The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory

By George Saintsbury

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CHAPTER VIII.

ICELANDIC AND PROVENÇAL.

Resemblances. Contrasts. Icelandic literature of this time mainly prose. Difficulties with it. The Saga. Its insularity of manner. Of scenery and character. Fact and fiction in the sagas. Classes and authorship of them. The five greater sagas. Njala. Laxdæla. Eyrbyggja. Egla. Grettla. Its critics. Merits of it. The parting of Asdis and her sons. Great passages of the sagas. Style. Provençal mainly lyric. Origin of this lyric. Forms. Many men, one mind. Example of rhyme-schemes. Provençal poetry not great. But extraordinarily pedagogic. Though not directly on English. Some troubadours. Criticism of Provençal

These may seem at first to be no sufficient reason for treating together two such literatures as those named in the title of this chapter. But the connection, both of likeness and unlikeness, between them is too tempting to the student of comparative literature, and too useful in such a comparative survey of literature as that which we are here undertaking, to be mistaken or refused. Both attaining, thanks to very different causes, an extraordinarily early maturity, completely worked themselves out in an[Pg 334] extraordinarily short time. Neither had, so far as we know, the least assistance from antecedent vernacular models. Each achieved an extraordinary perfection and intensity, Icelandic in spirit, Provençal in form.

And their differences are no less fascinating, since they start from this very diversity of similar perfection. Icelandic, after a brief period of copying French and other languages, practically died out as a language producing literature; and, perhaps for that very reason, maintained itself in all the more continuity as a spoken language. Even its daughter—or at least successor—Norse tongues produced nothing worthy to take up the tradition of the Sagas and the Poems. It influenced (till the late and purely literary revival of it biassed to some extent the beginnings of the later Romantic revival in Western Europe, a hundred and fifty years ago) nothing and nobody. It was as isolated as its own island. To Provençal, on the other hand, though its own actual producing-time was about as brief, belongs the schooling, to no small extent, of the whole literature of Europe. Directly, it taught the trouvères of Northern France and the poets of Spain and Italy prosody, and a certain amount of poetical style and tone; indirectly, or directly through France, it influenced England and Germany. It started, indeed, none of the greater poetical kinds except lyric, and lyric is the true grass of Parnassus—it springs up naturally everywhere; but it started the form of all, or at least was the first to adapt from Latin a prosody suitable to all.

The most obvious, though not the least interesting,[Pg 335] points of likeness in unlikeness have been left to the last. The contrasts between the hawthorn and nightingale of Provence, her "winds heavy with the rose," and the grey firths, the ice- and foam-fretted skerries of Iceland; between the remains of Roman luxury pushed to more than Roman effeminacy in the one, and the rough Germanic virtue exasperated to sheer ferocity in the other,—are almost too glaring for anything but a schoolboy's or a rhetorician's essay. Yet they are reproduced with an incredible—a "copy-book"—fidelity in the literatures. The insistence of experts and enthusiasts on the law-abiding character of the sagas has naturally met with some surprise from readers of these endless private wars, and burnings, and "heath-slayings," these feuds where blood flows like water, to be compensated by fines as regular as a water-rate, these methodical assassinations, in which it is not in the least discreditable to heroes to mob heroes as brave as themselves to death by numbers, in which nobody dreams of measuring swords, or avoiding vantage of any kind. Yet the enthusiastic experts are not wrong. Whatever outrages the Icelander may commit, he always has the law—an eccentric, unmodern, conventional law, but a real and recognised one—before his eyes, and respects it in principle, however much he may sometimes violate it in practice. To the Provençal, on the other hand, law, as such, is a nuisance. He will violate it, so to speak, on principle—less because the particular violation has a particular temptation for him than because the thing is forbidden. The Icelander may covet and take an[Pg 336]other man's wife, but it is to make her his own. The Provençal will hardly fall, and will never stay, in love with any one who is not another's. In savagery there is not so very much to choose: it requires a calculus, not of morals but of manners, to distinguish accurately between carving the blood-eagle on your enemy and serving up your rival's heart as a dish to his mistress. In passion also there may be less difference than the extreme advocates of both sides would maintain. But in all things external the contrast, the hackneyed contrast, of South and North never could have been exhibited with a more artistic completeness, never has been exhibited with a completeness so artistic. And these two contrasting parts were played at the very same time at the two ends of Europe. In the very same years when the domestic histories and tragedies (there were few comedies) of Iceland were being spun into the five great sagas and the fifty smaller ones, the fainter, the more formal, but the not less peculiar music of the gracious long-drawn Provençal love-song was sounding under the vines and olives of Languedoc. The very Icelanders who sailed to Constantinople in the intervals of making the subjects of these sagas, and sometimes of composing them, must not seldom have passed or landed on the coasts where cansos and tensos, lai and sirvente, were being woven, and have listened to them as the Ulyssean mariners listened to the songs of the sirens.

It is not, of course, true that Provençal only sings of love and Icelandic only of war. There is a fair[Pg 337] amount of love in the Northern literature and a fair amount of fighting in the Southern. And it is not true that Icelandic literature is wholly prose, Provençal wholly poetry. But it is true that Provençal prose plays an extremely small part in Provençal literature, and that Icelandic poetry plays, in larger minority, yet still a minor part in Icelandic. It so happens, too, that in this volume we are almost wholly concerned with Icelandic prose, and that we shall not find it necessary to say much, if anything, about Provençal that is not in verse. It is distinctly curious how much later, cœteris paribus, the Romance tongues are than the Teutonic in attaining facilities of prose expression. But there is no reason for believing that even the Teutonic tongues falsified the general law that poetry comes before prose. And certainly this was the case with Icelandic—so much so that, uncertain as are the actual dates, it seems better to relinquish the Iceland of poetry to the first volume of this series, where it can be handled in connection with that Anglo-Saxon verse which it so much resembles. The more characteristic Eddaic poems—that is to say, the most characteristic parts of Icelandic poetry—must date from Heathen times, or from the first conflicts of Christianity with Heathenism in Iceland; and this leaves them far behind us.[160] On the other hand, the work which we have in Provençal before the extreme end of the eleventh century is not finished literature. It has linguistic interest, the interest of origins, but no more.

