APPENDIX.

No. III.

AN INQUIRY

INTO

THE ORIGIN, PROGRESS, NATURE, AND CHARACTERISTIC

FEATURES OF

ICELANDIC POETRY.

1

APPENDIX.

No. III.

ICELANDIC POETRY.

Of all the liberal arts, none can lay claim to a more remote antiquity, or boast of a more extensive diffusion, than poetry. Through all the different gradations of mental culture, from the lowest state of uncivilized humanity to the highest degree of refinement, the power of its charms has been felt, and its multifarious utility acknowledged. The shepherd and the husbandman, the legislator and the prophet, the sage, the lover, and the warrior, have, each in his respective station, cultivated the poetic talent, and either converted it into a means of present amusement, consolation, or instruction, or employed it as a vehicle for transmitting the memory of past events to posterity.

The general principles of poetry, like the grand outlines of the human character, are the same among all nations; nevertheless each people display in their poetical compositions, certain peculiar traits and properties, arising from the genius and laws of their language, the nature of their religion, their political and domestic circumstances, manners, and customs, which so completely distinguish these compositions from the productions of other nations, as justly to entitle them to the character of an original and independent national poetry. Thus the poetry of the Hebrews differs from that of the Greeks; the Latin, though more consonant with the latter, from both; and the numerous versified productions of the northern and western European nations from each other.

Though they unquestionably possess much in common, and have, in more instances than one, reciprocated with each other, yet their respective poetry retains a discriminating garb, which may easily be recognised, even by strangers, but is still more perceptible by the native eye.

It has generally been agreed among the learned, that the ancient inhabitants of Scandinavia were, and that the Icelanders still are, possessed of a peculiar and underived national poetry. While the bards and minstrels occupied a conspicuous place in the more westerly regions of Europe, the north exhibited its Skalds: an order of men who were poets by profession, whose names have been enrolled in the annals of fame, and who have left behind them ample specimens of their poetic skill. In the Edda, the Heimskringla, the edited and manuscript Sagas, besides a multiplicity of more recent examples of versification, we possess almost innumerable monuments of northern prosody, all of which bear the most unequivocal marks of independent origin, and well merit the attention of such as wish to become acquainted with the diversified productions of the human intellect, or the peculiar features which it assumes under different circumstances.

Accustomed, indeed, as we are, from our school years, to hear the Roman historians expatiating on the barbarism and ferocity of the northern nations, and taught to regard the terms " Goth” and "Gothic," as synonymous with savage and barbarous, we naturally deem it in a high degree paradoxical to assert, that those very nations, whose furious ravages extinguished the poor remains of expiring genius among the Romans, should cherish the art of poetry with all possible care among their own countrymen ; * but not to insist on events of a recent date, still more irreconcilable with the boasted illumination and refinement of the age, it must not be forgotten, that effeminacy and excessive politeness are even more hostile to some of the principal beauties of poetry-enthusiasm, boldness, and sublimity, than the fierce and martial spirit which generally characterizes the ruder and more ancient stages of society.

In examining the ancient prosody of the north, it is necessary that we divest ourselves of local and educational prejudices, and abandon, as it were, our own ideas of poetic taste; that we make every allowance for the distinctive genius of the language, and • Preface to five pieces of Runic poetry, London, 1763, 8vo.

place ourselves in the circumstances of the poet, and by familiarizing ourselves with his religion, manners, customs, and, in short, his entire range of objects, that we be prepared for taking, not a partial and superficial, but a liberal, penetrating, and extensive view of the whole.

The principal nations of Scandinavia being descended from the Goths or Getæ, who had their seat in the vicinity of the Black Sea, it follows, by consequence, that their poetry is to be traced to the same source. Not that we are able, at this distance of time, to determine its original characters, as it existed among that people, or mark its progress during the subsequent peregrinations of their offspring across the vast regions of Russia and Germany: the storms of ages have obliterated the tract, and all we have to assist us in our inquiry is the guidance of a few scanty and insulated monuments, the inscriptions of which rather leave us to draw inferences, than furnish us with clear and particular directions. The testimony of Herodotus* and other ancient authors in favour of the wisdom of the Scythians, a general name given by the Greek historians to the northern nations, might of itself warrant the conclusion, that the art of poetry was cultivated by that people; for we know, that among the Greeks, a wise man and a poet were often synonymous terms. Ælian, in the second book of his treatise on the nature of animals, describing the hyperboreans, expressly states, that they were addicted to poetry; † and we are informed by Quintus Curtius, that when Alexander sentenced to death for a revolt some of the Sogdians, a people who lived between the Caspian and Black Seas, they were filled with joy to that degree that they sung and danced; and when asked by the king, what was the cause of this frantic and untimely joy? they replied, that as they were soon to be restored to their ancestors by so great a conqueror, they could not help celebrating so honourable a death, which was the wish of all brave men, in their own accustomed songs. ‡ It is impossible for any one, who is at all acquainted with the sanguinary religion of Odin, or who has perused the death-song of Regner Lodbrok, not to be sensible of the palpable coincidence between the spirit of this passage, and that con

In Melpom. lib. iv.

+ Ανθρωπων ὑπερβορέων γενος και τιμας Απολλινος εκείθι άδουσι μεν και ποιητ ύμνουσι δε και συγγραφείς.

See Wharton's Dissert. I. to his History of English Poetry.