Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/106

88 phrases, and has thus become exceedingly flexible. It has a great abundance of grammatical forms, and, consequently, gives the poet great liberty in the arrangement of his words; furthermore, there is such a wealth of rhymes, and particularly of alliterations in the language, that they come as it were spontaneously even to an inexperienced writer of verses.

In connection with this universal taste and talent for verse-making we find an equally widespread respect for, and gratitude toward, those who in a wider and profounder sense deserve the name of poets, who not only have the gift of uniting words in rhyme and metre, but who also know how to express the thoughts and feelings of the race and to paint in true and graphic colors pictures of popular life.

In few countries in the whole world is the talent for poetry in the true sense of the word so universal as in Iceland, and nowhere else is the true poet so highly honored by his people as here. The gift of poetry is in Iceland in reality a patent of nobility which is recognized wherever the poet comes both among the rich and among the poor, and by the common peasant not less than by the scholar. In these peculiarly favorable circumstances we must certainly look for the chief explanation of the fact that this small nation during centuries of want and suffering has been able to produce a line of poets, many of whom really have claim to a prominent position in the poetic galleries of the civilized world. This opinion will be approved by every one who does not shrink from conquering the obstacles which he will meet with in a tongue which is but little known, and in the very peculiar character of that poetry, a character which is so new and strange to all who are not born Icelanders, and which in some respects is a result of the never perfectly interrupted connection with the strongly marked culture of the poetry of antiquity. These obstacles are in fact so great, that the translation of modern Icelandic poems into a modern tongue, so as to preserve not only the spirit but also the peculiar phrases and the charac-