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Although there is practically as little doubt about the antiquity of Icelandic literature[161] as about its interest, there is unusual room for guesswork as to the exact dates of the documents which compose it. Writing seems to have been introduced into Iceland late; and it is not the opinion of scholars who combine learning with patriotism that many, if any, of the actual MSS. date further back than the thirteenth century; while the actual composition of the oldest that we have is not put earlier than the twelfth, and rather its later than its earlier part. Moreover, though Icelanders were during this period, and indeed from the very first settlement of the island, constantly in foreign countries and at foreign courts—though as Vikings or Varangians, as merchants or merely travelling adventurers, they were to be found all over Europe, from Dublin to Constantinople—yet, on the other hand, few or no foreigners visited Iceland, and it figures hardly at all in the literary and historical records of the Continent or even of the British Isles, with which[Pg 339] it naturally had most correspondence. We are therefore almost entirely devoid of those side-lights which are so invaluable in general literary history, while yet again we have no borrowings from Icelandic literature by any other to tell us the date of the borrowed matter. At the end of our present time, and still more a little later, Charlemagne and Arthur and the romances of antiquity make their appearance in Icelandic; but nothing Icelandic makes its appearance elsewhere. For it is not to be supposed for one moment that the Nibelungenlied, for instance, is the work of men who wrote with the Volsunga-Saga or the Gudrun lays before them, any more than the Grettis Saga is made up out of Beowulf. These things are mere examples of the successive refashionings of traditions and stories common to the race in different centuries, manners, and tongues. Except as to the bare fact of community of origin they help us little or not at all.

The reasons why Icelandic literature, in its most peculiar and interesting form of the saga, did not penetrate abroad are clear enough; and the remoteness and want of school-education in the island itself are by no means the most powerful of them. The very thing which is most characteristic of them, and which in these later times constitutes their greatest charm, must have been against them in their own time. For the stories which ran like an epidemic through Europe in the years immediately before and immediately after 1200, though they might be in some cases concerned directly with national heroes, appealed without exception to[Pg 340] international and generally human interests. The slightest education, or the slightest hearing of persons educated, sufficed to teach every one that Alexander and Cæsar were great conquerors, that the Story of Troy (the exact truth of which was never doubted) had been famous for hundreds and almost thousands of years. Charlemagne had had directly to do with the greater part of Europe in peace or war, and the struggle with the Saracens was of old and universal interest, freshened by the Crusades. The Arthurian story received from fiction, if not from history, an almost equally wide bearing; and was, besides, knitted to religion—the one universal interest of the time—by its connection with the Graal. All Europe, yet again, had joined in the Crusades, and the stories brought by the crusaders directly or indirectly from the East were in the same way common property.

But saga-literature had nothing of this appeal. It was as indifferently and almost superciliously insular as the English country-house novel itself, and may have produced in some of the very few foreigners who can ever have known it originally, something of the same feelings of wrath which we have seen excited by the English country-house novel in our own day. The heroes were not, according to the general ideas of mediæval Europe, either great chiefs or accomplished knights; the heroines were the very reverse of those damsels "with mild mood" (as the catch-word in the English romances has it) whom the general Middle Age liked or thought it liked. An intricate, intensely local,[Pg 341] and (away from the locality) not seldom shocking system of law and public morality pervaded the whole. The supernatural element, though in itself it might have been an attraction, was of a cast quite different from the superstitions of the South, or even of the Centre; and the Christian element, which was to the Middle Ages the very air they breathed, was either absent altogether or present in an artificial, uneasy, and scanty fashion.

Yet all these things were of less importance than another, which is, after all, the great differentia, the abiding quality, of the sagas. In the literature of the rest of Europe, and especially in the central and everywhere radiating literature of France, there were sometimes local and almost parochial touches—sometimes unimportant heroes, not seldom savage heroines, frequently quaint bits of exotic supernaturalism. But all this was subdued to a kind of common literary handling, a "dis-realising" process which made them universally acceptable. The personal element, too, was conspicuously absent—the generic character is always uppermost. Charlemagne was a real person, and not a few of the incidents with which he was connected in the chansons were real events; but he and they have become mere stuff of romance as we see them in these poems. Whether Arthur was a real person or not, the same to an even greater extent is true of him. The kings and their knights appealed to Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians alike, because they were not obtrusively English, German, Italian,[Pg 342] or French. But the sagas are from the first and to the (at least genuine) last nothing if not national, domestic, and personal. The grim country of ice and fire, of jökul and skerry, the massive timber homesteads, the horse-fights and the Viking voyages, the spinning-wheel and the salting-tub, are with us everywhere; and yet there is an almost startling individuality, for all the sameness of massacre and chicanery, of wedding and divorce, which characterises the circumstances. Gunnar is not distinguished from Grettir merely by their adventures; there is no need of labels on the lovers of Gudrun; Steingerd in Kormak's Saga and Hallgerd in Njal's, are each something much more than types of the woman with bad blood and the woman with blood that is only light and hot. And to the unsophisticated reader and hearer, as many examples might be adduced to show, this personality, the highest excellence of literature to the sophisticated scholar, is rather a hindrance than a help. He has not proved the ways and the persons; and he likes what he has proved.

To us, on the contrary, the characteristics of saga-work, at which a glance has been made in the foregoing paragraphs, form its principal charm, a charm reinforced by the fact of its extraordinary difference from almost all other literature except (in some points) that of the Homeric poems. Although there is a good deal of common form in the sagas, though outlawry and divorce, the quibbles of the Thing and the violence of ambush or holmgang, recur to and beyond the utmost limits of permitted repetition, the[Pg 343] unfamiliarity of the setting atones for its monotony, and the individuality of the personages themselves very generally prevents that monotony from being even felt. The stories are never tame; and, what is more remarkable, they seldom or never have the mere extravagance which in mediæval, at least as often as in other, writing, plays Scylla to the Charybdis of tameness. Moreover, they have, as no other division of mediæval romance has in anything like the same measure, the advantage of the presence of interesting characters of both sexes. Only the Arthurian story can approach them here, and that leaves still an element of gracious shadowiness about the heroines, if not the heroes. The Icelandic heroine has nothing shadowy about her. Her weakest point is the want of delicacy—not in a finicking sense by any means—which a rough promiscuous life to begin with, and the extreme facility and frequency of divorce on the other, necessarily brought about. But she is always, as the French have it, a "person"—when she is good, a person altogether of the best; even when she is bad, a person seldom other than striking and often charming.

