FICTION
ANCESTORS
The Tree of the Folkungs. By Verner von Heidenstam• (GyldendaL 2 vols. 12s. net.) WE view the past through distorting glasses. Rome and Greece, flanked by a pyramid, fill all the foreground. Along with Christianity from the Mediterranean lands came also Mediterranean myths and a reverence for southern virtues that have blinded us a little to our more native, more northern traditions. Most of us have even forgotten that the Norman conquest was a conquest, not by Latin invaders, but by North-
men. Because civilization moves slowly northward, writers are bound to seek their formal culture in the south, and our men of letters, since long before the Renaissance even, through a descent of classical scholars and romantic poets, have made Italy and Greece their Mecca, as much as if we English were in fact exiles from the Adriatic. And yet our virtues, and our intuitions, both national and literary, are utterly non-Hellenic, non-Latin. There is something in a frosty day which makes our blood tingle happily : Christmas of the holly and mistletoe is our festival. And our children take more naturally to Hans Andersen and Grimm with their pine trees than to Kingsley's Heroes and olive-groves.
In M. Verner von Heidenstam's The Tree of the Folkungs there is a particular northern vigour, common sense, tenderness of imagination and spirituality which calls to something inherent in the English reader. The book is no more to be called a historical novel than are William Morris's magnificent but all.
too-unread prose romances : M. von Heidenstam never makes Scott's fault of turning archaeologist and bore. The Tree of the Folkungs is a splendid, sweeping story : it tells how a Swedish family of viking origin was founded, and how Christianity came to Scandinavia.
Back from plunder on the high seas, laden with a sack of treasure, Folke Filbyter makes his home of a shed, sets up landmarks, builds a great hall roughly furnished :-
" His first care was to provide, not wall-hangings" or decorated bowls, but twelve white -hens and a red cock . . . Though his thralls could scarcely have found a better master, they would readily have forgiven him for beating and starving if only he had borne himself somewhat more proudly, marking the distance between himself and them. They would have liked him . . . to spread a white cloth on his table and forbid them to eat at it."
This, by the way, is a characteristic passage. M. von Heidenstam continually with one deft hint throws in the description of his scene, and the psychological situation too, economically and yet convincingly.
Folke takes a dark-skinned dwarf-girl of the woods to wife, and when his sons are grown sends off the two oldest, well- equipped, as vikings : but the youngest he keeps at home because he is not valiant, but quick of speech and thoughtful. How angry is Folke when the first Christian missionary comes to his hall, begging. There had been no beggars in Gothland till then. But Ingevald, his son, is struck by the Christian beggar's kissing him in return for the blows it is his duty to administer. And when the boy marries a cold, forced bride, he begins to " brood on life and death and good and evil " until when his beautiful, haughty wife dies in giving Folke a grand- son, Ingevald also looses his hold on life. Folke sees him dying quite unmoved, he is enchanted with the baby :-
" It was his own flesh and blood, and it did not surprise the thralls ,o see the former sea-king sit rocking the cradle like a woman . . . They surrounded him . . . with shouts of laughter when they, saw how clumsy: he was . . . Nor had they ever heard such lullabies, for their master sang the ernly songs he knew. They were gloomy war-songs which he had heard the vikings sing as they sat at their oars and the lights of the coast of Frankland twinkled as distant and as tiny as the stars."
But the Christian missionary comes again, while the master of the house is out ploughing, baptizes the dvinst Ingevald and steals the child. From that time on the old man only lives to recover the stolen babe :-
" There was a hollow in the earthern floor, made by himself° when he sat by the cradle. It made him think of a plundered nest and-he burst into wailing . . . The thralls threw down their picks and spades and joined him to share his grief. It had never entered their minds that Folks Filbyter had a heart. And now it burned before them with such a flame that their own shrivelled hearts were kindled by it."
The terrible and unscrupulous old man becomes quite mild, though never less impressive, as he rides up and down the land seeking his lost grandchild unavailingly. The years pass. His two oldest sons, back from Constantinople, return as valiant Christian guards of the new Christian king. The story leaps two hundred years, presses on to the days when old rough Folke's descendant Valdemar is King of Sweden, and chivalry has come in the train of the new religion, to all Europe. This second part of the story of the Folkungs is told with every bit as much of that rare combination of delicacy and strength which is M. von Heidenstam's peculiar genius, and the debonair Valdemar's character is portrayed as searchingly and as wholly as that of his grandiose ancestor.
M. Verner von Heidenstam's name is unfamiliar, although he is a Nobel prize-winner, but his power is equal to the great compass of the half-traditional, half-imaginative tale he tells. The book is full of small dramatic incidents, each perfect in itself, yet finding its true place in the whole large scheme of action. The actual writing is not pretentious, yet able to conjure up vivid landscapes, sounds of husbandry and warfare, tones of voice and the footsteps and gestures of a vital con- course of people. And in the creation of the legendary Folke Filbyter, M. von Heidenstam achieves emotional greatness of rare order. Not the most cynical, most hardened reader could read unmoved of the old decrepit father's discovery by his ambitious sons and grandson : it is heartbreaking in its effortless simplicity and as impossible to read dry-eyed as the last act of Lear.
When the autumn evenings come, those who still have leisure to enjoy a stirring tale and a moving tale might well keep The Tree of the Folkungs at hand. It tears the reader away from a perpetual contemplation of one-half of his past, the acquired half, to a mighty and invigorating view of the other, the northern and natural half. For in most of his characteris- tics old Folke Filbyter is the father not alone of a race of kings, but also of those unanalysable but historically important figures, the English squire and the English gentleman.
Previous page
