|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 5
"It is properly in the bearing of Fritiof's character that I have sought
the solution of this problem. The noble, the high-minded, the bold--which
is the great feature of all heroism--ought not of course to be missing
there, and sufficient material abounded both in this and many other
sagas. But together with this more general heroism, I have endeavored to
invest the character of Fritiof with something individually Northern--
that fresh-living, insolent, daring rashness which belongs, or at least
formerly belonged to the national temperament. Ingeborg says of Fritiof
(Canto 7):
'How glad, how daring, how inspired with hope,
Against the breast of norn he sets the point
Of his good sword, commanding:
"Thou shalt yield!"'
These lines contain the key to Fritiof's character and in fact to the
whole poem." [Tegn�r, Samlade Skrifter, II, p. 393. The entire treatise
is found in English translation in Andersen's Viking Tales.]
In what manner Tegn�r modernizes his story by divesting the original saga
of its grotesque and repugnant features can most readily be illustrated
in a comparison between his account of Fritiof's encounter with king
Helge in Balder's temple (Canto 13) and the original story. The latter
tells how Fritiof unceremoniously enters the temple, having first given
orders that all the king's ships should be broken to pieces, and threw
the tribute purse so violently at the king's nose that two teeth were
broken out of his mouth and he fell into a swoon in his high seat. But as
Fritiof was passing out of the temple, he saw the ring on the hand of
Helge's wife, who was warming an image of Balder by the fire. He seized
the ring on her hand, but it stuck fast and so he dragged her along the
floor toward the door and then the image fell into the fire. The wife of
Halfdan tried to come to her assistance, only to let the image she was
warming by the fire fall into the flames. As the image had previously
been anointed, the flames shot up at once and soon the whole house was
wrapped in fire. Fritiof, however, got the ring before he went away. But
as he walked out of the temple, said the people, he flung a firebrand at
the roof, so that all the house was wrapped in flames. Of the violent
feeling that, according to Tegn�r, racked Fritiof's soul as he went into
exile or of the deep sense of guilt that latter hung as a pall over his
life there is no mention in the original. Here we touch upon the most
thoroughgoing change that Tegn�r made in the character of his hero. He
invested him with a sentimentality, a disposition towards melancholy, an
accusing voice of conscience that torments his soul until full atonement
has been won, that are modern and Christian in essence and entirely
foreign to the pagan story. On this point Tegn�r: "Another peculiarity
common to the people of the North is a certain disposition for melancholy
and heaviness of spirit common to all deeper characters. Like some
elegiac key-note, its sound pervades all our old national melodies, and
generally whatever is expressive in our annals, for it is found in the
depths of the nation's heart. I have somewhere or other said of Bellman,
the most national of our poets:
'And work the touch of gloom his brow o'shading,
A Northern minstrel-look, a grief in rosy red!'
For this melancholy, so far from opposing the fresh liveliness and
cheering vigor common to the nation, only gives them yet more strength
and elasticity. There is a certain kind of life-enjoying gladness (and of
this, public opinion has accused the French) which finally reposes on
frivolity; that of the North is built on seriousness. And therefore I
have also endeavored to develop in Fritiof somewhat of this meditative
gloom. His repentant regret at the unwilling temple fire, his scrupulous
fear of Balder (Canto 15) who--
'Sits in the sky, cloudy thoughts sending down,
Ever veiling my spirit in gloom',
and his longing for the final reconciliation and for calm within
him, are proofs not only of a religious craving, but also and still more
of a national tendency to sorrowfulness common to every serious mind, at
least in the North of Europe." [Tegn�r, Samlade Skrifter, II, p. 394.]
Tegn�r thus found it easy to justify the sentimentality that
characterizes Fritiof's love for Ingeborg, an element in Fritiofs Saga
that has been most severely condemned by the critics. To the criticism
that this love is too modern and Platonic, Tegn�r correctly answers that
reverence for the sex was from the earliest times a characteristic of the
German people so that the light and coarse view that prevailed among the
most cultivated nations of antiquity was a thing quite foreign to the
habits of the North.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|