There is, of course, Icelandic literature in prose outside of the sagas—the great law code (Gragas or Greygoose), religious books in the usual plenty, scientific books of a kind, and others. But the saga, the story, was so emphatically the natural mould into which Icelandic literary impulse threw itself, that it is even more difficult here than elsewhere at the time to separate story and his[Pg 344]tory, fiction and fact. Indeed the stricter critics would, I believe, maintain that every saga which deserves the name is actually founded on fact: the Laxdæla no less than the Heimskringla,[162] the story of Kormak no less than that of Jarl Rognwald. A merely and wholly invented story (they hold, and perhaps rightly) would have been repugnant to that extraordinarily business-like spirit which has left us, by the side of the earlier songs and later sagas, containing not a little of the most poetical matter of the whole world, the Landnama Bok of Ari Frodi, a Domesday-book turned into literature, which is indeed older than our time, but which forms a sort of commentary and companion to the whole of the sagas by anticipation or otherwise.

Difficult as it may be to draw the line between intended history, which was always strongly "romanced" in form, if not intentionally in fact, and that very peculiar product of Icelandic genius the saga proper, in which the original domestic record has been, so to speak, "super-romanced" into a work of art, it is still possible to see it, if not to draw it, between the Heimskringla, the[Pg 345] story of the Kings of Norway (made English after some earlier versions by Messrs Magnusson and Morris, and abstracted, as genius can abstract, by Carlyle), the Orkneyinga and Færeyinga Sagas (the tales of these outlying islands before the former came under Norwegian rule), the curious conglomerate known as the Sturlunga Saga on the one hand, and the greater and lesser sagas proper on the other. The former are set down to the two great writers Snorri and Sturla, the one the chief literary light of Iceland in the first half of the thirteenth century, the other the chief light in the second, both of the same family, and with Ari Frodi the three greatest of the certainly known men of letters of the island. Conjecture has naturally run riot as to the part which either Snorri or Sturla may have taken in the sagas not directly attributed to either, but most probably dating from their time, as well as with the personalities of the unknown or little known poets and prosemen who shaped the older stories at about the same period. But to the historian who takes delight in literature, and does not care very much who made it provided it is made well, what has been called "the singular silence" as to authorship which runs through the whole of the early Icelandic literature is rather a blessing than otherwise. It frees him from those biographical inquiries which always run the risk of drawing nigh to gossip, and it enables him to concentrate attention on the literature itself.

This literature is undoubtedly best exemplified, as we should expect, in the wholly anonymous and[Pg 346] only indirectly historical sagas of the second division, though it is fair to say that there is nothing here much finer than such things as the famous last fight of King Olaf in the Heimskringla, or as many other incidents and episodes in the history-books. Only the hands of the writers were freer in the others: and complete freedom—at least from all but the laws of art—is never a more "nobil thing" than it is to the literary artist.

There seems no reason to quarrel with the classification which divides the sagas proper into two classes, greater and lesser, and assigns position in the first to five only—the Saga of Burnt Njal, that of the dwellers in Laxdale, the Eyrbyggja, Egil's Saga, and the Saga of Grettir the Strong. It is very unlucky that the reception extended by the English public to the publications of Mr Vigfusson and Professor York Powell, mentioned in a note above, did not encourage the editors to proceed to an edition at least of these five sagas together, which might, according to estimate, have been done in three volumes, two more containing all the small ones. Meanwhile Njala—the great sagas are all known by familiar diminutives of this kind—is accessible in English in the late Sir G.W. Dasent's well-known translation;[163] the Eyrbyggja and Egla in abstracts by Sir Walter Scott[164] and Mr Gosse;[165] Laxdæla has been treated as it deserves[Pg 347] in the longest and nearly the finest section of Mr Morris's Earthly Paradise;[166] and the same writer with Dr Magnusson has given a literal translation of Grettla.[167]

The lesser sagas of the same group are some thirty in number, the best known or the most accessible being those of Gunnlaug Serpent's-Tongue, often printed in the original,[168] very short, very characteristic, and translated by the same hands as Grettla;[169] Viga Glum, translated by Sir Edmund Head;[170] Gisli the Outlaw (Dasent);[171] Howard or Havard the Halt, The Banded Men, and Hen Thorir (Morris and Magnusson)[172]; Kormak, said to be the oldest, and certainly one of the most interesting.[173]

So much of the interest of a saga depends on small points constantly varied and renewed, that only pretty full abstracts of the contents of one can give much idea of them. On the other hand, the attentive reader of a single saga can usually give a very good guess at the general nature of any other from a brief description of it, though he must of course miss the individual touches of poetry and of character. And though I speak with the humility[Pg 348] of one who does not pretend to Icelandic scholarship, I think that translations are here less inadequate than in almost any other language, the attraction of the matter being so much greater than that of the form. For those who will not take the slight trouble to read Dasent's Njala, or Morris and Magnusson's Grettla, the next best idea attainable is perhaps from Sir Walter Scott's abstract of the Eyrbyggja or Mr Blackwell's of the Kormak's Saga, or Mr Gosse's of Egla. Njal's Saga deals with the friendship between the warrior Gunnar and the lawyer Njal, which, principally owing to the black-heartedness of Gunnar's wife Hallgerd, brings destruction on both, Njal and almost his whole family being burnt as the crowning point, but by no means the end, of an intricate series of reciprocal murders. For the blood-feuds of Iceland were as merciless as those of Corsica, with the complication—thoroughly Northern and not in the least Southern—of a most elaborate, though not entirely impartial, system of judicial inquiries and compensations, either by fine or exile. To be outlawed for murder, either in casual affray or in deliberate attack, was almost as regular a part of an Icelandic gentleman's avocations from his home and daily life as a journey on viking or trading intent, and was often combined with one or both. But outlawry and fine by no means closed the incident invariably, though they sometimes did so far as the feud was concerned: and there is hardly one saga which does not mainly or partly turn on a tangle of outrages and inquests.

