Chapter IX

We find the poet in the humble white house at the corner of Franciskan and Kloster streets in Lund, pacing the floor of his spacious two-windowed study, murmuring and humming his verses to himself, and now and then pausing before an open cabinet that serves him for a desk, to write down his strophes as he completes them. In the room two canary birds are warbling; accompanied by their song he is composing his "Fridthjof." He is at this time about forty years old; neither passion nor disease have as yet imprinted their traces on his visage The furies are lurking on his threshold; but it almost seems as if they purposed to await the completion of the main work of his life before they crossed it, and seized upon him for their prey. His brow is clear and arched; his gaze bright and free.

"Both earnest and profoundly true
Is every feature of his noble face,"

as he says of his Axel.

He has chosen his theme, or more correctly speaking, his theme has emerged from the memories of his childhood and presented itself so alluringly before him that he has designed the outlines of its treatment, and commenced his work within them. He wishes to furnish a picture of life in the ancient north. With full conviction he had formerly joined the "Gothic" union; for he saw in the national historic and poetic tendency of this society the true medium course between the cosmopolitan rationalistic culture and the exaggerated Teutonic enthusiasm of the "Phosphorists." He soon experienced the grief, however, of seeing how his worthy and ardent ally, Pehr Henrik Ling, who had taken a position in the intellectual life of Sweden similar to that of Arndt and Jahn in Germany, drove the Swedish public in alarm from the poetry of northern antiquity by his boasting language and his colossal disregard of form. His awkward touch on harp strings made of northern bear sinews destroyed the superb material which, in the hands of Oehlenschläger, had won all hearts in Denmark. Tegnér concluded to take one single saga as a central point about which to gather all the most characteristic images of the ancient north: viking life and brotherhood in arms, the wisdom of the Hávamál and the vows made on Frey's boar at Yuletide, the heroic song and the election of kings at the Thing, the self infliction of wounds with the point of the sword and the runic stone, the poesy of life and of death in ancient times. There must be a good, pure atmosphere in the poem; a sharp, fresh breeze must blow through it; Scandinavians should feel at home in it; but beyond all else there must be none of the icy temperature of the old Norse poems of the worthy Ling! This saga was, of course, a love story, and with the yearnings and sorrows of love the hard web of his material must be permeated. The material was Norse, but the treatment must be Swedish; Norway and Sweden which not long before had been divided, must now be blended together in song. There was a rustling in his mind's ear as of the clash of shields and the whizzing of a shower of arrows, the rattling of quivers and the clinking of foaming beakers, the stamping of fiery coursers and the restless flight of hooded falcons, blows on the sword and strokes with the sword, and through it all the long, languishing, cooing, dreamy nightingale note and the still more thrilling call of the quail in the stillness of the summer night. As regards the scenery he truly had no need to transplant himself in fancy into its midst; he had become too thoroughly familiar with it in his childhood and youth in the country to require any such effort. He knew them well, these trees with white trunks and drooping crowns; one of them bore two characters in its birch trunk: were these the letters, "E" and "A," or was it an "F" and an "I" in runes? He knew, between fir-overgrown coasts, this smooth icy path over which the steel-footed warrior sped, while behind him came rushing the sledge in which sat that fair young queen who would soon pass over her own name on the ice.

"And many a rune, too, on the ice he engraves;
Fair Ing'borg drives o'er her own name on the waves."[11]

And when the springtime came, when the billows beckoned enticingly, when the sea spoke aloud of deeds of valor, while the boats along the coast seemed most urgent in their invitations to come on board and seek a knowledge of the world, he was well aware what a viking must have felt at such a moment.

