Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/223

 or freely paraphrased them into modern ballads, or songs, in modern measures. Grundtvig has done so with great poetic genius and spirit; and his translations have justly placed him in the first rank of Danish poets. Many of his translations might be placed by the side of the best pieces of Burger or of Scott in the ballad style; but then they are Grundtvig's, not the scalds'. They are no more a translation of the verses of the scalds quoted by Snorro Sturleson, than Shakspeare's Hamlet is a translation of the story of Hamlet in Saxo Grammaticus.

The translator and Mr. S. Laing have rendered into English verse these scaldic pieces of poetry, from prose translations of them laboriously made out. The ideas in each strophe, the allusions, and imagery, were first ascertained by collating the Norse translations of them in M. Jacob Aal's excellent translation of the Heimskringla published in 1838, and those in the folio edition of 1777, and the Latin prose translations of them by Thorlacius and "Werlauf, in the sixth volume of that edition, published in 1826, with the Icelandic text. The ideas, allusions, and imagery are, much oftener than could be expected, obtained, and rendered line for line; and the meaning of each half strophe is always, it is believed, given in the corresponding four English verses. The English reader, it is hoped, will thus be better able to form an idea of the poetry of the scalds, than if the translators had been more ambitious, and had given a looser paraphrase of those pieces according to their own taste or fancy. Some of these pieces of scaldic poetry, it will be seen even by this