Balder is the creation of Old Norse poetry that is most popular with contemporary English writers, and Matthew Arnold first made him so.  As Bugge points out, no deed of his is “celebrated in song or story.  His personality only is described; of his activity in life almost no external trait is recorded.  All the stress is laid upon his death; and, like Christ, Baldr dies in his youth."[21]

SIR GEORGE WEBBE DASENT (1820-1896).

Among the scholars who have labored to give England the benefit of a fuller and truer knowledge of Norse matters, none will be remembered more gratefully than Sir George Webbe Dasent.  Known to the reading public most widely by his translations of the folk-tales of Asbjoernsen and Moe, he has still a claim upon the attention of the students of Icelandic.  As we have seen, he gave out a translation of the Younger Edda in 1842, and during the half century and more that followed he wrote other works of history and literature connected with our subject.  Two saga translations were published in 1861 and 1866, The Story of Burnt Njal, and The Story of Gisli the Outlaw, which will always rank high in this class of literature. Njala especially is an excellent piece of work, a classic among translations.  The “Prolegomena” is rich in information, and very little of it has been superseded by later scholarship.  In 1887 and 1894 he translated for the Master of the Rolls, The Orkney Saga and The Saga of Hakon, the texts of which Vigfusson had printed in the same series some years before.  The interest of the government in Icelandic annals connected with English history is indicated in these last publications, and England is fortunate to have had such enthusiastic scholars as Vigfusson and Dasent to do the work.  These men had been collaborators on the Cleasby Dictionary, and in this work as in all others Dasent displayed an eagerness to have his countrymen know how significant England’s relationship to Iceland was.  He was as certain as Laing had been before him of the preeminence of this literature among the mediaeval writings.  Like Laing, too, he would have the general reader turn to this body of work “which for its beauty and richness is worthy of being known to the greatest possible number of readers."[22]

To mark the progress away from the old conception of unmitigated brutality these words of Dasent stand here:[23] “The faults of these Norsemen were the faults of their time; their virtues they possessed in larger measure than the rest of their age, and thus when Christianity had tamed their fury, they became the torch-bearers of civilization; and though the plowshare of Destiny, when it planted them in Europe, uprooted along its furrow many a pretty flower of feeling in the lands which felt the fury of these Northern conquerers, their energy and endurance gave a lasting temper to the West, and more especially to England, which will wear so long as the world wears, and at the same time implanted principles of freedom which shall never be rooted out.  Such results are a compensation for many bygone sorrows.”