"Ellide, too, now has no sport on the sea;
Now ceaseless her cable she jerks to get free."[12]

But it was not possible to journey forth into the world. At the foster-father's house, at Hilding's,--at Myhrman's, on the Rämen estate,--dwelt the fairest of the fair, the beloved one whom it was impossible to forsake. And all the memories of youth, sweet and childlike, overpower him at this thought. He remembers how it was his wont to carry to Anna the first anemone that blossomed and the first strawberry,

"The first pale flow'r that spring had shed,
The strawberry sweet that first grew red."[13]

And he dreams of so many good times when he and she (or was it Fridthjof and Ingeborg?) paused in their wanderings by the rustling waters of the forest streamlet, and there was no other way for Ingeborg to cross than to let him bear her over in his arms, and smiling he wrote,

"So pleasant feels, when foam-rush 'larms,
The gentle ding of small white arms!"[14]

And unconsciously there blends with these memories another erotic enthusiasm of a more recent date, another form, that of the fully matured Ingeborg--not Anna Myhrman, whose footsteps are heard in the adjoining room. The footsteps of the excellent housewife who is now in the meridian of life do not reach his ear; no, it is a younger, more attractive face, a slenderer form, another, more musical voice; he dare not love this woman, it were contrary to divine and human law; she is married to King Ring, to Fridthjof's friend, whose confidence in him is unbounded. Fridthjof must away, far out to sea, to deaden his yearning with deeds of valor and victories. But one day--late though it may be, one day will come the hour of atonement, and the stormy heart of Fridthjof will find repose.

The old Norse Fridthjof's Saga is a narrative written in Iceland about the year 1300; it is assumed that the historic portions of the incidents took place about the year 800. Fridthjof, the son of a bonde, who was brought up with the king's daughter Ingeborg, sues for her hand and is rejected. In order to be revenged on her brothers, he refuses to give them his powerful aid in the war against King Ring, and avails himself of their absence to enter into a betrothal with Ingeborg, who has been shut up by her brothers in Baldershage a place consecrated to Balder, where it was forbidden man to embrace a woman, for it was supposed that Fridthjof would not dare seek a rendez-vous in that sacred spot. But Fridthjof defies the gods, visits Ingeborg, and violates the temple. Meanwhile peace is concluded with Ring on condition that the brothers give the aged king their sister to wife. Of Fridthjof they demand that he go forth on their errand to collect tribute from Angantyr, on the Orkney Islands. During his absence they set fire to the home of his fathers. Fridthjof returns, finds the king sacrificing in Baldershage, and casts the purse of silver he has brought with him into Helge's face with such force that Helge falls down in a swoon. Through an accident Balder's image is cast into the fire, and the whole house becomes wreathed in flames. Fridthjof flees, returns, visits King Ring, saves the life of the old king, and, when finally the latter dies, marries Ingeborg.

In this plot Tegnér's poetic eye detects the main features of an object of universal human interest, and susceptible of generalizing symbolism. Fridthjof struggles for his love with reckless defiance; in spite of all the powers that be, he is determined to conquer his happiness amid storm.

"His good sword pointing to the norn's fair bosom,
Thou shalt,' saith he, 'thou shalt give way!"'[15]

He refuses to obey a royal mandate. In the prime of his manhood he becomes, first a violator of the temple, then a temple burner, then the outlawed, proscribed "Wolf in the Sanctuary" (_varg i veum_). He flees and does penance, renounces and is purified, and receives at last the hand of the beloved object of his affections as a reward, not for his struggle, but for his persistent fidelity. Not the maiden but the widow, not happiness itself but the pale reflection of happiness, he embraces as his bride. Was not this in itself a symbol of human life?

One step more and the symbol stands completed in all its radiance. There was a central point to the saga which, beneath the poet's gaze, must necessarily become transformed to a fruitful germ. This was the sanctuary of Balder. About a Balder's temple everything revolves; here Ingeborg is imprisoned; here Ingeborg and Fridthjof meet; here the kings offer sacrifice. The temple was honored; it was violated; it was burned to the ground.

