Icelandic literature

“ Jón Trausti and Einar H. Kvaran—who between them form an interesting contrast—were the most prolific novelists at the beginning of the present century. By that time prose was becoming an increasingly important part of Icelandic literature. It would be more or less true to say that in the first thirty years of the century it had gained an equal footing with poetry. For the last thirty years, however, prose has taken first place, after poetry had constituted the backbone of Icelandic literature for six hundred years, or since the end of saga-writing. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This list (and it contains but a few of the published sagas) shows the attention paid to the culture of letters in a remote corner of the world, at a time when the whole continent of Europe was sunk in barbarism and ignorance.—The second or modern period of Icelandic literature by no means commences with the termination of the old literature; a long time of utter mental inactivity followed, and the 15th and 16th centuries produced scarcely anything but a few unimportant religious books. In the 17th century the knowledge of the ancient literature and glory of the island began to revive. ”

“ Although, on account of the exceedingly conservative tendency of Icelandic orthography, the language of Modern Icelandic literature still seems to be almost identical with the language of the 17th century, it has in reality undergone a constant and active development, and, phonetically regarded, has changed considerably. ”

“ Two of the most notable peculiarities of the Icelandic workmanship are thus brought together,—the habit of presenting actions and events as they happen, from the point of view of an immediate witness; and the habit of correcting the heroic ideal by the ironical suggestion of the other side. Nothing is so deeply and essentially part of the nature of the Icelandic story, as its inability to give a limited or abstract rendering of life. ”

“ One at least of the Icelandic Sagas is one of the great prose works of the world—the story of Njal and his sons.
The most perfect heroic literature of the Northern nations is to be found in the country where the heroic polity and society had most room and leisure; and in Iceland the heroic ideals of life had conditions more favourable than are to be discovered anywhere else in history. Iceland was a world divided from the rest, outside the orbit of all the states of Europe ”

“ During this new golden age, several literary tendencies and genres may be observed. But Romanticism remained the most lasting and potent literary force for about a century. However, one of the characteristics of the Icelandic literature of later ages is the infrequent manifestation of literary trends in their purest and most extreme forms. ”

“ Icelandic poetry is characterized by this quality. One has but to compare the account of the end of the world as it is found in the last strophes of Völuspá, or in the Prose Edda, with the similar account in Revelations to see how much two languages may differ in this respect. It would seem as if the short verses characteristic of Icelandic poetry forbade lengthy descriptions. The effect must be produced by a number of quick strokes: there is never time to go over a line once made. A simile is never elaborated, a new one is made when the poet wishes to insist on the figure. ”

“ This clear self-consciousness is the distinction of Icelandic civilisation and literature. It is not vanity or conceit. It does not make the Icelandic writers anxious about their own fame or merits. It is simply clear intelligence, applied under a dry light to subjects that in themselves are primitive, such as never before or since have been represented in the same way. The life is their own life ”

“ What has helped Icelandic to retain its early conditions is, more than anything else, its relative isolation and the consequent minimum contact with other languages, on the one side, and the fact of its unbroken use in literature on the other. The production of literature in Iceland, although it dwindles in value and amount after the classical period until it is awakened to new life by the Reformation, has never wholly ceased since its very beginning. ”

“ The Icelandic sagas proper, that is to say, the narratives which have the description of Icelandic affairs for their object, extend from the time of the first settlement of the island to about the year 1030, a period which, on account of struggles arising from the further colonization of Iceland and from the introduction and establishment of the new faith, necessarily awakened the greatest interest and furnished the richest materials for tradition. ”

“ The survey that this essay takes begins with Thomas Gray (1716-1771) , and comes down to the present day. It finds the fullest measure of the old Norse poetic spirit in William Morris (1834-1896) , and an increasing interest and delight in it as we come toward our own time. The enterprise of learned societies and enlightened book publishers has spread a knowledge of Icelandic literature among the reading classes of the present day ”

“ Old Icelandic was spoken not only in Iceland, but also in Greenland, where Icelandic colonists lived for a lengthened period (983-about 1400) . Our knowledge of its character is almost exclusively Sources. derived from the remarkably voluminous literature, [13] dating from the middle of the 12th century, and written in the Latin alphabet, adapted to the special requirements of this language. Nothing is preserved of older runic literature. [14] Indeed, Old Icelandic possesses only very few runic monuments (about forty) , all of them almost worthless from a philological point of view. ”

“ It is written, like all old Teutonic work of the kind, in alliterative unrhymed rhythm. In Iceland, a new heroic literature was invented in the middle ages, and to this we owe the Sagas, which are, in fact, a reduction to prose of the epics of the warlike history of the North. These Sagas took the place of a group of archaic Icelandic epics, the series of which seems to have closed with the noble poem of Atlamál, the principal surviving specimen of epic poetry as it was cultivated in the primitive literature of Iceland. ”

“ As a result, the art of story-telling was resorted to for passing away the monotony of the dark winter days. The periodical meetings in summer were used for an interchange of news and of stories and poems, and to this day the Icelanders are probably the greatest lovers of oral literature. The Icelandic classics still fonn the most popular reading mat- ter of the masses of the people. This vitality of the Icelandic literature is again closely con- nected with social conditions. ”

