ICELANDIC LEGENDS.*
"Tux NORSE LEGENDS" have a very high scientific value, which has only gradually dawned upon the cultivated mind of Europe, as a faint consequence of the modern scientific researches into Greek and Roman, and thence into the wider field of general comparative mythology. The immense impulse given of very late years to comparative philology by the astonishing discoveries due to the application of the modern methods of inquiry, has also found its counterstroke in a corresponding impulse to mythological studies. Thus after ransacking the tales of the East we are gradually beginning to ferret out the old stories nearer home. But so completely had the course of events for many centuries fixed the attention of the European scholar on the East, that the Scandinavian and German mythology remained until a very recent period as remote from his appre- hension, as utterly foreign to his thoughts and interests, as if the relations of distance had been inverted. It was, indeed, natural that his attention should be chiefly turned in the line of his cradle. The Americans are almost better English antiquarians than we are ourselves. And probably centuries hence, they will be far better acquainted with English legendary lore, than with that immense mass of tradition of all kinds which is growing with tropical haste unheeded around them in the fruitful soil of backwood ignorance and superstition. Yet to the future student the indigenous traditions of the American settlements will possess a scientific value of their own, as being the truest record of all the transition links between the English imagination of the olden time and the new imagination of the America of his day.
This illustration is a fair, at all events, we think, a suggestive parallel, as to the place in European history of German and Scandinavian mythology. To our minds there are few recondite fields of history so fascinating as that which investigates the gradual transformation, under change of scenery and circum- stance, of the imagination of nations, a transformation affecting the whole drapery of their thoughts, and even, it can hardly be denied, the very essence of their principles. And it deserves to be pointed out, that it is only within a very few years that the pleasures of such a very-curious and refined, yet profound and all- important, inquiry have been brought so much as within our reach. It is entirely on the foundation of the thread of race which philology has established between the East and West that the vital connection between the different. mythologies has also been proved. So long, indeed, as it remained doubtful whether the Western population was an offshoot from the Eastern, we could only speculate upon the different mythological flora on the supposition that they were indigenous to different parts of the globe. But the filiation of race enables us to study not the growth merely, but the problem of the transformation of imagi- native forms. That much has already been done in detail is well known. How much there is yet to explore is less easy to tell. But every new translation of new Norse legends is a valuable addition to English scholarship.
Who the joint authors of the beautiful volume before us may be we have not an idea, never having seen their names in print
before. If Mr. Powell is a Welshman, as the name implies, he was naturally prepared by native superstition for inquiry into kindred and congenial subjects. Eirikur Magnusson is celiesarity2 Danish name. Possibly in the interests of science a whn and a Dane did put their heads together to add to the sweets of
* Icelandic Legeads, collected by .16n Arneson. Translated by George E. Powell and Skil= Maspatieson. London. Bentley.
the English nursery and the treasures of the English study. And a very excellent contribution they have made, of no less than sixty-six new tales translated from a selection published at Leipzig in 1802 by Mr. Jon Arneson, who, as the editors inform us, is deservedly called "The Grimm of Iceland," and further enriched in its English dress with twenty-eight illustrations by various artists, among whom we trace Mr. Powell's own name. These illustrations are in perfect keeping with the character of the work—no small merit, when we recall the nasty florid clap-trap with which it is now the fashion to adorn boys' own books. The contents are grouped under four heads :—" Stories of Elves," "Stories of Water Monsters," "Stories of Trolls," "Stories of Ghosts and Goblins," and about a score "Miscellaneous Stories," among which last we have "The Black School," "The Fly," " Kalf Arnason," "Priest Hilfthin and the Devil," and (his own name seems to have had strange fascination for the Danish trans- lator) no less than seven stories about Eirikur in a lump. They are, however, salient enough, and one especially witty and terse, about time youth who unwittingly, by his disobedience, having raised a troop of devils, got rid of them by setting them to make rope out of sand.
The opening story, called the "Genesis of the Hid-folk," is very characteristic of the weird, -rough familiarity, in part friendly, in part independent, with which the aboriginal Norseman looked on the supernatural in nature, together with his quaint waggish views of moral retribution.
"Once upon a time, God Almighty came to visit Adam and Eve They received Him with joy, and showed Him everything they had in the house. They also brought their children to Him, to show Him, and these He found promising and full of hope. Then He asked Eve whether she had no other children than these whom she now showed Him. She said None.'
But it so happened that she had not finished washing them all, and being ashamed to let God see them dirty, had hidden the unwashed pnes. This God knew well, and said therefore to her, 'What man hides from God, God will hide from man.' These unwashed children became forth- with invisible, and took up their abode in mounds, and hills, and rocks. From these are the elves descended, but we men from those of Eve's children whom she had openly and frankly shown to God. And it is only by the will and desire of the elves themselves that men can ever see them."
There are many points in this legend which it is interest- ing to compare with the popular Jewish legends of the visits of God to earth, as, for instance, his visits to Adam, and also to the tent of Abraham. We feel how much more mellow, dignified, and sublime was the Jewish imagination, how much nearer, so to speak, it lay to the sun, and to the simple grandeur and majesty of the desert, how much further from the looming,, uncertain grotesquery, the popular pugnacious wit, of the quaintly carved, misty, and trickish North. On the other hand, too, we see the multiplicity of the Northern imagination in the fact that in this very same legend, which opens with one explanation of the origin of the Hid-folk, it ends with another totally different and per- fectly unconnected. The second account, given without note or warning, and probably belonging to another cycle of thought, is as follows :—
" When the devil, in times gone by, made war in heaven, he, with all his armies, was driven into outer darkness. Those who turned their eyes to look after him as he fell, were also driven out of heaven ; but those who were neither for nor against him were sent to the earth, and commanded to dwell there in the rocks and mountains. These are called Elves and Hid-folk."
Again, the contrast is very striking, on the one hand, between the crushing grandeur and devouring cruelty of the Asiatic legends in their earlier forms, or, even in their later forms, the absence of all sense of practical reality and fact, as if life were a dream, and no standard of comparison existed; and, on the other hand, the gradual awakening of the human mind in its migration westward to the spirit of comparison. Man seems to have grown tamer and bolder, to have recovered his wits as he struggled on in the hand of nature, seeing new and milder sights, and to have begun at length to look her in the face, and peck at her secrets familiarly. Then follows a strange freak of ambition, and he
imagines himself behind the scene in the form of the most lovely gods and goddesses that ever• resembled his vainest beau-
ideal of himself. This is the Greek form—a polished, political, rounded, and beautiful conception—as it were, the point of exact perfection and beauty in that line of ideas—a sort of highest life upstairs. But further north, under more adverse circum- stances, man is still partly cowed by the weird churlishness of nature, partly emboldened by the active necessities of existence. Hence a half-sceptical, half-burly spirit of chaff against the queer, morose, tolerably inoffensive aspect, but capricious and mischievous temper of Northern nature on the part of the Norseman; nor is he at all tempted to identify himself with her. There is, too, a strange waggishness amid their half- smothered alarm, as if nature, and all her giants, and elves, and trolls might be one too many for any one man alone in the night, but in the day-time, and with their heads all well together, they knew enough of the world to hold their own, and snap their fingers at her and all her crew. We have not space to pursue the subject further, and we will only add that the new volume of Icelandic Legends before us cannot fail to take its place in every good library, and at the same time be equally welcome in the schoolroom and nursery. The style is beautifully crisp, pointed, and pure ; and Mr. Powell, for to him, we presume, the beauty of the style is mainly due, may congratulate himself warmly on his success. Why on earth did he not give us Mr. Vigftisson's preface ? That was a sad blunder.
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