question of what the country can best afford-to let the evil gather strength with every year, or to grapple with it earnestly, and at once. ART. V.-1. Vejledning til det Islandske eller gamle Nordiske 3. Nordiske Oldskrifter udgivne af det Nordiske Literatur-Samfund. Kjöbenhavn, 1847-62. (Icelandic Texts, with Glossaries or Translations in Danish.) 4. Grettis Saga. Ved G. Magnusson og G. Thorardson. Kjöbenhavn, 1853. 5. Lexicon Poeticum Antiqua Lingua Septentrionalis. Hafniæ, 1860. 7. The Story of Burnt Njal, or Life in Iceland at the end of the Tenth Century. From the Icelandic of the Njáls Saga. By George Webbe Dasent, D.C.L. Edinburgh, 1861, 8vo. 2 vols. 8. Die Ausdrücke: Altnordische, Altnorwegische, und Isländische Sprache. Von K. Maurer. München, 1867. 9. Sæmundar Edda hins Froða. Udgiven af S. Bugge. Chris tiania, 1867. 10. Sæmundar Edda hins Froða. Udgiven af S. Grundtvig. Kjöbenhavn, 1868. 11. Grettis Saga; the Story of Grettir the Strong. Translated from the Icelandic by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris. London, 1869. 12. Lilja (The Lily); an Icelandic Religious Poem of the Fourteenth Century. Edited, with a Metrical Translation, Notes, and Glossary, by Eirikr Magnusson. London, 1870. 13. Die Edda, Die ältere und jüngere, nebst den mythischen Erzählungen der Skalda. Uebersetzt und mit Erläuterungen begleitet, von Karl Simrock. Vierte Auflage. Stuttgart, 1871. 14. The Orkneyinga Saga. Translated from the Icelandic, by Jon A. Hjaltalin and Gilbert Goudie; edited, with Notes and Introduction, by Joseph Anderson, Keeper of the National Museum of the Antiquaries of Scotland. Edinburgh, 1873. 15. An Icelandic-English Dictionary, chiefly founded on the Collections made from prose works of the Twelfth to the Fourteenth Centuries. By the late Richard Cleasby. Enlarged and completed by Gudbrand Vigfusson. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press. Part I., A-H, 1869; Part II., H-R, 1871; Part III., R-Ö, 1874. THEO HE above list of books on the language and literature of Iceland presents but a sample of the numbers which within the last thirty years have issued from Scandinavian, German and English presses, following one another with all the briskness of competitors in some newly-opened field of golden promise. Ever since the fresh stimulus given to these studies by the great philologer of the north, Erasmus Rask, the acceleration of interest has been steadily accumulating, and notwithstanding the great disadvantages under which Icelandic has had to be learnt, the books that have been produced in the present century are too numerous for us here to recite. It is the last on the list which now at length removes the difficulty of Icelandic study, and which affords occasion for the present article. Like some great road driven through the heart of a land which has hitherto been known only to the rare and hardy adventurer, this complete and masterly lexicon opens up a language and literature which has hitherto been closed to all but the leisurely few, and makes it the inheritance of the whole world. And this important work, which now for the first time crowns our Icelandic library with a sense of completeness, has, with a happy chronological fitness, reached its termination in the year 1874, just a thousand years from the date of the Norwegian colonisation of the sub-arctic island. When in the ninth century the great feudalising movement had reached Norway, and Harald Harfager was relentlessly forcing the allodial owners to do him suit and service as their sovereign lord, the untamed Viking spirit of the western fiords burst away to seek a free land, and successive bands settled on the shore of Iceland, which at first served chiefly as a new base for piratical expeditions and plans of southern conquest. But when at length their wild career was run, they became gradually domesticated in the strange land; they formed a Commonwealth, which is one of the greatest of curiosities for the jurist; they produced a literature so original as to be absolutely unique; and they preserved a language which may be called the survival of Gothic antiquity. Perhaps there is not in all the records of the world, not even in Greece itself, a more striking example of the character and circumstances of a people being faithfully mirrored in the writings they have produced. The old ancestral mythologies which they had brought with them from the mainland took shape in a Vol. 139.-No. 278. 2 G series series of lyrical odes, which have in modern times acquired the collective name of the Sæmundar Edda,' that is, the Edda of the collector or composer Sæmund. One of the characteristics of Icelandic literature is the droll homeliness of its book-titles, and the title Edda simply means Grandmother. This Edda is also spoken of as the elder Edda, and the poetical Edda, to distinguish it from a later collection of old-world lore, which is called the prose Edda, or the younger Edda. This latter was the work of Snorri Sturlason, who died in 1241; and after him it is sometimes also called Snorra Edda, which means the Edda of Snorri. Of this work Simrock says, it is to be regarded as the oldest and trustiest commentary on the Songs of the Elder Edda.' These two Eddas stand wide apart, and between them lies the first and freshest era of the Sagas. An age of wild adventure had been succeeded by a corresponding development of romantic stories; and as the Viking age had supplied the material, so the domestic life which the Icelanders settled down into, was remarkably fit for the culture and preservation of traditional narratives. In proportion as they were further removed from the centres of population and those springs of novelty which are so frequent in populous places, in the same degree were their ancestral tales the more cherished and the oftener repeated, till, like Solon's ordinance for the recitation of Homer, some ancient tale formed part of every solemnity. The word Saga (plural Sögur) is a substantive of the verb to say, and the English analogue is saw, as in Shakspeare's 'wise saws and modern instances." It applies to any kind of narrative or tale, whether history or legend; but the precise sentiment of the word harmonises very closely with that of the English 6 story.' Story-telling had its securest rooting-place in the winter circle of the