Egil’s Saga (38 page)

Homer: γέγηθε δέ τε ϕρένα ποιμήν.

Pope:
The conscious swains, rejoicing in the sight,
Eye the blue vault, and bless the useful light. (Il. viii, 559.)

Homer: τὀν δ’ άπαμειβόμενος προσέϕη πόδας ώκύς
’Α
χιλλεύς
Δ
ιoγεvές
Λα
ερτιάδη, πολνμήχαν’
Ό
δυσσεῦ,

Pope
: Then thus the goddess-born, “Ulysses, hear”. (
Il.
ix, 307–8.)

*
We now have, for the
Iliad
, the version of Lang, Leaf and Myers.

*
Passionate, in the sense that, for instance, Beethoven’s greatest tragic works are passionate, or Webster’s Italian tragedies, with a passion that makes itself felt through an iron restraint and concentration. In a sense, it can be said that the spirit of the sagas is beyond passion, if passion is thought of in its common and freer manifestations, examples of which abound in all regions, the highest and the lowest, from Wagner and Shakespeare to the products of the Keltic twilight and the inarticulate moans and shrieks of the untutored savage.

*
Or, in a nutshell, as my friend George Rostrevor Hamilton has said it:

To a Translator of the Classics

They lived in a dead language: now, instead,
You in a living language make them dead.

*
The distinguished editors of
Origines Islandicae
adopt this course, with grotesque results, Þórir becomes not Thorir but
Thore;
Steinarr,
Stan-here;
Herjólfr,
Hare-wolf;
Jörundr,
Eor-wend
; Önundr,
Ean-wend
; Böðvarr, not Bodvar but
Bead-were;
Broddi,
Brorde;
Skeggi,
Scegge
(which the reader will naturally call ‘sedge’); Kolbeinn,
Colban;
and Ragnarr Loðbrók (Ragnar Hairybreeks) becomes
Ragn-here Lod-broc
.

NOTES

I. BOOKS FOR ENGLISH READERS

For the benefit of those who, having tasted, would have more, I name below a few sound vintages. Where particulars of publishers, etc., are not stated here, they will be found in the
List of Abbreviations
.

(1) T
RANSLATIONS OF
S
AGAS

The Story of Burnt Njal
: G. W. Dasent (cheap edition now available, but without introduction, index, etc., in Everyman’s Library).

The Saga Library (Bernard Quaritch): containing Morris’s translations of
Eyrbyggja
(vol. II, ‘The Story of the Ere-Dwellers’); the
Heimskringla
(vols. III-V);
Howard the Halt
, the
Banded Men
, and
Hen-Thorir
(vol. I).

The Story of Grettir the Strong
: Morris’s translation.

Three Northern Love Stories
: Morris’s translation (for
Gunnlaug the Worm-tongue’s Saga
).

The Story of Gisli the Outlaw
: Dasent.

The Faereyinga Saga
: F. York Powell (David Nutt, 1896).

Cormac the Skald
: W. G. Collingwood and Jón Stefansson (published by the Viking Club, Wm. Holmes Ltd., Ulverston, 1902): for
Kormak’s Saga
.

The Völsunga Saga
: Morris (The Walter Scott Publishing Co. Ltd., no date [? 1906]).

To the foregoing I add, with some misgivings,
Origines Islandicae
: Vigfusson and York Powell (2 vols., Clarendon Press, 1905), which contains texts and complete or partial translations of many sagas.

(2) B
OOKS ON, OR BEARING ON, THE
S
AGAS

Epic and Romance
: W. P. Ker (Macmillan, 1926).

Collected Essays
: W. P. Ker (Macmillan, 1925); see vol. II, essays on ‘Iceland and the Humanities’, ‘The Early Historians of Norway’, ‘Gudmund Arason’, ‘Sturla the Historian’, ‘Jón Arason’.

The Icelandic Sagas
: W. A. Craigie (Cambridge University Press, 1913).

The Origin of the Icelandic Family Sagas
: Knut Liestol (Williams and Norgate, 1930).

The Heroic Age
: H. Munro Chadwick (Cambridge University Press, 1926).