Balder was a peculiar god; in him paganism, as the contemporaries imagined it, was brought into contact with the Christianity many would gladly have adapted to it. Balder represented paganism without fierceness, Christianity without dogmatism. The Jesus in whom Tegnér believed, like him whom Oehlenschläger acknowledged, had more of the nature of a Balder than of a Christ. And it was the temple of Balder that Fridthjof, in his youthful arrogance, had burned. This burning of the temple must necessarily be made the main catastrophe of the saga; it determined, with overwhelming force, a highly spiritual conclusion. Fridthjof must necessarily end by rebuilding the temple which he had burned to ashes.

For is not youthful vigor in its uncurbed impetuosity always a violator of the temple, and do we not all end in our years of maturity with an honest effort to atone for the profanation committed in the heat of youthful passion? Do we not all, to the best of our ability, build the temple larger, stronger, more beautiful than we found it? As it was with that emperor who found a metropolis of wood and left behind him one of marble, so it will be at all times with energetic and earnest natures who discover their surroundings to be swayed by a hallowed temple of poor wood; they will bum it to ashes, and leave behind them another Balder's temple, and the strongest among them one like that of Fridthjof.

"Of granite blocks enormous, joined with curious care
And daring art, the massy pile was built, and there
(A giant work intended
To last till time was ended)
It rose like Upsal's temple, where the North
Saw Valhal's halls fair imag'd here on earth."[16]

Thus conceived, the poem grouped itself about a grand, simple, fundamental thought, and with this before his eyes Tegnér proceeded, first of all, to plan the final romance.

Of course, every feature of the old narrative could not be used. But of the changes he undertakes, only those have psychologic interest in which his poetic character is to be recognized.

First of all, he removes everything that from an erotic point of view could give offence to a reader, above all, to a lady reader of his day. For this reason all family bookcases were thrown open to his poem. According to Tegnér's own confession, he gained the idea for his "Fridthjof" from Oehlenschläger's "Helge," and in Denmark people have never been quite able to comprehend how it was that the imitation attained so much greater fame than the vigorous original; but how was it possible that a poem which, like that of Oehlenschläger, from beginning to end treated of a northern Vendetta, of fratricide, arson, drunkenness, rape, tarring, and incest, could ever vie for public favor with a poetic work like "Fridthjofs Saga," which was made, as it were, for a birthday or a Christmas present, and which, in fact, for more than twenty years, has been a standing confirmation gift for young girls in Germany? To be sure, Tegnér keeps up an incessant play (with a relish, too, that to me personally is very distasteful) on words and expressions, with which, according to accepted literary standards, the idea of something sensual is connected; he compares Ingeborg's bosom to "budding roses" and other protuberances, which a female bosom is as wholly unlike as it is possible to be; but in this harmless dalliance of the poet is exhausted all tendency to sensuality in the poem. His Scandinavians of old love like a well-bred couple of affianced lovers in modern Sweden. Yet, while they do not for one instant forget themselves, the poet is less strict, and we sometimes feel his eye fixed on Ingeborg's white neck. It would certainly have been better had the poet's eye been more chaste and had Fridthjof been more human. From the way in which the sexual element of this love story is treated, we are strongly reminded that the poet is not only invested with an academician but with a priestly office, and is about to mount to a still higher one. Plainly enough Tegnér has wished to make the poem conform thoroughly to modern views of heroic virtue and female chastity. Therefore, although he allows Fridthjof to pass the night with Ingeborg in Baldershage, it is done in all propriety and honor, and he has Fridthjof, when accused in the Thing, solemnly declare that he had not broken Balder's peace. Thus Tegnér does not hesitate to rob his poem of its actual ideal centre of gravity, the conscious and defiantly executed desecration, if by so doing he succeeds in preserving the decorum of his narrative. Fridthjof declares that his love belongs rather to heaven than to earth; at his rendez-vous with Ingeborg he wishes that he were dead, and, with the pale maid in his arms, could wander to Valhal--certainly a most unnatural thought for an impassioned lover in the hour of his bliss.

