“The Riding to Lithend is an Icelandic play taken out of the noblest of the Sagas,” wrote Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie in his review of the published drama in 1909. “[It] is a fight, one of the greatest fights in legend....  The subject is stirring, and Mr. Bottomley takes it into a very high region of poetry, giving it a purport beyond that of the original teller of the tale.... [The play] is not a representation of life; it is a symbol of life.  In it life is entirely fermented into rhythm, by which we mean not only rhythm of words, but rhythm of outline also; the beauty and impressiveness of the play do not depend only on the subject, the diction, and the metre, but on the fact that it has distinct and most evident form, in the musician’s sense of the word.  It is one of those plays that reach the artist’s ideal condition of music, in fact.”

This is high praise; but who, after studying the play, will doubt that it is deserved?  The powerfully moving events of the story indeed lead up to the climax in a forthright and exciting manner.  The terror of the house-women and the thrall, the fearful love of Gunnar’s mother Rannveig, and the caution of Kolskegg his brother, who “sailed long ago and far away from us” in obedience to the doom or sentence of the Thing—­all these bring out sharply the quite reckless daring of Gunnar himself, who braves the decree.  A mysterious and epic touch is added by the three ancient hags-evidently of these minor Norns who watch over individual destinies and announce the irrevocable doom of the gods.  It was Hallgerd who broke their thread, representing, of course, Gunnar’s span of life.

The centre of interest, as well as the spring of the action, is clearly Hallgerd, descendant of Sigurd Fafnirsbane and of Brynhild—­

  ... a hazardous desirable thing,
  A warm unsounded peril, a flashing mischief,
  A divine malice, a disquieting voice.

She, and not any superstitious belief in “second-sight” and death decreed, is the cause of Gunnar’s remaining outlawed.  She wrangles about the headdress, not because she particularly wants it, but to send her husband on a perilous mission to secure it.  She says openly that she has “set men at him to show forth his might ... planned thefts and breakings of his word” to stir him to battle.  Mr. Abercrombie believes that “She loves her husband Gunnar, but she refuses to give him any help in his last fight, in order that she may see him fight better and fiercer.”  We should, then, have to suppose that her amazing speech at his death—­

  O clear sweet laughter of my heart, flow out! 
  It is so mighty and beautiful and blithe
  To watch a man dying—­to hover and watch—­

is not for the blow Gunnar had given her when she “planned thefts and breakings of his word,” but is rather, as the lines powerfully indicate, the exultation of a descendant of the Valkyrie watching above the battlefields.