II. B
ERSERK
(berserkr): see
ch. I
, p. 1.

O.E.D.
gives no quotation earlier than Scott’s
Pirate
, 1822. The derivation is in dispute: some say ‘bear-sark’, i.e. with bearskin shirt or kirtle; others ‘bare-sark’, i.e. without byrny. The latter is supported by the Yngl. 6: Odin’s “own men went without byrnies, and were mad as dogs or wolves, and bit on their shields, and were as strong as bears or bulls; menfolk they slew, and neither fire nor steel would deal with them: and this is what is called Bareserks-gang”. In Thorbiorn Hornklofi’s
Raven’s-Song
the lady asks the raven about the berserks, “men battle-bold that stride among the folk”; and the raven says, “Wolf-coats they hight, they that in battle bear bloody shields”. And in the same song, singing of the battle of Hafrsfirth, the raven says:

Roared there the bareserks,

Battle-wood was the host,

Loud howled the Wolf-coats

And clattered the iron.

Probably the biting of the shield-rim had a direct connexion with the roaring: cf. the bellowing (barritus) of Tacitus’s Germans, “asperitas soni et fractum murmur,
objectis ad os scutis”.
^*
So do little boys, banging their open hands against their mouths to give a broken, gobbling effect to their yells, ‘ba-ba-ba-ba-bah’.

That this peculiar form of
furor athleticus
was no mere legend is proved by the fact that laws were made against it. Persons subject to it were called ‘shape-strong’,
hamrammr
(see
here
), because they were thought to have the power of assuming bestial forms, as of wolf or bear. The fits left them strengthless, as we see in Kveldulf’s case,
ch.
XXVII
; cf. also the Eb. passage mentioned below.

It is not uncommon in the sagas to hear of berserks going about the countryside in Norway and challenging men for their women or goods; Grett. 40 is a
locus classicus
: the berserk “began to roar aloud, and bit the rim of his shield, and thrust it up into his mouth, and gaped over the comer of the shield”. Grettir very adroitly kicked the tail of the shield so hard that the man’s throat was riven asunder and his jaws fell down on his breast. Such bullies were much feared by honest folk, and their discomfiture was a stock exploit for a man of valour: see Glum. 4, 6, Gisl. I, and Egil’s dealing with Ljot the Pale in our own saga.

They were useful followers for kings and earls, but sometimes embarrassing to a private gentleman, as was found by Vermund the Slender (Eb. 25) when he induced Earl Eric to give him two such to take home to Iceland, because he deemed his brother, Slaying Stir, “lay heavy on his fortune, and dealt unjustly with him as with most others when he could bring his strength to bear on him. So he thought that Stir would deem it less easy to deal with him if he had such fellows” as these berserks were. The end of it was that they made
themselves so “big and rough with Vermund” that he had to pray his violent brother to take them off his hands. Stir took them; employed them to his satisfaction in some man-slaying business he had in hand, but at length himself too found them “hard and high-minded”, as the earl had foretold, and in the end rid himself of them in a very cruel and treacherous manner (Eb. 28). (See also following note on
‘Shape-strong’
.)

III. S
HAPE-STRONG
(hamrammr): see
ch. I
, p. 1.

Odin was Himself a shape-changer: “Lay then the body as if asleep or dead, but He was then fowl or beast, fish or worm, and fared in the twinkling of an eye to far-off lands on His own errands or other men’s” (Yngl. 7).

The classic instance is Sigmund the Volsung and his son Sinfjotli. They “find a certain house, and two men with great gold rings asleep therein: now these twain were spell-bound skin-changers, and wolf-skins were hanging up over them in the house; and every tenth day might they come out of those skins; and they were kings’ sons: so Sigmund and Sinfjotli do the wolf-skins on them, and then might they nowise come out of them, though forsooth the same nature went with them as heretofore; they howled as wolves howl, but both knew the meaning of that howling; they lay out in the wild-wood, and each went his way; and a word they made betwixt them, that they should risk the onset of seven men, but no more, and that he who was first to be set on should howl in wolfish wise…. And when they were parted, Sigmund meets certain men, and gives forth a wolf’s howl; and when Sinfjotli heard it, he went straightway thereto, and slew them all, and once more they parted” (Vols. 8).

Landn. 14 tells how Dufthak of Dufthak’s-holt “was exceeding shape-strong, and so was Storolf Haengson; he dwelt then at Knoll; there was strife betwixt them about grazing. That saw a man of second sight at eventide about day-set, that a great bear walked from Knoll but a bull from Dufthak’s-holt, and their meeting was in Storolfsfield and they went to it wrathfully, and the bear’s might was the greater. In the morning was that seen, that a dell was left there where they had met together, as if the earth were turned up, and it is named there now ‘Wavepit’. They were both outwearied”.