"To that far heaven my love belongeth,
More than this earth,--receive it then;
In heav'n 'twas nurtured, and it longeth
To reach its starry home again."[17]

Strange words from the lips of a poet who, moreover, was never weary of pursuing Platonic love with mockery, and with pretty sharp mockery too. His own was a fiery, passionate temperament. Notwithstanding his marriage, his years, and his office, he was an ardent and, as rumor declared, frequently a successful adorer of the fair sex. His conversational tone with ladies was often so loose as to scandalize people; and in letters, aphorisms, and poems published after his death, he made no concealment of his realistic conception of love. He does not even pay homage to the spiritualistic presentation of the relation of the sexes in poetry. He writes, for instance:--

"_Aeneadum genitrix, hominum divumque voluptas_ is not only poetized by the ancients, but deified as well. Our sentimental, nervous contemplation of love is by no means the only one, still less the most vigorous. How pale and weak, even from a purely poetic point of view, are most of the modern erotics with their water-colored tintings when compared to the eternal fresco paintings of the ancients!" And yet I should hesitate to believe that Tegnér would allow himself to be guided in this point exclusively by conventional motives. He was educated in far too idealistic doctrines ever to draw, with full consciousness, from a model, nor has he had a defined model for Ingeborg, as can plainly be detected in the poem itself, which on that account lost in individual realistic life what it gained in typical grandeur. Yet wholly without a model no artist can paint, and entirely without remodelling the dispositions and impressions of real life no poet can compose, least of all so subjective a poet as Tegnér. In the beginning of the poem he was inspired by the memories of his intercourse with his betrothed bride on the country estate of her parents; the idyllic element of Fridthjofs love undoubtedly arises from these memories, but not its dreamily enthusiastic pathos. Numerous indications point to the fact that Tegnér, who, like most poets, was always half in love, was thoroughly enamored during the years when he was writing his "Fridthjofs Saga."

At the time when the canto in which Fridthjofs love attains its highest lyric expression was written (1824), Tegnér's affections may perchance have still been in a state of ecstatic, half-unconscious frenzy, now intersected with budding desire, now with that languishing for death, which sometimes accompanies even prosperous love, when an excess of passionate yearning, filling and torturing the soul, calls forth the wish that the heart might break:--

"How bless'd were he already yonder!
How bless'd who now with thee could die,--
And, conqu'ring, 'mong the gods could wander,
Embracing his pale maid on high."[18]

Perhaps he was simply not in a condition to carry into poetic practice his own poetics of love. As there are, undoubtedly, poets who, with full justice, can take for their motto the line,--

"_Vita verecunda est, Musa jocosa mihi,"_

so, too, there are poets who, especially at the time when romantic idealism governed poetry, have felt themselves constrained by an inner impulse to realize the formula of the opposing ranks.

The second modification of his materials--in which Tegnér's literary individuality vigorously betrayed itself--is the removal of all that might strike us as burlesque in the ancient narrative. The burlesque features appeared to the idealistic poet simply disturbing and odious. I choose a prominent example.

The ninth chapter of the old saga, in which Fridthjof brings the tribute to the sacrifice-offering kings, represents Balder-worship in the following vivid manner: "Then Fridthjof went in and saw that there were but a few people in the hall of the dises; the kings were there at the time sacrificing, and sat drinking. Fire was burning on the floor, and the wives of the kings sat at the fires and warmed the gods, whereas other women were anointing the gods and wiping them with napkins. Fridthjof went before King Helge, and said, 'Here you have the tribute.' Herewith he swung the purse wherein was the silver, and threw it at his nose so violently that two teeth were broken out of his mouth, and he fell into a swoon in his high seat; but Half-dan caught him, so that he did not fall into the fire.... But as Fridthjof walked over the floor toward the door, he saw that goodly ring (which he had given Ingeborg) on the hand of Helge's wife while she was warming Balder at the fire. Fridthjof took after the ring, but it stuck fast to her hand, and so he dragged her along the floor toward the door, and then Balder fell into the fire. But when Half-dan's wife caught after him quickly, the god that she had been warming also fell into the fire. The flame now blazed up around both the gods, as they had previously been anointed, and thence it ran up into the roof, so that the whole house was wrapped in flames. Fridthjof got hold of the ring before he went out."[19]

The objections that may be raised to the historic reliability of this presentation are not unknown to me. But what a superb piece of prose from an ethnographic and picturesque point of view! How plainly the narrative brings the whole naïvely burlesque scene before the mind's eye!

