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.

Books by Maurice Hewlett

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Letters written by Senhouse to Sanchia.

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