Thrand the Strider, who helped Snorri the Priest in his attack on the evil-doers at Ere in Bitter, “was said to be not of one shape whiles he was heathen; but the devilhood fell off from most men when they were christened” (Eb. 61).

The power seems to have come sometimes direct from the beast itself. Odd Arngeirson of Lavahaven found his father and brother slain by a white bear, and the bear lying there sucking their blood. “Odd slew the bear, and brought him home; and men say that he ate him all, and accounted himself then to have avenged his father when
he slew the bear, and then his brother, when he ate him. Odd was thereafter evil, and ill to do with. He was shape-strong so exceedingly, that he walked from home out of Lavahaven at evening and came the morning after into Thursowaterdale
^*
to help his sister, that the Thursodalers were minded to stone to hell” (Landn. 306).

Kveldulf’s evening-sleepiness was no doubt considered premonitory of the departure of himself in werewolf form while his body slept. The whole condition is closely allied to berserks-gang (see
note
), and the verb
hamask
means to be seized with that furor
athleticus
: see the instance in
ch.
XXVII
. Skallagrim inherited these propensities from his father, and Egil too shows signs of it in his fits of gloom and of fury.

That shape-changing was sometimes involuntary (and highly undignified) appears from some scoffs in the
Lokasenna
(
C.P.B
. vol. I, pp. 104–6); see also the flytings in the
Helgakviða (ibid
. pp. 136–7), and Sharphedinn’s fatal taunt to Flosi, “Because thou art the sweetheart of the Swinefell’s goblin, if, as men say, he does indeed turn thee into a woman every ninth night” (Nj. 122).

The belief is of course found in every age and land. In India the shape-changer becomes a tiger; in Japan a fox; in Africa a hyaena, less commonly a lion. The Greek word is
λυκάνθρωπος
. Herodotus,
IV
, 105, was told “that once every year each man of the Neurians becometh a wolf for a few days and then is turned again into the same shape as before. Yet am I not all persuaded when they say these things; but they say them none the less, and swear to what they say”.

In Europe the shape is generally of wolf or bear. “Wolf-madness, when men run howling about graves and fields in the night, and will not be perswaded but that they are wolves…. Wierus tells a story of such a one at Padua, 1541, that would not believe to the contrary, but that he was a wolf. He hath another instance of a Spaniard, who thought himself a bear…. This malady, saith Avicenna, troubleth men most in February, and is now a dayes frequent in Bohemia and Hungary, according to Heumius…. They lye hid, most part, all day, and go abroad in the night, barking, howling, at graves and deserts” (Burton,
Anat. Mel
. Part I, Sec.I, Mem. I, Subs. iv). The change was considered to be effected by “an oyntment which they make by the instinct of the devili, and putting on a certayne inchaunted girdle”. Witches, who generally selected smaller and less harmful forms, as the cat, the hare, the crow, the weasel, sometimes used incantations, such as this (to take the shape of a hare):

I sall goe intill ane haire,

With sorrow, and sych, and meikle caire;

And I sall goe in the Divellis nam,

Ay quhill I com hom againe.

And, to resume her shape:

Haire, haire, God send thee caire.

I am in an haire’s liknes just now,

Bot I sall be in a womanis liknes ewin now.
^*

A fine modem story built on the theme of lycanthropy is Prosper Merimée’s
Lokis
.

IV. G
ENERAL
N
OTE ON THE
V
ERSES
.

The stave on the wind at sea, p. 131, will serve as an example by which to explain very shortly and without technicalities the main features of the verse-form in which Egil’s shorter poems are cast. The original reads as follows:

Þel høggr stórt fyr stále
stafnkvígs á veg jafnan
út meþ èla meitle
andœrr jǫtonn vandar,
en svalbúenn seljo
sverfr eirarvanr þeire
Gestels ǫlpt meþ gustom
gandr of stále ok brande.

Lit. “The furious (andœrr) giant (jǫtonn) of the wand
or
branch (vandar) still hews (jafnan høggr) the great (stórt) frost, i.e. ‘ice-cold sea’ (þel) out before the prow (út fyr stále) on the way (á veg) of the stem-bull (stafnkvígs) with chisel (meþ meitle) of storms
or
blizzards (èla); and (en) the cold-robed (svalbúenn) sallow-fiend (seljo gandr) sweeps (sverfr) pitiless (eirarvanr) that swan of Gestil (þeire ǫlpt Gestels) with gusts (meþ gustom) over prow and stem-post (of stále ok brande)”.

I. Now first, as to form.