Whoever has beheld in the Berlin museum the little clay image of an old Norse goddess, can form a vivid conception of these odious little idols which the pious women hold on their laps, anointing them and warming them by the fire. Everything is admirable here; the old northern piety which leads the people to see a Balder in the puppet, with the same burning faith that in our day leads men and women of the people in the South to see the Queen of Heaven in another puppet, and the surrounding scenery with the smoking wood-pile in the centre and the drinking knights in the adjoining hall. A more modern poet with a lively appreciation of the coloring of time and locality would not have had the heart to alter the slightest trifle in such a scene; he would have viewed it as a treasure-trove. I do not speak of the realists; realists do not write romance cycles; I have in mind the great stylists among the poets of the present day. It is a scene which might have been introduced into Victor Hugo's "_La légende des siècles_" (The Legend of the Centuries); but still better adapted would it have been for so rigid an artist as Lecomte de Lisle, who might have interwoven it in his "Poèmes barbares." To Tegnér, however, this scenery only seemed rude, odious, wholly unavailable for poetic art. The sharp contrasts between barbaric and Hellenic poetry did not exist for him; he strove to the best of his endeavors to Hellenize his barbaric material. From principle he refrained from mingling the wild burlesque element with a pathetic or beautiful whole. Instead, he painted--and with profound art--a night in which the midnight sun stands high in the heavens; in which Balder's pyre, the symbol of the sun, bums on the consecrated stone, while pale priests, with silvery white beards, stand with flint-knives in their hands around the temple wall. The statue of Balder towers up on a pedestal, with Fridthjofs ring entwined about its arm, and the king, with his crown on his head, is busied about the altar. This scenery is far more beautiful than that of the saga, but it is abstract and much less individual.

Besides the scandalous and burlesque elements in his material, there is a third thing which Tegnér recoils from and avoids. It is guilt.

It belongs to Tegnér's poetic system to shun all sharply pronounced guilt, no less than all that is decidedly odious or quaint. His hero is too benignly good to be carried to extremes of passing rage, revenge, or fierceness. He makes an assault and controls himself at once. He does not take revenge, as in the saga, for the mortification and grief the kings have inflicted on him; he does not scuttle their ship on his return home in order to punish them for the injustice they have done him; his weapon-brothers sink the vessel later, in order to facilitate Fridthjofs flight. We saw, furthermore, that Fridthjof, in his relations to Ingeborg, according to Tegnér's treatment, was guilty of no actual profanation of the temple. But most strikingly does the poet's solicitude to avoid profound guilt reveal itself where Fridthjofs relation to the burning of the temple is described. In the saga Fridthjof always displays a haughty spirit towards Balder. He declares that he rates the favor of Ingeborg of more account than that of Balder. When the return of the kings compels him to give up his nightly visits in Baldershage, he speaks with a certain irony concerning Balder to Ingeborg, saying, "Well and handsomely have you treated us, nor has the bonde Balder been angry with us."[20] And finally, when through his heedlessness fire has arisen in Balder's temple, in his destructive rage he flings a flaming firebrand at the roof. Tegnér gives the scene quite differently. The state of mind of his Fridthjof toward Balder is most pious; he kneels before him at Ingeborg's side, and commends to his protection their mutual love; he makes energetic efforts to extinguish the fire in the temple, and when these fail, he moves away weeping and full of anguish.

