The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature | Page 6

Son of Fingal_. [By Hugh Blair.] London. 1763.
=1770=. Percy. _Northern Antiquities: or a description of the Manners,
Customs, Religion and Laws of the ancient_ _Danes, and other
Northern Nations; including these of our own Saxon Ancestors. With a
translation of the Edda or System of Runic Mythology, and other
Pieces from the Ancient Icelandic Tongue. Translated from M. Mallet's
Introduction à l'Histoire de Dannemarc_. London. 1770.
=1774=. Warton. The History of English Poetry. By Thomas Warton.
London. 1774-81.
In this book the prefatory essay entitled "On the Origin of Romantic
Fiction in Europe" is significant. It is treated at length later on.
SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE (1628-1699).
From the above list it appears that the earliest mention in the English
language of Icelandic literature was Sir William Temple's. The two
essays noted above have many references to Northern customs and
songs. Macaulay's praise of Temple's style is well deserved, and the
slighting remarks about the matter do not apply to the passages in
evidence here. Temple's acknowledgments to Wormius indicate the
source of his information, and it is a commentary upon the exactness of
the antiquarian's knowledge that so many of the statements in Temple's
essays are perfectly good to-day. Of course the terms "Runic" and
"Gothic" were misused, but so were they a century later. Odin is "the
first and great hero of the western Scythians; he led a mighty swarm of
the Getes, under the name of Goths, from the Asiatic Scythia into the
farthest northwest parts of Europe; he seated and spread his kingdom
round the whole Baltic sea, and over all the islands in it, and extended
it westward to the ocean and southward to the Elve."[6] Temple places
Odin's expedition at two thousand years before his own time, but he
gets many other facts right. Take this summing up of the old Norse
belief as an example:
"An opinion was fixed and general among them, that death was but the
entrance into another life; that all men who lived lazy and inactive lives,
and died natural deaths, by sickness, or by age, went into vast caves
under ground, all dark and miry, full of noisom creatures, usual in such

places, and there forever grovelled in endless stench and misery. On the
contrary, all who gave themselves to warlike actions and enterprises, to
the conquests of their neighbors, and slaughters of enemies, and died in
battle, or of violent deaths upon bold adventures or resolutions, they
went immediately to the vast hall or palace of Odin, their god of war,
who eternally kept open house for all such guests, where they were
entertained at infinite tables, in perpetual feasts and mirth, carousing
every man in bowls made of the skulls of their enemies they had slain,
according to which numbers, every one in these mansions of pleasure
was the most honoured and the best entertained."[7]
Thus before Gray was born, Temple had written intelligently in English
of the salient features of the Old Norse mythology. Later in the same
essay, he recognized that some of the civil and political procedures of
his country were traceable to the Northmen, and, what is more to our
immediate purpose, he recognized the poetic value of Old Norse song.
On p. 358 occurs this paragraph:
"I am deceived, if in this sonnet (two stanzas of 'Regner Lodbrog'), and
a following ode of Scallogrim there be not a vein truly poetical, and in
its kind Pindaric, taking it with the allowance of the different climates,
fashions, opinions, and languages of such distant countries."
Temple certainly had no knowledge of Old Norse, and yet, in 1679, he
could write so of a poem which he had to read through the Latin. Sir
William had a wide knowledge and a fine appreciation of literature, and
an enthusiasm for its dissemination. He takes evident delight in telling
the fact that princes and kings of the olden time did high honor to bards.
He regrets that classic culture was snuffed out by a barbarous people,
but he rejoices that a new kind came to take its place. "Some of it
wanted not the true spirit of poetry in some degree, or that natural
inspiration which has been said to arise from some spark of poetical
fire wherewith particular men are born; and such as it was, it served the
turn, not only to please, but even to charm, the ignorant and barbarous
vulgar, where it was in use."[8]
It is proverbial that music hath charms to soothe the savage breast. That
savage music charms cultivated minds is not proverbial, but it is
nevertheless true. Here is Sir William Temple, scion of a cultured race,
bearing witness to the fact, and here is Gray, a life-long dweller in a
staid English university, endorsing it a half century