When abreast of long, high, and broken Málmey (Malm or sand isle), bluff at both ends, we had fairly entered the Skagafjörð, which my classical friend translates “Sinus qui eminet;” he is less happy with Grafarós, ostium sepulturæ; Gröf, as in “Grafar-lækr,” here means the deeply-encased bed of a stream. A little farther we left to starboard a triad of islands classical in Iceland story. The northern rock-needle bears the common name Karl (old man), whose hip, the Kerlíng (carline), to the south, suggests a ship under sail. The middle, and by far the largest, feature is Drángey, an area of 800 square yards, rising steep-to some 600 feet high, and inaccessible except on the south, where the cliff breaks, and where adventurous cragsmen swarm up to rob birds’ nests. It is one of the richest of its kind, and it is known far and wide as the last refuge of Grettir Ásmundarson, popularly “Grettir the Strong.” The millennial lithograph simply says of this strong man, “outlaw for twenty years, and died in this capacity.” While telling the tale of his well-merited death, the Icelandic speaker’s eyes, to my wonder and confusion, filled with tears: I could not but think of my poor friend James Hunt, who died of a broken heart because “Anthropology” was not welcomed by the “British Ass.” The “Oxonian” abridges the prodigious long yarn spun by the Gretla, and shows the “William Wallace of Iceland,” as the outlaw is called by the admirers of muscular un-Christianity, to have been, pace Mr Morris, even for Iceland, a superior ruffian. With few exceptions, we may say the same of the Saga heroes generally, and it is ethnologically interesting to contrast their excessive Scandinavian destructiveness with the Ishmaelitic turn of the Bedawin—the reader has only to glance at the pages of Antar, translated by Terry Hamilton. But the Arab, though essentially a thief and a murderer, boasting that blood is man’s only dye, and that battle is to him like manna and quails, has a soft corner in his heart which the Iceland poet lacked; he was chivalrous as a knight-errant in his treatment of women; he was great upon the subject of platonic love, whose place in the hyperborean north is poorly occupied by friendship, however tender and true; his poetry was inspired by the sun, not by eternal ice and snow; and, like all the peoples of the glowing south, his fiery savagery is gloomed by a peculiar and classic shade of sadness. Witness this address of the dying Bedawi to his fellow-clansmen:
“O bear away my bones when the camel bears his load,
And bury me beside you, if buried I must be;
And bury not my bones ’neath the burden of the vine,
But high upon the hill, to be sighted and to see;
“And call aloud your names as you pass along my grave,
For haply shall the voice of you revive the bones of me.
I have fasted with my friends during life and in my death;
I will feast with you the day when the meeting shall be free.”
. . . . . . .
We may compare the sentiment with that of the Roman epitaph,
“Hic propter viam positus
Ut dicant prætereuntes
Lolli, vale!”
And one might quote by the score such inscriptions as—
“Have, anima dulcis!”
which breathe only the most tender melancholy. This sentiment, apparently unknown to the rugged and realistic soul of the north, is felt deepest in the brightest climates, for instance, amongst the Hindús, and generally the races which inhabit the “Lands of the Sun.” Nor amongst the Arabs do we find the abominable heroines of Scandinavia; “the grimmest and hardest hearted of all women,” adulteresses all and murderesses, justifying the Norsk proverb, “Woman’s counsel is ever cold (cruel).”
The eastern shore of the Naze Firth then showed Thórðarhöfði, a majestic headland of black lava, coiled and writhed, whose central hollows are striped with yellow clay washed from above; whose upper crags lodge the eagle and his brood, and whose base is caverned by the ceaseless onslaughts of the waves. At first it seems an island, backed by its lakelet, the Höfðarvatn, but it is connected with its mainland by strips of natural causeway to the north and south, not unlike Etruscan Orbetello. Wild strawberries are said to flourish in the well-sheltered hollows. From about Grafarós it wears the aspect of a couchant lion, and doubtless it was of old, like Helgafell, a Holy Hill. The Thórðr who gave it a name was an “illuster and vailzeand compioun” of Irish blood and fifth in descent from Ragnar Loðbrok (hairy-breeks),[85] one of the most unpleasantly truculent persons in Scandinavian myth. His epicedium or death-song, of course composed for and not by him, the only refrain of whose twenty-nine stanzas is—
“We hewed with the hanger” (Hiuggom ver með hiaurvi—Pugnavimus ensibus),