History as literature, and other essays

by Theodore Roosevelt

The heroes are much like those of the early folk of kindred stock everywhere. They are huge, splendid barbarians, sometimes yellow-haired, sometimes black- or brown-haired, and their chief title to glory is found in their feats of bodily prowess. Among the feats often enumerated or referred to are the ability to leap like a salmon, to run like a stag, to hurl great rocks incredible distances, to toss the wheel, and, like the Norse berserkers, when possessed with the fury of battle, to grow demoniac with fearsome rage. This last feat was especially valued, and was recognized as the “heroes’ fury.” As with most primitive peoples, the power to shout loudly was much prized, and had a distinct place of respect, under the title of “mad roar,” in any list of a given hero’s exhibitions of strength or agility; just as Stentor’s voice was regarded by his comrades as a valuable military asset. So, when the slaughter begins in Etzel’s hall, the writer of the Nibelung lay dwells with admiration on the vast strength of Diederick, as shown by the way in which his voice rang like a bison horn, resounding within and without the walls. Many of the feats chronicled of the early Erse heroes are now wholly unintelligible to us; we can not even be sure what they were, still less why they should have been admired.

Among the heroes stood the men of wisdom, as wisdom was in the early world, a vulpine wisdom of craft and cunning and treachery and double-dealing. Druids, warlocks, sorcerers, magicians, witches appear, now as friends, now as unfriends, of the men of might. Fiercely the heroes fought and wide they wandered; yet their fights and their wanderings were not very different from those that we read about in many other primitive tales. There is the usual incredible variety of incidents and character, and, together with the variety, an endless repetition. But these Erse tales differ markedly from the early Norse and Teutonic stories in more than one particular. A vein of the supernatural and a vein of the romantic run through them and relieve their grimness and harshness in a way very different from anything to be found in the Teutonic. Of course the supernatural element often takes as grim a form in early Irish as in early Norse or German; the Goddess with red eyebrows who on stricken fields wooed the Erse heroes from life did not differ essentially from the Valkyrie; and there were land and water demons in Ireland as terrible as those against which Beowulf warred. But, in addition, there is in the Irish tales an unearthliness free from all that is monstrous and horrible; and their unearthly creatures could become in aftertime the fairies of the moonlight and the greenwood, so different from the trolls and gnomes and misshapen giants bequeathed to later generations by the Norse mythology.

Still more striking is the difference between the women in the Irish sagas and those, for instance, of the Norse sagas. Their heirs of the spirit are the Arthurian heroines, and the heroines of the romances of the Middle Ages. In the “Song of Roland”—rather curiously, considering that it is the first great piece of French literature—woman plays absolutely no part at all; there is not a female figure which is more than a name, or which can be placed beside Roland and Oliver, Archbishop Turpin and the traitor Ganelon, and Charlemagne, the mighty emperor of the “barbe fleurie.” The heroines of the early Norse and German stories are splendid and terrible, fit to be the mothers of a mighty race, as stern and relentless as their lovers and husbands. But it would be hard indeed to find among them a heroine who would appeal to our modern ideas as does Emer, the beloved of Cuchulain, or Dierdrè, the sweetheart of the fated son of Usnach. Emer and Deirdrè have the charm, the power of inspiring and returning romantic love, that belonged to the ladies whose lords were the knights of the Round Table, though of course this does not mean that they lacked some very archaic tastes and attributes.

Emer, the daughter of Forgall the Wily, who was wooed by Cuchulain, had the “six gifts of a girl”—beauty, and a soft voice, and sweet speech, and wisdom, and needlework, and chastity. In their wooing the hero and heroine spoke to one another in riddles, those delights of the childhood of peoples. She set him journeys to go and feats to perform, which he did in the manner of later knight errants. After long courting and many hardships, he took Emer to wife, and she was true to him and loved him and gloried in him and watched over him until the day he went out to meet his death. All this was in a spirit which we would find natural in a heroine of modern or of mediæval times—a spirit which it would be hard to match either among the civilizations of antiquity, or in early barbarisms other than the Erse.

So it was with Deirdrè, the beautiful girl who forsook her betrothed, the Over-King of Ulster, for the love of Naisi, and fled with him and his two brothers across the waters to Scotland. At last they returned to Ireland, and there Deirdrè’s lover and his two brothers were slain by the treachery of the king whose guests they were. Many versions of the Songs of Deirdrè have come down to us, of her farewell to Alba and her lament over her slain lover; for during centuries this tragedy of Deirdrè, together with the tragical fate of the Children of Lir and the tragical fate of the Children of Tuirenn, were known as the “Three Sorrowful Tales of Erin.” None has better retained its vitality down to the present day. Even to us, reading the songs in an alien age and tongue, they are very beautiful. Deirdrè sings wistfully of her Scottish abiding-place, with its pleasant, cuckoo-haunted groves, and its cliffs, and the white sand on the beaches. She tells of her lover’s single infidelity, when he came enamoured of the daughter of a Scottish lord, and Deirdrè, broken-hearted, put off to sea in a boat, indifferent whether she should live or die; whereupon the two brothers of her lover swam after her and brought her back, to find him very repentant and swearing a threefold oath that never again would he prove false to her until he should go to the hosts of the dead. She dwells constantly on the unfailing tenderness of the three heroes; for her lover’s two brothers cared for her as he did:

“Much hardship would I take,

Along with the three heroes;

I would endure without house, without fire,

It is not I that would be gloomy.

“Their three shields and their spears