Thus transformed, the character as a whole is more human and more noble, although undeniably less primitive, but the idealizing and modernizing process rendered it impossible to avoid a certain conflict between the character as it was represented by the poet, and several of the energetic traits that were attributed to it by the saga, and that passed unaltered into the poem. During the completion of the work, the poet must many times have queried within himself, whether it were after all worth while to treat ancient materials, when the antiquarian and the poetic elements could not be harmonized without incessant and useless compromises. His letters are full of evidences of this doubt; when the work was at length finished, after a struggle with the materials that lasted fully five years, they criticise "Fridthjof" most severely; they remind the admirers of the poem that poetry must be a "growing and not a preserved fruit"; they ring continued changes on the theme that "Fridthjof" is too much of an ancient saga to be a modern poem, and is in too high a degree modern poetry to be an old Norse saga; they declare that all poetry must be modern, "in the same sense that flowers are so in the springtime," and they condemn all that is archæological in the poem, as newly built ruins. Nevertheless, the universal critical mood has not erred when it rather took umbrage at the too modern than at the too antique element of the poem. A rigid stylist would not have had Fridthjof forbid the presence of women on board ship in his "Viking Code," with such a sentimental play of words as the following:--

"For the dimple deceives on her cheek, and her tresses
Would net-like entrap thee above."[21]

Tegnér himself draws a parallel between his work and such studies as Goethe's "Iphigenia" and Walter Scott's "The Lady of the Lake." The last parallel has more truth than the first, although Tegnér himself says, "the Scotch particularism in Scott, like the Judaical tone in the Old Testament, limits and suppresses what might otherwise have freer and higher flight." Tegnér finds himself in a literary-historic station, which is half-way between the two extremes, Walter Scott and Byron. Half a century of his life falls within the lifetime of Goethe, and he witnessed the whole of Byron's life. From Goethe, whom it was difficult for him to understand, he learned but little; he showed himself most susceptible to his influence when it approached him through Oehlenschläger; for the Byronic impression his temperament was more open, yet he held himself bravely above all contamination, and the effort to do so was facilitated in a higher degree by the romantic idealistic vaccine with which he had early been inoculated. As a poet he was too filled with his own _ego_ to comprehend the impersonal element in the creative powers of Goethe; on the other hand, his egotism was not sufficiently profound to enable him to follow Byron on his voyages of discovery within subjectivity. Like Scott and Oehlenschläger he is national, closely bound to his country, his people and its heroic past; but there is in his nature a tendency against distinctly marked personality: he approaches the Byronic type at a certain remoteness.

As soon as the sixteenth to the nineteenth cantos of "Fridthjof" appeared in the year 1820, a universal cry of admiration rang through Sweden. Even the members of the romantic school, deeply moved, extended their hands for reconciliation. Before the entire work was completed (1825) Tegnér's fame had spread to the neighboring countries, especially to Germany, where Tegnér's first translator, Frau Amalia von Helwig, so well known as the friend of Goethe, made the aged poet acquainted with fragments of "Fridthjof," and won for it his favor. He called the attention of the German public to the poem, and although what he wrote about Tegnér in the vigorless style of his old age scarcely amounts to a dozen lines, it can readily be understood what an event a recognition on the part of Goethe grew to be in a small country like Sweden. Goethe's words read as follows: "We need not enter into any detailed statement to prove to those readers already friendly to the North, how admirable these cantos are. May the author as speedily as possible complete the entire work, and may the excellent translator continue to take pleasure in her labors that we may possess this sea-epic complete in the same purport and tone as what has already appeared! We would only add the brief remark that the vigorous, gigantic, barbaric style of antique poetry, approaches us, in a manner nearly incomprehensible to ourselves, with a new, musingly tender, yet undisfigured and highly agreeable form." To this day the Swedes never weary of referring to these words of praise. The admiration for Tegnér in his fatherland increased with the growing popularity of the poem; indeed, after his death it became so strong that it drowned almost all criticism, and finally reached its climax in such exaggerations as that of Mellin, who proclaimed Tegnér to be the "greatest poet of the Teutonic race." That homage to the man, however, which is and will always remain the best, is that which is at the same time homage to the truth.