. A branch of the historic sagas is the Kings' Sagas, in which we find _Heimskringla_, the _Saga of Olaf Tryggvason_, the _Flatey Book_, and others.
This sketch does not pretend to