Historical Lectures and Essays | Page 8

Waterford, the husband of
some saffron-robed Irish princess, "fair as an elf," as the old saying was;
some "maiden of the three transcendent hues," of whom the old book of
Linane says:
Red as the blood which flowed from stricken deer, White as the snow
on which that blood ran down, Black as the raven who drank up that
blood;
--and possibly, as in the case of Brian Boru's mother, had given his fair-
haired sister in marriage to some Irish prince, and could not resist the
spell of their new creed, and the spell too, it may be, of some sister of
theirs who had long given up all thought of earthly marriage to tend the
undying fire of St. Bridget among the consecrated virgins of Kildare.
I am not drawing from mere imagination. That such things must have
happened, and happened again and again, is certain to anyone who
knows, even superficially, the documents of that time. And I doubt not
that, in manners as well as in religion, the Norse were humanised and
civilised by their contact with the Celts, both in Scotland and in Ireland.
Both peoples had valour, intellect, imagination: but the Celt had that

which the burly angular Norse character, however deep and stately, and
however humorous, wanted; namely, music of nature, tenderness, grace,
rapidity, playfulness; just the qualities, combining with the
Scandinavian (and in Scotland with the Angle) elements of character
which have produced, in Ireland and in Scotland, two schools of lyric
poetry second to none in the world.
And so they were converted to what was then a dark and awful creed; a
creed of ascetic self-torture and purgatorial fires for those who escape
the still more dreadful, because endless, doom of the rest of the human
race. But, because it was a sad creed, it suited better, men who had,
when conscience re-awakened in them, but too good reason to be sad;
and the minsters and cloisters which sprang up over the whole of
Northern Europe, and even beyond it, along the dreary western shores
of Greenland itself, are the symbols of a splendid repentance for their
own sins and for the sins of their forefathers.
Gudruna herself, of whom I spoke just now, one of those old Norse
heroines who helped to discover America, though a historic personage,
is a symbolic one likewise, and the pattern of a whole class. She too,
after many journeys to Iceland, Greenland, and Winland, goes on a
pilgrimage to Rome, to get, I presume, absolution from the Pope
himself for all the sins of her strange, rich, stormy, wayward life.
Have you not read--many of you surely have--La Motte Fouque's
romance of "Sintram?" It embodies all that I would say. It is the
spiritual drama of that early Middle Age; very sad, morbid if you will,
but true to fact. The Lady Verena ought not, perhaps, to desert her
husband, and shut herself up in a cloister. But so she would have done
in those old days. And who shall judge her harshly for so doing? When
the brutality of the man seems past all cure, who shall blame the
woman if she glides away into some atmosphere of peace and purity, to
pray for him whom neither warnings nor caresses will amend? It is a
sad book, "Sintram." And yet not too sad. For they were a sad people,
those old Norse forefathers of ours. Their Christianity was sad; their
minsters sad; there are few sadder, though few grander, buildings than a
Norman church.
And yet, perhaps, their Christianity did not make them sad. It was but
the other and the healthier side of that sadness which they had as
heathens. Read which you will of the old sagas--heathen or

half-Christian--the Eyrbiggia, Viga Glum, Burnt Niall, Grettir the
Strong, and, above all, Snorri Sturluson's "Heimskringla" itself--and
you will see at once how sad they are. There is, in the old sagas, none
of that enjoyment of life which shines out everywhere in Greek poetry,
even through its deepest tragedies. Not in complacency with Nature's
beauty, but in the fierce struggle with her wrath, does the Norseman
feel pleasure. Nature to him was not, as in Mr. Longfellow's exquisite
poem, {3} the kind old nurse, to take him on her knee and whisper to
him, ever anew, the story without an end. She was a weird witch-wife,
mother of storm demons and frost giants, who must be fought with
steadily, warily, wearily, over dreary heaths and snow-capped fells, and
rugged nesses and tossing sounds, and away into the boundless sea--or
who could live?--till he got hardened in the fight into ruthlessness of
need and greed. The poor strip of flat strath, ploughed and re-ploughed
again in the short summer days, would yield no more; or