As Njala is the most complete and dramatic of the[Pg 349] sagas where love has no very prominent part except in the Helen-like dangerousness, if not exactly Helen-like charm, of Hallgerd, of whom it might certainly be said that

so Laxdæla is the chief of those in which love figures, though on the male side at least there is no lover that interests us as much as the hapless, reckless poet Kormak, or as Gunnlaug Serpent's-Tongue. The Earthly Paradise should have made familiar to all the quarrel or, if hardly quarrel, feud between the cousins Kiartan and Bodli, or Bolli, owing to the fatal fascinations of Gudrun. Gudrun is less repulsive than Hallgerd, but she cannot be said to be entirely free from the drawbacks which, as above suggested, are apt to be found in the Icelandic heroine. It is more difficult to sentiment, if not to morality, to pardon four husbands than many times four lovers, and the only persons with whom Gudrun's relations are wholly agreeable is Kiartan, who was not her husband. But the pathos of the story, its artful unwinding, and the famous utterance of the aged heroine—

which is almost literally from the Icelandic, redeem anything unsympathetic in the narrative: and the figure of Bodli, a strange mixture of honour and faithlessness to the friend he loves and murders, is[Pg 350] one of the most striking among the thralls of Venus in literature.

The defect of the Eyrbyggja Saga is its want of any central interest; for it is the history not of a person, nor even of one single family, but of a whole Icelandic district with its inhabitants from the settlement onwards. Its attraction, therefore, lies rather in episodes—the rivalry of the sorceresses Katla and Geirrid; the circumventing of the (in this case rather sinned against than sinning) bersarks Hall and Leikner; the very curious ghost-stories; and the artful ambition of Snorri the Godi. Still, to make an attractive legend of a sort of "county history" may be regarded as a rare triumph, and the saga is all the more important because it shows, almost better than any other, the real motive of nearly all these stories—that they are real chansons de geste, family legends, with a greater vividness and individuality than the French genius could then impart, though presented more roughly.

The Saga of Egil Skallagrimsson, again, shifts its special points of attraction. It is the history partly of the family of Skallagrim, but chiefly of his son Egil, in opposition to Harald Harfagr and his son Eric Blood-axe, of Egil's wars and exploits in England and elsewhere, of his service to King Athelstan at Brunanburh, of the faithfulness of his friend Arinbiorn, and the hero's consequent rescue from the danger in which he had thrust himself by seeking his enemy King Eric at York, of his son's shipwreck and Egil's sad old age, and of many other[Pg 351] moving events. This has the most historic interest of any of the great sagas, and not least of the personal appeal. Perhaps, indeed, it is more like a really good historical novel than any other.

If, however, it were not for the deficiency of feminine character (a deficiency which rehandlers evidently felt and endeavoured to remedy by the expedient of tacking on an obvious plagiarism from Tristan as an appendix, ostensibly dealing with the avenging of the hero), the fifth, Grettis Saga or Grettla, would perhaps be the best of all.

It is true that some experts have found fault with this as late in parts, and bolstered out with extraneous matter in other respects beside the finale just referred to. The same critics denounce its poetical interludes (see infra) as spurious, object to some traits in it as coarse, and otherwise pick it to pieces. Nevertheless there are few sagas, if there are any, which produce so distinct and individual an effect, which remind us so constantly that we are in Iceland and not elsewhere. In pathos and variety of interest it cannot touch Njala or Laxdæla: in what is called "weirdness," in wild vigour, it surpasses, I think, all others; and the supernatural element, which is very strong, contrasts, I think, advantageously with the more business-like ghostliness of Eyrbyggja.

After an overture about the hero's forebears, which in any other country would be as certainly spurious as the epilogue, but to which the peculiar character of saga-writing gives a rather different claim here, the story proper begins with a description of the youth[Pg 352] of Grettir the Strong, second son to Asmund the Grey-haired of Biarg, who had made much money by sea-faring, and Asdis, a great heiress and of great kin. The sagaman consults poetical justice very well at first, and prepares us for an unfortunate end by depicting Grettir as, though valiant and in a way not ungenerous, yet not merely an incorrigible scapegrace, but somewhat unamiable and even distinctly ferocious. That, being made gooseherd, and finding the birds troublesome, he knocks them about, killing some goslings, may not be an unpardonable atrocity. And even when, being set to scratch his father's back, he employs a wool-comb for that purpose, much to the detriment of the paternal skin and temper, it does not very greatly go beyond the impishness of a naughty boy. But when, being promoted to mind the horses, and having a grudge against a certain "wise" mare named Keingala, because she stays out at graze longer than suits his laziness, he flays the unhappy beast alive in a broad strip from shoulder to tail, the thing goes beyond a joke. Also he is represented, throughout the saga, as invariably capping his pranks or crimes with one of the jeering enigmatic epigrams in which one finds considerable excuse for the Icelandic proneness to murder. However, in his boyhood, he does not go beyond cruelty to animals and fighting with his equals; and his first homicide, on his way with a friend of his father's to the Thing-Parliament, is in self-defence. Still, having no witnesses, he is, though powerfully backed (an all-important matter), fined and outlawed for three years. There is little love[Pg 353] lost between him and his father, and he is badly fitted out for the grand tour, which usually occupies a young Icelandic gentleman's first outlawry; but his mother gives him a famous sword. On the voyage he does nothing but flirt with the mate's wife: and only after strong provocation and in the worst weather consents to bale, which he does against eight men.

They are, however, wrecked off the island of Haramsey, and Grettir, lodging with the chief Thorfinn, at first disgusts folk here as elsewhere with his sulky, lazy ways. He acquires consideration, however, by breaking open the barrow of Thorfinn's father, and not only bringing out treasures (which go to Thorfinn), but fighting with and overcoming the "barrow-wight" (ghost) itself, the first of the many supernatural incidents in the story. The most precious part of the booty is a peculiar "short-sword." Also when Thorfinn's wife and house are left, weakly guarded, to the mercy of a crew of unusually ruffianly bersarks, Grettir by a mixture of craft and sheer valour succeeds in overcoming and slaying the twelve bersarks single-handed. Thorfinn on his return presents him with the short-sword and becomes his fast friend. He has plenty of opportunity: for Grettir, as usual, neither entirely by his own fault nor entirely without it, owing to his sulky temper and sour tongue, successively slays three brothers, being in the last instance saved only with the greatest difficulty by Thorfinn, his own half-brother Thorstein Dromond, and others, from the wrath of Swein, Jarl of the district. So that by the time when he can return to[Pg 354] Iceland, he has made Norway too hot to hold him; and he lands in his native island with a great repute for strength, valour, and, it must be added, quarrelsomeness. For some time he searches about "to see if there might be anywhere somewhat with which he might contend." He finds it at a distant farm, which is haunted by the ghost of a certain godless shepherd named Glam, who was himself killed by Evil Ones, and now molests both stock and farm-servants. Grettir dares the ghost, overcomes him after a tremendous conflict, which certainly resembles that in Beowulf most strikingly,[174] and slays him (for Icelandic ghosts are mortal); but not before Glam has spoken and pronounced a curse upon Grettir, that his strength, though remaining great, shall never grow, that all his luck shall cease, and, finally, that the eyes of Glam himself shall haunt him to the death.

