552 
THE AMERICAN-SC AN BIN AVIAN REVIEW 
pal, “Krummi,” the Icelanders’ pet name for the raven. Stefansson 
finds “Krummi old and black, but my friend,” and woe to those who 
despise his raucous song, “for hearts that worship the Sun may beat 
within breasts tented with black feathers.” Would David Stefansson 
chant of nightingales or skylarks? Hardly! He knows his own, and 
“Krummi,” black and old with his voice “which never reaches a tone 
of beauty, although it owns no other desire than to sing and fly as the 
swans sing of the sun and the sky.” “Abba-labba-la” is not a conven¬ 
tional world Lorelei, but an Icelandic Lorelei. She has no golden 
locks to comb with a comb of gold. She is “dark of cheek and brow” 
and she would not think of turning herself into a fairy of light. She 
is a “vamp” who boasts of her wickedness. She is always dark and 
dangerous, and she lures her victims, nevertheless. 
I am inclined to think that the revival of the thulur —I know no 
other term to apply to these old nursery rhymes—by Mme. Thorodd- 
sen and “ILulda” has done more for the new nationalistic movement 
than most critics of modern Icelandic literature realize. For hun¬ 
dreds of years every Icelandic child has been brought up on thulur, 
whose quaint, lilting, skipping, irregular meter appeals irresistibly 
to the childish mind. I have never found any equivalent to this form 
of versification in any other literature, and I know very little of its 
origin. Sophus Bugge, the Norwegian scholar, and the late Dr. 
Gudbrandur Vigfusson of Oxford were inclined to believe that Ice¬ 
land owed its thulur to the Western Isles, that is, the Orkneys, and 
therefore to Scotland or Ireland. Dr. Halldor Hermansson of 
Cornell University, perhaps the most sound and thorough of the mod¬ 
ern students of Icelandic literature and language, disagrees with this 
view. He thinks they “are products of the literary activity of the 
Icelanders in the twelfth century and perhaps to some extent of the 
two following centuries.” 
The thulur known to all Icelandic children are purely nursery 
rhymes, somewhat akin to Mother Goose. The new thulur are fairy 
tales for young and old and depend somewhat for their popularity on 
the form in which they are written, but most of them stand on their 
own merits, and are singularly appealing and lovely. I find in the 
imagery of many of these poems remarkably close relationship to 
Yeats and Synge and the new Irish school. I therefore tried to find 
out whether Mme. Thoroddsen or “Hulda” read English. I have 
been told that neither has any knowledge whatever of English and 
that they could hardly have come under any influence emanating from 
the new Irish school. 
Another significant tendency in the new Icelandic literature is 
that of ignoring or at least withstanding the temptations the language 
offers for alliteration and intricate verse form. One almost has to 
know the tongue to realize what this means. I doubt that any other 
