Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/224

 dim reflection, have very considerable poetical merit; many, again, are extremely flat and prosaic, and are merely prose ideas cut into the shape of verse by the scald. These, it must be recollected, may have had their beauty and merit in the technical construction of the verse, and may have been very pleasing and harmonious, although such merits is lost upon us in a different language. The ideas are all we can get at; not the forms and technical beauties of the expression of those ideas. It will not escape the observation of the English reader that in the ideas there is a very tedious monotony, in the descriptions of battles and bloodshed, in the imagery of war, in the epithets applied to the warriors and kings; and in general there is a total want of sentiment or feeling. The spirit is altogether material. The scalds deal only in description of material objects, and mainly of those connected with warfare by sea or land. But this, no doubt, belongs to the spirit of the state of society and times; and it will be considered of some importance to know what the ideas were which were then considered poetical, and which pleased the cultivated classes for whom the scalds composed. The English public will be able, in some degree, from these translations, to judge what the poetry of the scalds was,—what may have been its real poetic merit: of the labour and difficulty of presenting these pieces to the public, even in this imperfect way, none can judge but those who will try the same task.