Grettir at first cares little for this; but the last part of the curse comes on almost at once and makes him afraid to be alone after dark, while the second is not long delayed. On the eve of setting out once more for Norway, he quarrels with and slays a braggart named Thorbiorn; during the voyage itself he is the unintentional cause of a whole household of men being burnt to death; and lastly, by his own quarrelsome temper, and some "metaphysical aid," he misses[Pg 355] the chance of clearing himself by "bearing iron" (ordeal) before King Olaf at Drontheim. Olaf, his own kinsman, tells him with all frankness that he, Grettir, is much too "unlucky" for himself to countenance; and that though he shall have no harm in Norway, he must pack to Iceland as soon as the sea is open. He accordingly stays during the winter, in a peace only broken by the slaying of another bersark bully, and partly passed with his brother Thorstein Dromond.

Meanwhile Asmund has died, his eldest son Atli has succeeded him, and has been waylaid by men suborned by Thorbiorn Oxmain, kinsman of the Thorbiorn whom Grettir slew before leaving Iceland the second time. Atli escapes and slays his foes. Then Thorbiorn Oxmain himself visits Biarg and slays the unarmed Atli, who is not avenged because it was Grettir's business to look after the matter when he came home. But Glam's curse so works that, though plaintiff in this case, he is outlawed in his absence for the burning of the house above referred to, in which he was quite guiltless; and when he lands in Iceland it is to find himself deprived of all legal rights, and in such case that no friend can harbour him except under penalty.

Grettir, as we might expect, is not much daunted by this complication of evils, but he lies hid for a time at his mother's house and elsewhere, not so much to escape his own dangers as to avenge Atli on Thorbiorn Oxmain at the right moment. At last he finds it; and Thorbiorn, as well as his sixteen-year-old son Arnor, who rather disloyally helps him, is slain by Grettir[Pg 356] single-handed. His plight at first is not much worsened by this; for though the simple plan of setting off Thorbiorn against Atli is not adopted, Grettir's case is backed directly by his kinsmen and indirectly by the two craftiest men in Iceland, Snorri the Godi and Skapti the Lawman, and the latter points out that as Grettir had been outlawed before it was decreed that the onus of avenging Atli lay on him, a fatal flaw had been made in the latter proceeding, and no notice could be taken of the death of Thorbiorn at all, though his kin must pay for Atli. This fine would have been set off against Grettir's outlawry, and he would have become a freeman, had not Thorir of Garth, the father of the men he had accidentally killed in the burning house, refused; and so the well-meant efforts of Grettir's kin and friends fall through.

From this time till the end of his life he is a houseless outlaw, abiding in all the most remote parts of the island—"Grettir's lairs," as they are called, it would seem, to this day—sometimes countenanced for a short time by well-willing men of position, sometimes dwelling with supernatural creatures,—Hallmund, a kindly spirit or cave-dweller with a hospitable daughter, or the half-troll giant Thorir, a person of daughters likewise. But his case grows steadily worse. Partly owing to sheer ill-luck and Glam's curse, partly, as the saga-writer very candidly tells us, because he "was not an easy man to live withal," his tale of slayings and the feuds thereto appertaining grows steadily. For the most part he lives by simple cattle-lifting and the like, which naturally does not make him popular; twice[Pg 357] other outlaws come to abide with him, and, after longer or shorter time, try for his richly priced head, and though they lose their own lives, naturally make him more and more desperate. Once he is beset by his enemy Thorir with eighty men; and only comes off through the backing of his ghostly friend Hallmund, who not long after meets his fate by no ignoble hand, and Grettir cannot avenge him. Again, Grettir is warmly welcomed by a widow, Steinvor of Sand-heaps, at whose dwelling, in the oddest way, he takes up the full Beowulf adventure and slays a troll-wife in a cave just as his forerunner slew Grendel's mother. But in the end the hue and cry is too strong, and by advice of friends he flies to the steep holm of Drangey in Holmfirth—a place where the top can only be won by ladders—with his younger brother Illugi and a single thrall or slave. Illugi is young, but true as steel: the slave is a fool, if not actually a traitor. After the bonders of Drangey have done what they could to rid themselves of this very damaging and redoubtable intruder, they give up their shares to a certain Thorbiorn Angle. Thorbiorn at first fares ill against Grettir, whose outlawry is on the point of coming to an end, as none might last longer than twenty years. With the help of a wound, witch-caused to Grettir, and the slave's treacherous laziness, Thorbiorn and his crew climb the ladders and beset the brethren—Grettir already half dead with his gangrened wound. The hero is slain with his own short-sword; the brave Illugi is overwhelmed with the shields of the eighteen assailants, and then slaughtered in cold blood.[Pg 358] But Thorbiorn reaps little good, for his traffickings with witchcraft deprive him of his blood-money; the deaths of his men, of whom Illugi and Grettir had slain not a few, are set against Illugi's own; and Thorbiorn himself, after escaping to Micklegarth (Constantinople) and joining the Varangians, is slain by Thorstein Dromond, who has followed him thither and joined the same Guard on purpose, and who is made the hero of the appendix above spoken of.

