GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



did they stipulate that they should be baptized in the hot springs 

 'in cold weather, for which we can scarcely blame them but we 

 hear of sea-kings, nominally Christians, who never put to sea or 

 engaged in any serious undertaking, without invoking the aid of 

 Thor. 



Halfred the Skald (or poet), when he accepted Christianity, 

 announced that he should never speak ill of the old gods, nor cease 

 to celebrate them in his songs ; and no doubt the Christian doctrine 

 of humility and forgiveness, was a bitter pill to the heroes of many a 

 deed of valour and vengeance ; one can picture the flash of scorn 

 in the Viking's blue eyes, when first told that if his enemy smote 

 him on one cheek he was to turn to him the other ; that if he stole 

 his coat, he was to give him his cloak also. 



Before the awakening of the literary spirit in Iceland (one of the 

 effects of the introduction of Christianity) the scattered Sagas which 

 so commended themselves to William Morris, and the poems called 

 collectively the " Elder Edda " or " The Edda of Saemund," a 

 certain learned Icelandic Priest of the eleventh century, had been 

 passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation, 

 by the Skalds. Grotesque and obscure though they are, having 

 lost much in translation because the peculiarly alliterative form of 

 the verse is difficult to translate into English poetry yet many of 

 the songs of the " Elder Edda " are full of a wild and original 

 beauty. 



The Sagas were prose epics, and the finest, though they deal with 

 events and people belonging to the tenth and eleventh centuries, 

 were not written down till the thirteenth century, William Morris's 

 favourite period. 



But it was not alone the period that commended itself to him ; 

 physically and temperamentally, he was the true descendant of 

 those Norsemen whose heroic literature he so delightedly un- 

 earthed. The man who could drive his head against a wall, so as 

 to leave a deep dent in the plaster, bite almost through the wood- 

 work of a window frame, and who, on one occasion, in illustration 

 of the manner in which passengers landing from a cross-channel 

 steamer staggered beneath the weight of luggage, to the horror and 

 amusement of his audience, tucked a chair under each arm, and 

 lifted the coal-box with his teeth, might well have drawn the sword 

 of Odin from the heart of the Branstock tree, as Sigmund the 



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