CHAPTER VI: HOWARD THE HALT
Introduction
IN every society and in all periods the obligations of family affection and duty to kinsmen have been recognised as paramount. In the early European communities a man’s first duty was to stand by his kinsman in strife and to avenge him in death, however unrighteous the kinsman’s quarrel might be.
How pitiful is the aged Priam’s lament that he must needs kiss the hands that slew his dear son Hector, and, kneeling, clasp the knees of his son’s murderer! How sad is Cuchulain’s plaint that his son Connla must go down to the grave unavenged, since his own father slew him, all unwitting! One remembers, too, Beowulf’s words: “Better it is for every man that he avenge his friend than that he mourn him much!” Since, then, family affection, the laws of honour and duty, and every recognised standard of life demanded that a kinsman should obtain a full wergild (or money payment) for his relative’s death, unless he chose to take up the blood-feud against the murderer’s family, we can hardly wonder that some of the heroes of early European literature are heroes of vengeance. Orestes and Electra are Greek embodiments of the idea of the sacredness of vengeance for murdered kinsfolk, and similar feelings are revealed in Gudrun’s revenge for the murder of Siegfried in the “Nibelungenlied.” To the Teutonic or Celtic warrior there would be heroism of a noble type in a just vengeance fully accomplished, and this heroism would be more easily recognised when the wrongdoer was rich and powerful, the avenger old, poor, and friendless. While admitting that the hero of vengeance belongs to and represents only one side of the civilisation of a somewhat barbaric community, we must allow that the elements of dogged perseverance, dauntless courage, and resolute loyalty in some degree redeemed the ferocity and cruelty of the blood-feud he waged against the ill-doer.
It is certain that in the popular Icelandic saga of “Howard the Halt” tradition has recorded with minute detail of approbation the story of a man and woman, old, weak, friendless, who, in spite of terrible odds, succeeded in obtaining a late but sufficing vengeance for the cruel slaughter of their only son, the murderer being the most powerful man of the region. The part here assigned to the woman indicates the firm hold which the blood-feud had gained on the imagination of the Norsemen.
Icelandic Ghosts
The story possesses a further interest as revealing the unique character of the Icelandic ghost or phantom. In other literatures the spirit returned from the dead is a thin, immaterial, disembodied essence, a faint shadow of its former self; in Icelandic legend the spirit returns in full possession of its body, but more evil-disposed to mankind than before death. It fights and wrestles, pummels its adversary black and blue, it is huge and bloated and hideous, it tries to strangle men, and leaves finger-marks on their throats. If the ghosts are those of drowned men, they come home every night dripping with sea-water, and crowd the family from the fire and from the hall. Apparently they are evil spirits animating the dead body, and nothing but the utter destruction of the body avails to drive away the malignant spirit.
The Story. Howard and Thorbiorn
Thus runs the saga of “Howard the Halt”: