Chapter XXV: The End of It

They say that Cormac set sail in the _Raven_ before noon of the day when he said good-bye to Stangerd. And they say that when he was in the open sea, clearing Grimsey, which is the most northerly of the islands, he saw a sea-beast of grey colour in the sea upon the port bow. He had a spear in his hand, and, as the beast swirled up alongside the ship, he threw the spear and pierced her side. She rolled over, and he saw her dead blue eyes and broad, expressionless face. He said to his brother Thorgils, “That was the face of Thorveig the spae-wife, who set a curse upon me. If she is dead now? What had I best do?”

Thorgils said, “There’s no going back now.”

“There’s no going back at all, in my belief,” Cormac said.

* * * * *

It is true that just about then Thorveig the spae-wife did die; but Cormac did not go back, and I believe he never saw Stangerd again, though he never forgot her, and died at last with her name in his mouth. He served the Kings of Norway for many years; became a great Viking; was known in Ireland and Scotland. They say, indeed, that he made a settlement for himself at Scarborough in England; but I don’t know how that may be. So far as I am concerned, I have done with him.

As is the case with all good tales, there are more sides than one to Cormac’s. Was he cursed by the spae-wife, or by his own nature? Did he well by Stangerd, or ill? Was the poet right who said that when one of his kind loves a woman, the woman will be sorry for it?

The same poet, who is not Cormac, closes his version of the story upon a note which can be variously interpreted.

He says:

So much for Cormac. And what _she_ gain’d
Of her wild lover, or how suffer’d
To have her well of sweetness drain’d
By one or other as he offered--
She was a woman and, men think,
Rewarded; for they crav’d, she proffer’d;
They thirsted and she gave them drink.
They dipt their cups for what she coffer’d,
And if they needed, should she shrink
Lest she might come to want? Their thriving
Was hers, we say--without a wink,
Because we mean it. She got by giving.
For giving man life is her living.
At least, that’s man’s serene persuasion.
He calls it her re-generation.

Now that’s all very well; but--I should like to have Stanvor Slimlegs’ opinion more than anyone’s.

NOTE

Two English versions of this tale are known to me, both literal translations of the Saga as it now stands. One of them, the more critical and crabbed of the pair, is to be found in the second volume of York Powell’s and Vigfussen’s _Origines Islandicæ_; the other, which includes a good deal omitted in the first, and is a more genial work altogether, if not so correct, is by Messieurs W. G. Collingwood and Jón Stefánsson, and was published at Ulverston, in Lancashire, in 1902. It is embellished with charming landscapes of the places named in the tale. Both of these versions have been useful to me, and I hereby express my obligations to their learned authors; but both of them render Cormac’s tale exactly as it now exists, with all its joints loose, and some missing, with an abrupt beginning, no middle, and no end. My business with it has been to make it accountable, and relate part to part; for as it stands it is not reasonable; its parts don’t cohere; it seems to lack human nature and that logic of events which only a study of human nature can give. Those must have been in the tale once, but they are not there now, and I have tried to put them back again. We are apt to stumble upon the discrepancies in old stories, to put them down to outlandish customs, or outmoded ones, or the vagaries of the romancer, and to slur them over. But it’s not the way to get the good out of a good tale to say: “To be sure, it might be better, but let’s get on....” Human nature knows neither time nor place, has been very much the same in Odin’s day and in Christ’s, is very much the same in Iceland and in England, and in all the countries I ever heard of or saw. Reading closely into Cormac’s tale, I find it quite reasonable and full of human nature as we know it now.

Cormac was a poet, so much the better or so much the worse than other poets before him or since in that he didn’t know it, or at any rate didn’t know what his _poiesis_ involved. He didn’t know when he began, but he had an inkling before he had done. Men of his sort, who joy in the thought rather than the deed, and see beauty the better the less they handle it, have flourished in the world at all ages of it--in the days of Paris,[A] who did basely, in the days of Dante, who did sublimely, and in our own, when thinking and doing alike are going out of fashion in favour of talking about one or the other. Therefore, according to me, there is sound human nature in the tale of Cormac’s preposterous love-making, and no less in the account of the lovely Stangerd whom he so long and squeamishly beset. As for old Berse of the many battles, he is a man of men, and deserves a saga all to himself. He had one once, but it has perisht.

M. H.

[A] This may seem a hard saying, yet I am very sure that Paris had more joy in considering Helen’s beauty than in consuming it.

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