in other countries or were at other times, but the Icelandic Saga is a unique plant.
Nor, if we turn to the remains of the early Norwegian poets [Book iv, §§ 2–4], do we find in them either the vocabulary, or the style, or the spirit of these poems; they too have high qualities of their own, but not those which are so marked in the Helgi or the Tapestry-poet. To take more prosaic, but perhaps clearer considerations,—the flora and fauna of the poems, yew-trees, harts, wolves, for instances, are certainly non-Icelandic. Hunting with hounds, bird-clubbing, can never at any time have been pursued in Iceland. The geographical considerations and the vocabulary are also wholly non-Icelandic.
On the other hand, putting Iceland out of the question, the life is not of a kind which we can fancy to have existed in Norway or Scandinavia at the period when these poems were certainly composed. Ladies in bower, working at their tapestry of gold, lofty castles or forts, are quite mediæval in tone, and Scandinavia was not mediævalised till far later than this. On the contrary, in the early Ethic poems, such as the Guests’ Wisdom and the admitted Norwegian poems, the life depicted is singularly primitive and archaic, and the early Kings’ Lives testify to this in every page (notice fetching the reindeer on foot in a thawing fellside). But the quantity of foreign words used by the Helgi, Aristophanic, and Tapestry poets, the foreign customs, the peat-digging, the flora and fauna, are altogether unsuitable; hazel and oak and ash and thorn and willow are certainly un-Norwegian; the fir and birch are its characteristic trees.
Nor do the conditions of life, the budding chivalry of the Helgi poems, the Gaelic vocabulary of our Aristophanes, the air of luxurious plenty of the Tapestry-poet, the strong Christian influence of Celtic cast in the strophic prophetic poems, fall in at all with what we know of Sweden and Denmark in the ninth and tenth centuries.
Where, then, shall we find a place to which the conditions of life depicted in the poem shall apply—a temperate country, with Kelts in or near it, with a certain amount of civilisation and refinement and foreign trade, with Christian influences, with woods and deer and forest trees, with a fine coast and islands, where there were fortified places[1], where there was plenty of rich embroidered tapestry[2], where
- ↑ The Roman towns, Chester for instance, where Ingimund the Ostman and Etheldreda’s men fought, are, as may be seen from Pevensey or Richborough to this day, very striking fortifications of the burg kind. Note too the later forts of Ælfred (London-burgh, etc.) and of his son and daughter, who built the chain of stone and stockaded holds which kept their kingdom safe and enabled them soon to absorb all the Danish settlements and kingdoms in the south of the main island. In Ireland there are the Round Towers; in Scotland many a ‘camp,’ old and new, was manned against the invaders.
- ↑ England is pre-eminently the home of fine needlework, as Ireland of intricate illumination, at this period. The tapestry of Ely (Brihtnoth’s deeds), of Bayeux (the Conquest), the rich cope which Eadmer saw with pride on the Beneventan archbishop’s back at the Council [see the story told at length in English in Dr. Freeman’s