The defects of this are obvious, and may be probably enough accounted for in part by the supposition of the experts above referred to—that the saga as we have it is rather later than the other great sagas, and is a patchwork of divers hands. It may perhaps be added, as a more purely literary criticism, that no one of these hands can have been quite a master, or that his work, if it existed, must have been mutilated or disfigured by others. For the most is nowhere made, except in the Glam fight and the last scenes on Drangey, of the admirable situations provided by the story; and the presentation of Grettir as a man almost everywhere lacks the last touches, while the sagaman has simply thrown away the opportunities afforded him by the insinuated amourettes with Steinvor and the daughters of the friendly spirits, and has made a mere fabliau episode of another thing of the kind. Nevertheless the attractions of Grettla are unique as regards the mixture of the natural and supernatural; not inferior to any other as illustrating the quaintly blended life of Iceland; and of the highest kind as regards the conception of the hero[Pg 359]—a not ungenerous Strength, guided by no intellectual greatness and by hardly any overmastering passion, marred by an unsocial and overbearing temper, and so hardly needing the ill luck, which yet gives poetical finish and dramatic force to the story, to cast itself utterly away. For in stories, as in other games, play without luck is fatiguing and jejune, luck without play childish. It is curious how touching is the figure of the ill-fated hero, not wholly amiable, yet over-matched by Fortune, wandering in waste places of a country the fairest spots of which are little better than a desert, forced by his terror of "Glam-sight" to harbour criminals far worse than himself, and well knowing that they seek his life, grudgingly and fearfully helped by his few friends, a public nuisance where he should have been a public champion, only befriended heartily by mysterious shadowy personages of whom little is positively told, and when, after twenty years of wild-beast life, his deliverance is at hand, perishing by a combination of foul play on the part of his foes and neglect on that of his slave. At least once, too, in that parting of Asdis with Grettir and Illugi, which ranks not far below the matchless epitaph of Sir Ector on Lancelot, there is not only suggestion, but expression of the highest quality:—

"'Ah! my sons twain, there ye depart from me, and one death ye shall have together, for no man may flee from that which is wrought for him. On no day now shall I see either of you once again. Let one fate, then, be over you both; for I know not what weal ye go to get for yourselves[Pg 360] in Drangey, but there ye shall both lay your bones, and many shall grudge you that abiding-place. Keep ye heedfully from wiles, for marvellously have my dreams gone. Be well ware of sorcery; yet none the less shall ye be bitten with the edge of the sword, for nothing can cope with the cunning of eld.' And when she had thus spoken she wept right sore. Then said Grettir, 'Weep not, mother; for if we be set upon by weapons it shall be said of thee that thou hast had sons and not daughters.' And therewith they parted."

These moments, whether of incident or expression, are indeed frequent enough in the sagas, though the main attraction may consist, as has been said, in the wild interest of the story and the vivid individuality of the characters. The slaying of Gunnar of Lithend in Njala, when his false wife refuses him a tress of hair to twist for his stringless bow, has rightly attracted the admiration of the best critics; as has the dauntless resignation of Njal himself and Bergthora, when both might have escaped their fiery fate. Of the touches of which the Egil's Saga is full, few are better perhaps than the picture in a dozen words of King Eric Blood-axe "sitting bolt upright and glaring" at the son of Skallagrim as he delivers the panegyric which is to save his life, and the composition of which had been so nearly baulked by the twittering of the witch-swallow under his eaves. The "long" kisses of Kormak and Steingerd, and the poet's unconscious translation of Æschylus[175][Pg 361] as he says, "Eager to find my lady, I have scoured the whole house with the glances of my eyes—in vain," dwell in the memory as softer touches. And for the sterner, nothing can beat the last fight of Olaf Trygveson, where with the crack of Einar Tamberskelvir's bow Norway breaks from Olaf's hands, and the king himself, the last man with Kolbiorn his marshal to fight on the deck of the Long Serpent, springs, gold-helmed, mail-coated, and scarlet-kirtled, into the waves, and sinks with shield held up edgeways[176] to weight him through the deep green water.

The saga prose is straightforward and business-like, the dialogue short and pithy, with considerable interspersion of proverbial phrase, but with, except in case of bad texts, very little obscurity. It is, however, much interspersed also with verses which, like Icelandic verse in general, are alliterative in prosody, and often of the extremest euphuism and extravagance in phrase. All who have even a slight acquaintance with sagas know the extraordinary periphrases for common objects, for men and maidens, for ships and swords, that bestrew them. There is, I believe, a theory, not in itself improbable, that the more elaborate and far-fetched the style of this imagery, the later and less genuine is likely to be the poem, if not the saga; but it is certain that the germs of the style are to be found[Pg 362] in the Havamal and the other earliest and most certainly genuine examples.

It is perhaps well to add that very small sagas are called thættir ("scraps"), the same word as "tait" in the Scots phrase "tait of wool." But it is admitted that it is not particularly easy to draw the line between the two, and that there is no difference in real character. In fact short sagas might be called thættir and vice versâ. Also, as hinted before, there is exceedingly little comedy in the sagas. The roughest horse-play in practical joking, the most insolent lampoons in verbal satire, form, as a rule, the lighter element; and pieces like the Bandamanna Saga, which with tragic touches is really comic in the main, are admittedly rare.

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In regard to the second, and contrasted, division of the subject of the present chapter, it has been already noted that, just as Icelandic at this period presents to the purview of the comparative literary historian one main subject, if not one only—the saga—so Provençal presents one main subject, and almost one only—the formal lyric. The other products of the Muse in langue d'oc, whether verse or prose, are so scanty, and in comparison[177] so unim[Pg 363]portant, that even special historians of the subject have found but little to say about them. The earliest monument of all, perhaps the earliest finished monument of literature in any Romance language, the short poem on Boethius, in assonanced decasyllabic laisses,—even in its present form probably older than our starting-point, and, it may be, two centuries older in its first form,—is indeed not lyrical; nor is the famous and vigorous verse-history of the Albigensian War in chanson style; nor the scanty remnants of other chansons, Girart de Rossilho, Daurel et Beton, Aigar et Maurin, which exist; nor the later romans d'aventure of Jaufre, Flamenca, Blandin of Cornwall. But in this short list almost everything of interest in our period—the flourishing period of the literature—has been mentioned which is not lyrical.[178] And if these things, and others like them in much larger number, had existed alone, it is certain that Provençal literature would not hold the place which it now holds in the comparative literary history of Europe.

That place is due to its lyric, construing that term in a wide sense such as that (but indeed a little wider) in which it has been already used with reference to the kindred and nearly contemporary lyric of France proper. It is best to say "nearly contemporary," because it would appear that Provençal actually had[Pg 364] the start of French in this respect, though no great start: and it is best to say "kindred" and not "daughter," because though some forms and more names are common to the two, their developments are much more parallel than on the same lines, and they are much more sisters than mother and daughter.

