mouth “Runic rhymes” are the only proper speech.  She stills the tempest with them, and “The Song of the Tempest” is a strong apostrophe, though it is neither Runic nor rhymed.  She preludes her life-story with verses that are rhymed but not Runic, and she sings incantations in the same wise.  This Reimkennar is an echo of the Voeluspa, and is the only kind of Norse woman that the time of Scott could imagine.  Claud Halcro, the poet, is fond of rhyming the only kind of Norseman known to his time, and in his “Song of Harold Harfager” we hear the echoes of Gray’s odes.  Scott’s reading was wide in all ancient lore, and he never missed a chance to introduce an odd custom if it would make an interesting scene in his story.  So here we have the “Sword Dance” (celebrated by Olaus Magnus, though I have never read of it in Old Norse), the “Questioning of the Sibyl” (like that in Gray’s “Descent of Odin"), the “Capture and Sharing of the Whale,” and the “Promise of Odin.”  In most of the natives there are turns of speech that recall the Norse ancestry of the Shetlanders.

In Scott, then, we see the lengthening out of the influence of the antiquarians who wrote of a dead past in a dead language.  The time was at hand when that past was to live again, painted in the living words of living men.

III.

FROM THE SOURCES THEMSELVES.

In the preceding section we noted the achievements of English scholarship and genius working under great disadvantages.  Gray and Scott may have had a smattering of Icelandic, but Latin translations were necessary to reveal the meaning of what few Old Norse texts were available to them.  This paucity of material, more than the ignorance of the language, was responsible for the slow progress in popularizing the remarkable literature of the North.  Scaldic and Eddie poems comprised all that was known to English readers of that literature, and in them the superhuman rather than the human elements were predominant.

We have come now to a time when the field of our view broadens to include not only more and different material, but more and different men.  The sagas were annexed to the old songs, and the body of literature to attract attention was thus increased a thousand fold.  The antiquarians were supplanted by scholars who, although passionately devoted to the study of the past, were still vitally interested in the affairs of the time in which they lived.  The second and greatest stage of the development of Old Norse influence in England has a mark of distinction that belongs to few literary epochs.  The men who made it lived lives that were as heroic in devotion to duty and principle as many of those written down in the sagas themselves.  I have sometimes wondered whether it is merely accidental that English saga scholars were so often men of high soul and strong action.  Certain it is that Richard Cleasby, and Samuel Laing, and George Webbe Dasent, and Robert Lowe are types of men that the Icelanders would have celebrated, as having “left a tale to tell” in their full and active lives.  And no less certain is it that Thomas Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold, and William Morris, and Charles Kingsley, and Gerald Massey labored for a better manhood that should rise to the stature and reflect the virtues of the heroes of the Northland.