Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/279

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viewed by the Norsemen of early times. The subject is treated under a series of headings, such as "The World," "Life," "The Soul," etc. ; but the division only serves to emphasize the various aspects of one all-pervading idea, which can perhaps be best expressed as "a sense of the wholeness of life." This sense of wholeness accounts, according to Gr0nbech, for the apparent conventionality of description found in the sagas, as in most primitive literature. The old Norse hero could never be anything but " well-armed," " sword-swinging," " horse-taming," even in his most commonplace actions, since these qualities belonged to his very nature or being, and he would be as incomprehensible without them as the figure of a man would be to a savage if depicted with less than two eyes and four limbs. The same conception is made to account for the e.xtreme importance attached to the maintenance of individual or family honour, — (the two are hardly separable). For an insult or injury meant a break in the unity of the nature attacked, and if left unavenged must lead to annihilation as surely as an ever-bleeding wound. One in whom this process of spiritual disintegration had been allowed to set in was known as -a fiiding, and was not only the most pitiable, but also the most dangerous, of men; for his shattered personality presented a loophole through which the evil forces of Udgard, the outer region of darkness, could make their way into Midgard, the bright, familiar world of men. Hence the nidittg was not merely left to the inevitable ill-fortune that must pursue one whose " luck " was broken : he became an outcast, deprived of all human rights, whether in life or in death. For, whereas the " whole- souled " man passed in death to a shadowy after-life of which the happiness consisted in the knowledge that his name and fame would be revived again and again in the persons of his descendants, for the niding there could be no after-life except as some horror of darkness haunting the place where his life had suffered ship- wreck. And so it became a duty, not only to put him to death, but to annihilate his body and by every possible means to wipe out all remembrance of him from the earth. It is clear from some cases quoted that a tiiding was often merely a sufferer from some slight lack of mental or physical balance : but in the strong life-instinct of a race bred among stern surroundings there could