It would appear, though such things can never be quite certain, that, as we should indeed expect, the first developments of Provençal lyric were of the hymn kind, and perhaps originally mixtures of Romance and Latin. This mixture of the vernacular and the learned tongues, both spoken in all probability with almost equal facility by the writer, is naturally not uncommon in the Middle Ages: and it helps to explain the rapid transference of the Latin hymn-rhythms to vernacular verse. Thus we have a Noel or Christmas poem not only written to the tune and in the measure of a Latin hymn, In hoc anni circulo, not only crowning the Provençal six-syllable triplets with a Latin refrain, "De virgine Maria," and other variations on the Virgin's title and name, but with Latin verses alternate to the Provençal ones. This same arrangement occurs with a Provençal fourth rhyme, which seems to have been a favourite one. It is arranged with a variety which shows its earliness, for the fourth line is sometimes "in the air" rhyming to nothing, sometimes rhymes with the other three, and sometimes forces its sound on the last of them, so that the quatrain becomes a pair of couplets.

The earliest purely secular lyrics, however, are attributed to William IX., Count of Poitiers, who was[Pg 365] a crusader in the very first year of the twelfth century, and is said to have written an account of his journey which is lost. His lyrics survive to the number of some dozen, and show that the art had by his time received very considerable development. For their form, it may suffice to say that of those given by Bartsch[179] the first is in seven-lined stanzas, rhymed aaaabab, the a-rhyme lines being iambic dimeters, and the b's monometers. Number two has five six-lined stanzas, all dimeters, rhymed aaabab: and a four-lined finale, rhymed ab, ab. The third is mono-rhymed throughout, the lines being disyllabic with licence to extend. And the fourth is in the quatrain aaab, but with the b rhyme identical throughout, capped with a couplet ab. If these systems be compared with the exact accounts of early French, English, and German lyric in chapters v.-vii., it will be seen that Provençal probably, if not certainly, led the way in thus combining rhythmic arrangement and syllabic proportion with a cunning variation of rhyme-sound. It was also the first language to classify[Pg 366] poetry, as it may be called, by assigning special forms to certain kinds of subject or—if not quite this—to constitute classes of poems themselves according to their arrangement in line, stanza, and rhyme. A complete prosody of the language of canso and sirvente, of vers and cobla, of planh, tenso, tornejamens, balada, retroensa, and the rest, would take more room than can be spared here, and would hardly be in place if it were otherwise. All such prosodies tend rather to the childish, as when, for instance, the pastorela, or shepherdess poem in general, was divided into porquiera, cabreira, auqueira, and other things, according as the damsel's special wards were pigs or goats or geese. Perhaps the most famous, peculiar, and representative of Provençal forms are the alba, or poem of morning parting, and the sirvente, or poem not of love. The sestina, a very elaborate canzonet, was invented in Provence and borrowed by the Italians. But it is curious to find that the sonnet, the crown and flower of all artificial poetry, though certainly invented long before the decadence of Provençal, was only used in Provençal by Italian experimenters. The poets proper of the langue d'oc were probably too proud to admit any form that they had not invented themselves.

Next in noteworthiness to the variety of form of the Provençal poets is their number. Even the multitude of trouvères and Minnesingers dwindles beside the list of four hundred and sixty named poets, for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries only, which Bartsch's list contains; some, it is true, credited with only a single piece, but others[Pg 367] with ten, twenty, fifty, or even close to a hundred, not to mention an anonymous appendix of over two hundred and fifty poems more. Great, however, as is the bulk of this division of literature, hardly any has more distinct and uniform—its enemies may say more monotonous—characteristics. It is not entirely composed of love-poetry; but the part devoted to this is so very much the largest, and so very much the most characteristic, that popular and almost traditional opinion is scarcely wrong in considering love-poetry and Provençal poetry to be almost, and with the due limitation in the first case, convertible terms.

The spirit of this poetry is nowhere better shown than in the refrain of an anonymous alba, which begins—

and which has for burden—

of which an adaptation by Mr Swinburne is well known. "In the Orchard," however, is not only a much longer poem than the alba from which it borrows its burden, but is couched in a form much more elaborate, and has a spirit rather early Italian than Provençal. It is, indeed, not very easy to define the Provençal spirit itself, which has sometimes been mistaken, and oftener exaggerated. Although the average troubadour poem—whether of love, or of satire, or, more rarely, of war—is much less simple in tone than the Northern lyric already commented on, it cannot be said to be very complex; and, on the[Pg 368] whole, the ease, accomplishment, and, within certain strict limits, variety of the form are more remarkable than any intensity or volume of passion or of thought. The musical character (less inarticulate and more regular), which has also been noted in the poems of the trouvères, is here eminent: though the woodnote wild of the Minnesinger is quite absent or very rarely present. The facility of double rhymes, with a full vowel sound in each syllable, has a singular and very pleasing effect, as in the piece by Marcabrun beginning—

"the other day by a hedge," the curiously complicated construction of which is worth dwelling on as a specimen. It consists of six double stanzas, of fourteen lines or two septets each, finished by a sestet, aabaab. The septets are rhymed aaabaab; and though the a rhymes vary in each set of fourteen, the b rhymes are the same throughout; and the first of them in each septet is the same word, vilana (peasant girl), throughout. Thus we have as the rhymes of the first twenty-eight lines sebissa, mestissa, massissa, vilana, pelissa, treslissa, lana; planissa, faitissa, fissa, vilana, noirissa, m'erissa, sana; pia, via, companhia, vilana, paria, bestia, soldana; sia, folia, parelharia, vilana, s'estia, bailia, l'ufana.

Such a carillon of rhymes as this is sometimes held to be likely to concentrate the attention of both writer and reader too much on the accompaniment, and to leave the former little time to convey, and the latter little chance of receiving,[Pg 369] any very particularly choice sense. This most certainly cannot be laid down as a universal law; there are too many examples to the contrary, even in our own language, not to go further. But it may be admitted that when the styles of literature are both fashionable and limited, and when a very large number of persons endeavour to achieve distinction in them, there is some danger of something of the sort coming about. No nation has ever been able, in the course of less than two centuries, to provide four hundred and sixty named poets and an indefinitely strong reinforcement of anonyms, all of whom have native power enough to produce verse at once elaborate in form and sovereign in spirit; and the peoples of the langue d'oc, who hardly together formed a nation, were no exception to the rule. That rule is a rule of "minor poetry," accomplished, scholarly, agreeable, but rarely rising out of minority.

