Then the temptation comes to Frithjof to slay the old man who had stolen his bride; but after a brief struggle he hurls his sword far away into the forest.
"Straight the ancient king awakens. 'Sweet has been my sleep,' he said.
'Pleasant 'tis to sleep in shadow, guarded by a brave man's blade.
But where is thy sword, O stranger, lightning's brother, where is he?
Who has parted one from other that should never parted be?'"
"'Not a whit care I,' said Frithjof, 'I shall find a sword some day;
Sharp, O King, are tongues of falchions, words of peace they seldom say;
In the steel dwell swarthy demons, demons strayed from Nifelhem,
No man's sleep to them is sacred, silver locks embitter them.'
"'Youth, no moment have I slumbered, but to prove thee feigned to rest,
Unproved men and weapons never trusts King Ring without a test.
Thou art Frithjof. I have known thee since thou first cam'st to my hall;
Much that thou hast hidden from me; from the first I guessed it all.'"
Soon after this interview the aged king feels death approaching; and in order not to go to the dark abode of Hela, he cuts death-runes upon his breast and ascends to Odin's bright hall. But before dying he gives Ingeborg to Frithjof, and makes him the guardian of his son. The people, in Thing assembled, glorying in Frithjof's great renown, desire, however, to make him King's successor; but he lifts the small boy above his head upon his shield and proclaims him king. He returns home and rebuilds Balder's temple, whereupon the sentence of outlawry is removed, and he is reconciled to Ingeborg's brothers and marries the beloved of his youth.
The last canto, called "The Atonement," is perhaps the most flagrant violation of historical verisimilitude in the whole epic. A hoary priest of Balder actually performs the wedding ceremony in the restored temple, and pronounces a somewhat unctuous wedding oration, which differs from those which Tegnér himself had frequently delivered chiefly in the substitution of pagan for the Christian deities. As a matter of fact, marriage was a purely civil contract among the ancient Norsemen, and had no association with the temple or the priesthood, which, by the way, was no separate office but a patriarchal function belonging to the secular chieftainship. But Tegnér's public were in nowise shocked by anachronisms of this sort; they probably rejoiced the more heartily in the happiness of the reunited lovers, because their marriage was, according to modern notions, so "regular."
It was soon after his publication of "Frithjof's Saga" that Tegnér became Bishop of Wexiö. He then removed from Lund and took up his residence upon the estate Oestrabo, near the principal town in his diocese. The great fame of his poem came to him as a surprise; and he even undertook to protest against it, declaring with perfect sincerity that he held it to be undeserved. In letters to his friends he never wearied of pointing out the faults of "Frithjof" and his own shortcomings as a poet. In a letter to the poet Leopold (August 17, 1825), who had praised the poem to the skies, he argues seriously to prove that his admiration is misplaced:
"My great fault in 'Frithjof' was not that I chose my theme from the old cycle of sagas, but that I treated it in a tone and with a manner which was neither ancient nor modern, neither antiquarian nor poetical, but hovered, as it were, on the boundary of both. For what does it mean to treat a subject poetically if not this, to eliminate everything which belongs to an alien and past age and now no longer appeals to any heart? The hearts to which it once did appeal are now all dust. Other modes of thought and feeling are current. It is impossible to properly translate one age into another. But to poetry nothing is really past. Poetry is the beautifying life of the moment; she wears the colors of the day; she cannot conceive of anything as dead.... But I am convinced that all poetic treatment of a theme belonging to a past age demands its modernization; and that everything antiquarian is here a mistake. This holds good not only in regard to the northern tone but also in regard to the Greek. Look, for instance, at Goethe's 'Iphigenie.' Who does not admire the beautiful, simple, noble, Hellenic form? And yet who has ever felt his soul warmed by this image of stone?... No living spirit has been breathed into these nostrils; the staring eyes gaze upon me without life and animation; no heart beats under the Hellenically rounded marble bosom. The whole is a mistake, infinitely more beautiful than 'Frithjof,' but fashioned according to the game principles of art. The Greeks said that the Muse was the daughter of Memory; but this refers only to the material, the theme itself, which is everywhere of minor consequence. The question, then, is as to the proper treatment. Where it tends toward the antiquarian it misses the mark; it represents, like 'Frithjof,' only a restored ruin."
This passage is by no means the only one in which Tegnér, with an utter absence of vanity or illusion, judged his work and found it wanting. There is no mock modesty in his manly deprecation of the honors that were showered upon him; but as a father knows best the faults of his child whom he loves, so he knew the defects of his work, as measured by his own high standard, and refused to accept any more praise than was his due. Not even the fact that Goethe expressed his admiration of "Frithjof's Saga" could persuade him that he was entitled to the extravagant homage which his enthusiastic countrymen accorded him. There were even times when he disclaimed the title of poet. Whether he was forgotten a little sooner or a little later, he said, was a matter of small moment.
"Speaking seriously," he writes in 1824 (accordingly before the publication of "Frithjof"), "I have never regarded myself as a poet in the higher significance of the word.... I am at best a John the Baptist, who is preparing the way for him who is to come."