“ Other countries, though their languages were not conquering their conqueror as English was doing with French, also displayed sufficient individuality in dealing with the models and the materials with which French activity supplied them. The best poetical work of Icelandic, like the best work of its cousin Anglo-Saxon, was indeed over before the period began, and the best prose work was done before it ended, the rapid and never fully explained exhaustion of Norse energy and enterprise preventing the literature which had been produced from having effect on other nations. ”

“ The decline of oral tradition can also be partly accounted for by the fact that the social conditions in Iceland gradually assumed a new character and consequently the saga materials, which were formerly liable to develop anywhere, now gathered around a few centres and no longer awakened the same general interest as before. The original institutions under which the Icelandic freeman considered himself the equal of every other freeman in the land, had gradually developed into the government of a few, inasmuch as a comparatively large power was centred in the hands of a few chiefs ”

“ Icelanders. Inhabitants of Iceland, originally Norwegians, who settled there about the end of the ninth century. A typical tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed Scandinavian race. The Icelandic Sagas form the chief part of ancient Scandinavian literature.
Idumæans or Edomites. A warlike Semitic race of Canaanite stock, thought to be descended from Esau, who were conquered by the Israelites under Saul and David, and again by Judas Maccabæus in 165 B.C., after which they disappear from history. ”

“ Bishop Percy noticed, that the historian of the Runic poetry has counted up among the ancient Icelandic poets one hundred and thirty-six different metres. The Icelandic and the Anglo-Saxon are cognate languages, being both dialects of the ancient Gothic or Teutonic. The genius of the Danish Scalds often displays in their Eddas8 a sublime creative power far out of the reach of the creeping and narrow faculty of the Saxon, yet the same mechanism regulated both ”

“ He was well read in German literature, Heine and Schiller being his favourites, and the study of the German masters and the old classical writers of Iceland opened his eyes to the corrupt state of Icelandic poetry and showed him the way to make it better. ”

“ Celtic influence is also specified as affecting Norse literature in general. The first generations of Icelandic poets were men of good birth, "nearly always, too, of Celtic blood on one side at least"; and they went to Norway or Denmark, where they lived as kings' or chiefs' henchmen. The immigration of Norse settlers from Ireland, too, affected the Iceland stock very early. "It is to the west that the best sagas belong: it is to the west that nearly every classic writer whose name we know belongs; and it is precisely in the west that the admixture of Irish blood is greatest" (ib.) ”

“ The mass of a stock must supply our data for judging the stock. But see, moreover, what I have said at p. 100.
[120] Lord Strangford’s note on this is:—‘The Irish monks whose bells and books were found in Iceland could not have contributed anything to the old Norse spirit, for they had perished before the first Norseman had set foot on the island. The form of the old Norse poetry known to us as Icelandic, from the accident of its preservation in that island alone, is surely Pan-Teutonic from old times ”

“ But he, the grandson of the founder of the house, wrote at any rate a large part of the history; there is no doubt of that, so that for this time there exists not only a contemporary chronicle, but the memoirs of one who was most intimately concerned, himself one of the persons in the drama.
And his work is the completion of Icelandic prose. It is hardly a metaphor to say that it is the mind of Iceland, expressing itself in the best way at the end of the old Icelandic life. ”

“ The strength and distinction of Icelandic poetry rest rather on the fact that it is original and national and, like that of Greece, owes little to foreign sources; and that it began in the heathen age, before Christian or Romantic influences had touched Iceland. Valuable as the early Christian poetry of England is, we look in vain there for the humour, the large-minded simplicity of motive, the suggestive character-drawing, the swift dramatic action, which are as conspicuous in many poems in the Edda as in many of the Sagas. ”

“ Thus, as a mass, the Icelanders are without doubt the best educated people in the world.
For six centuries the Icelanders have evidenced their love of literature by writing and preserving old Sagas and Eddas;—by producing original works on mythology, law, topography, archaeology, &c.—several of these at once the earliest and best of their kind in Europe ”

“ The literary history of Iceland, in the early ages of the republic, is of a most interesting character. When we consider the limited population of the country, and the many disadvantages under which they labored, their literature is the most remarkable on record. The old Icelanders, from the tenth to the sixteenth century, through a period in the history of the world when little intellectual light beamed from the surrounding nations, were as devoted and ardent workers in the fields of history and poetry as any community in the world, under the most favorable circumstances. ”

“ Poetry.—Iceland has always borne a high renown for song, but has never produced a poet of the highest order, the qualities which in other lands were most sought for and admired in poetry being in Iceland lavished on the saga, a prose epic, while Icelandic poetry is to be rated very high for the one quality which its authors have ever aimed at—melody of sound. ”

“ Iceland has always borne a high name for learning and literature; on both sides of their descent people inherited special poetic power. Some of older Eddaic fragments attest the great reach and deep overpowering strength of imagination possessed by their Norse ancestors ”

“ In the history of Scandinavian culture, however, lie some special illustrations of sociological law. The remarkable fact that the first great development of old Norse literature occurred in the poor and remote colonial settlement of Iceland is significant of much. To the retrospective yearning of an exiled people, the desire to preserve every memory of the old life in the fatherland, is to be attributed the grounding of the saga-cult in Iceland ”