Yet their educating influence was undoubtedly strong, and their actual production not to be scorned. In the capacity of teachers they were not without strong influence on their Northern countrymen; they certainly and positively acted as direct masters to the literary lyric both of Italy and Spain; they at least shared with the trouvères the position of models to the Minnesingers. It is at first sight rather surprising that, considering the intimate relations between England and Aquitaine during the period—considering that at least one famous troubadour, Bertran de Born, is known to have been concerned in the disputes between Henry II. and his[Pg 370] sons—Provençal should not have exercised more direct influence over English literature. It was a partly excusable mistake which made some English critics, who knew that Richard Cœur de Lion, for instance, was himself not unversed in the "manner of trobar," assert or assume, until within the present century, that it did exercise such influence. But, as a matter of fact, it did not; and the reason is sufficiently simple, or at least (for it is double rather than simple) sufficiently clear.

In the first place, English was not, until quite the end of the flourishing period of Provençal poetry, and specially at the period above referred to, in a condition to profit by Provençal models; while in the fourteenth century, when English connection with the south of France was closer still, Provençal was in its decadence. And, in the second place, the structure and spirit of the two tongues almost forbade imitation of the one in the other. It was Northern, not Southern, French that helped to make English proper out of Anglo-Saxon; and the gap between Northern French and Southern French themselves was far wider than between Provençal and the Peninsular tongues. To which things, if any one pleases, he may add the difference of the spirit of the two races; but this is always vague and uncertain ground, and is best avoided when we can tread on the firm land of history and literature proper. Such a rhyme-arrangement as that above set forth is probably impossible in English; even now it will be observed that Mr Swinburne,[Pg 371] the greatest master of double and treble rhymes that we have ever had, rarely succeeds in giving even the former with a full spondaic effect of vowel such as is easy in Provençal. In "The Garden of Proserpine" itself, as in the double rhymes, where they occur, of "The Triumph of Time" (the greatest thing ever written in the Provençal manner, and greater than anything in Provençal), the second vowels of the rhymes are never full. And there too, as I think invariably in English, the poet shows his feeling of the intolerableness of continued double rhyme by making the odd verses rhyme plump and with single sound.

Of poetry so little remarkable in individual manner or matter it is impossible to give abstracts, such as those which have been easy, and it may be hoped profitable, in some of the foregoing chapters; and prolonged analyses of form are tedious, except to the expert and the enthusiast. With some brief account, therefore, of the persons who chiefly composed this remarkable mass of lyric we may close a notice of the subject which is superficially inadequate to its importance, but which, perhaps, will not seem so to those who are content not merely to count pages but to weigh moments. The moment which Provençal added to the general body of force in European literature was that of a limited, somewhat artificial, but at the same time exquisitely artful and finished lyrical form, so adapted to the most inviting of the perennial motives of literature that it was sure to lead to imitation and development. It gave means and held up models[Pg 372] to those who were able to produce greater effects than are to be found in its own accomplishment: yet was not its accomplishment, despite what is called its monotony, despite its limits and its defects, other than admirable and precious.

The "first warbler," Count William IX. of Poitiers, has already been mentioned, and his date fixed at exactly the first year of our period. His chief immediate successors or contemporaries were Cercamon ("Cherchemonde," Cursor Mundi); the above quoted Marcabrun, who is said to have accompanied Cercamon in his wanderings, and who has left much more work; and Bertrand de Ventadorn or Ventadour, perhaps the best of the group, a farmer's son of the place from which he takes his noble-sounding name, and a professional lover of the lady thereof. Of Jaufre (Geoffrey) Rudel of Blaye, whose love for the lady of Tripoli, never yet seen by him, and his death at first sight of her, supply, with the tragedy of Cabestanh and the cannibal banquet, the two most famous pieces of Troubadour anecdotic history, we have half-a-dozen pieces. In succession to these, Count Rambaut of Orange and Countess Beatrice of Die keep up the reputation of the gai saber as an aristocratic employment, and the former's poem—

(in six-lined stanzas, rhymed ababab, with prose "tags" to each, something in the manner of the modern comic song), is at least a curiosity. The primacy of the[Pg 373] whole school in its most flourishing time, between 1150 and 1250, is disputed by Arnaut Daniel (a great master of form, and as such venerated by his greater Italian pupils) and Giraut de Bornelh, who is more fully represented in extant work than most of his fellows, as we have more than fourscore pieces of his. Peire or Peter Vidal, another typical troubadour, who was a crusader, an exceedingly ingenious verse-smith, a great lover, and a proficient in the fantastic pranks which rather brought the school into discredit, inasmuch as he is said to have run about on all fours in a wolfskin in honour of his mistress Loba (Lupa); Gaucelm Faidit and Arnaut de Maroilh, Folquet of Marseilles, and Rambaut of Vaqueras; the Monk of Montaudon and Bertrand de Born himself, who with Peire Cardinal is the chief satirist (though the satire of the two takes different forms); Guillem Figueira, the author of a long invective against Rome, and Sordello of mysterious and contingent fame,—are other chief members, and of some of them we have early, perhaps contemporary, Lives, or at least anecdotes. For instance, the Cabestanh or Cabestaing story comes from these. The last name of importance in our period, if not the last of the right troubadours, is usually taken to be that of Guiraut Riquier.

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It would scarcely be fair to say that the exploit attributed to Rambaut of Vaqueras, a poet of the very palmiest time, at the juncture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—that of composing a poem in lines written successively in three different[Pg 374] forms of Provençal (langue d'oc proper, Gascon, and Catalan), in langue d'oïl, and in Italian, with a coda line jumbled up of all five—is a final criticism at once of the merits and the defects of this literature. But it at least indicates the lines of such a criticism. By its marvellous suppleness, sweetness, and adaptation to the verbal and metrical needs of poetry, Provençal served—in a fashion probably impossible to the stiffer if more virile tongues—as an example in point of form to these tongues themselves: and it achieved, at the same time with a good deal of mere gymnastic, exercises in form of the most real and abiding beauty. But it had as a language too little character of its own, and was too fatally apt to shade into the other languages—French on the one hand, Spanish and Italian on the other—with which it was surrounded, and to which it was akin. And coming to perfection at a time when no modern thought was distinctly formed, when positive knowledge was at a low ebb, and when it had neither the stimulus of vigorous national life nor the healthy occupation of what may be called varied literary business, it tended to become, on the whole, too much of a plaything merely. Now, schools and playgrounds are both admirable things, and necessary to man; but what is done in both is only an exercise or a relaxation from exercise. Neither man nor literature can stay either in class-room or playing-field for ever, and Provençal had scarcely any other places of abode to offer.

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