Page:Sturla the Historian.djvu/6

 6 The intellectual fortunes of Iceland are as strange as its social history. There is the same mixture of very old Teutonic ideas with others that seem to have escaped the Middle Ages altogether, or at any rate to be more at home in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Nowhere is this more manifest than in the histories of Iceland, the prose narrative literature of the republic, in which Sturla, son of Thord, is one of the last and one of the most eminent names. Icelandic prose of the great age is in contradiction to a number of things that are commonly believed and reported about medieval literature: such as, that it is quaint, absurd, superstitious, childish, without perspective. For example: the Edda of Snorri Sturluson is a thirteenth-century prose book that has very little to learn from any renaissance or revival of learning. The tone of it, in its treatment of the stories of the gods, is not what is generally supposed to be medieval; it is more like what one expects from the eighteenth century, amused, ironical, humorous. At the same time Snorri is generous to the old gods and thoroughly interested in their adventures. Peacock, in his dealing with Welsh antiquities, is the modern author who is most like Snorri in this respect, in this curious combination of levity and romance, so unlike the medieval earnestness on the one hand, the medieval farce on the other.

The great work of the Icelanders is to be found in their family histories; those to which the name Saga is commonly given as if by some special right; the stories of Njal, of Egil Skallagrimsson and other famous men of the early days. These books leave the ordinary critical formulas fluttering helplessly about them. They seem to accomplish what for several generations, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was one of the