family: from this base it spread out and became a constant entertainment at public meetings, at feasts, weddings, wakes, at the festivities of Yule, and even at the assemblies of the Al-thing; and narratives of banquets are extant which tell what saga was recited on the occasion, just as in the Beowulf it is told what was the Song of the Scôp in the hall of the Gar-Danes. The early sagas had taken a definite shape in oral transmission before the literary period began, and as the writers of these were in no sense their authors, this may be the reason why their names have not come down to us along with their books. The title of Saga which properly indicated the narrative told with the living voice, had gained too firm a hold to be changed with the change of literary form, and being thus established beyond challenge it obtained the widest and vaguest application, covering all the narrative literature literature from the merely mythical at one extreme, through the various grades of half-historic, to the truly and fully historical at the other extreme. On the one hand we find a saga occupied with adventures, like those of William Tell; and on the other the truly historic group of the Islendinga Sögur, or Histories of the time of the Icelandic Commonwealth. Among these is even reckoned the highly documentary work, called the Landnámabók,' that is, 'The Book of the Land-taking,' or colonisation of the country; which is for Iceland what the Domesday Book is for England. But of all the group the most characteristic specimens are those which tell the career of men or families between the dates of 900 and 1030; and these are The Sagas,' properly and distinctively so called. Of these we can happily direct the English reader to some of the best examples in the sagas of Burnt Njal and of Grettir the Strong, both of which, as well as the later Orkneyinga Saga, appear in the above list in English translations. The latter is one of the more strictly historical sagas; but even of those which are less so in form and manner, and which even contain superstitious matter, we may say that their historical value, in the hands of a discriminating reader, is often very high; and we can almost endorse the sweeping words of Mr. Dasent, which were printed so far back as 1843: I cannot imagine it possible to write a satisfactory history of the Anglo-Saxon period, without a thorough knowledge of the Old Norse literature.'* In a preliminary glimpse of Icelandic literature, we must make mention of the old Laws of the Commonwealth, which form a collection known by the whimsical title of Grágás, that is, Gray-goose. Then there are the Laws after the Union with Norway in 1262. Then come Bible Paraphrases, Homilies, Lives of Saints: Romances and Fables, mostly after French and Latin originals, resembling our own mediæval translations. Then there are works of a scholastic character: the Icelandic language boasts to possess the earliest philological treatise written in any Gothic language. Then there are works arithmetical, geographical, medical, besides deeds and diplomas, and inscriptions; and all these without reckoning any of the postReformation literature. Taken as a whole, it must be admitted that this is the finest display that any language of the Gothic family is able to make in the way of a vernacular literature, and none is so purely native, so free from intermixture of alien material. *A Grammar of the Icelandic or Old Norse Tongue, translated from the Swedish of Erasmus Rask,' 1843, p. vii. 2 G 2 But But interesting as this literature is for its contents, it is hardly less so, at least to Englishmen, for the language in which it is enshrined. For, as we hope to be able to show, this language contains within itself the materials for enabling us to understand much that has hitherto been very imperfectly explained in the mechanism of the English language. In truth, it offers us a direct explanation in many places where we have hitherto had to be satisfied with an indirect explanation. We have, of course, looked to the Saxon in the first place as the great basis of our mother-tongue, after that we have looked to the Old French, long dominant in England, as the most prominent modifier of Saxon forms and structures. But the more the investigation has been pursued, the more has it ever come to light, that these sources left unexplained many a feature in our highly composite speech, while no other language seemed historically able to claim a place by the side of these two, which had severally reigned their hundreds of years in the land. The nearest approach to such a claim belonged to the Danes, and this claim was sometimes put in, but an adequate body of facts was never advanced to support it. That a language which never had a vernacular hold on any part of the soil, for which the utmost that could be urged was that it was current for a generation and a half in a bi-lingual court, a language which produced no literature in our island, that such a language should claim to be grouped, even in a minor sense, along with the great factors of the English language,. must always have appeared unworthy of credit, until a work was put into our hands full of the language of our Danish settlers, and at the same time resounding on all sides with the echoes of our most homely and most deeply ingrained idioms. . This Icelandic language has almost all the rich store of its vocabulary in common with the other languages of the Gothic stock on either side of the Baltic. It is the standard language of the northern division of the Gothic family. But as an indication how deeply it is severed from its southern or Teutonic kindred, the following particulars may suffice. It possesses neither of the prepositions by or to; nor has it any substantive ending in -ness; nor does it appear to have ever possessed either of the verbs to make, or to do. One word serves for both of these and that is göra, a word familiar to us in its transplanted position as the Scottish gar. In this language the sun is called sól, and the word ' sun' is only known as a rare poetic term; while in all the Teutonic languages this is reversed: moreover, the sea is called haf, a name quite unknown in the Teutonic regions. These are profound distinctions, and they describe a deep gulf between the Scandinavian and the Teutonic branches. |