BOOKS.
THE VIKINGS OF THE BALTIC.*
IF Dr. Dasent had been willing to translate the Jumsvikinga Saga in the same straightforward way in which, years ago, he translated A'jcila, he would, we think, have conferred a greater favour on the reading public than he has done in diluting it into a modern three- volume novel. Dr. Dasent is not at all a good novelist, but he is a very good translator, and be is only thoroughly safe when he is- moving within the rigid lines of some one else's authorship. In the present book, he commences his story with an address to the- The Village of the Baltic. By G. W. Dasent, D.C.L. 3 vole. London: Chapman, and Hall. reader which is little short of impertinent. Vhen one is told to "go away from this nineteenth century, with its manners and customs," "far, far away into the North in the tenth century," and when the author adds,— "You do not care to follow me? Oh yes, you will ; for this will be a very amusing story, full of perilous ventures and hair-breadth escapee, and 3 utterly different from your humdrum and every-day existence—for I will not call it life—that the mere contrast must be as refreshing to you as a dose of quinine to a fever-stricken man on the Gold Coast,"
the reader is all the more affronted at this unseemly famili- arity, when he finds that this "very amusing story" is really an old chronicle of feats by sea and land, rough and uncouth, which Dr. Dasent has taken and adorned, clothing its bald places with picturesque details of his own, and destroying its savage simplicity by adding long passages of a comic sort. If there is one quality less at Dr. Dasent's com- mand than another, it is humour, and accordingly there is some- thing absolutely excruciating in the thread of low comedy that he has thought well to introduce. Again, by way of garnishing his saga, he has introduced us, especially in the nineteenth chapter of Vol. I., to persons who were dead more than two hundred years before this story begins. On the whole, then, we think we are justified in wishing that Dr. Dasent had modestly confined himself to a literal translation of the saga of the Vikings of Joinsborg.
Jomsborg was a haven on the south side of the Baltic, in the estuary of the Oder, being situated, as is supposed, on the inner side of the great flat island of Wollin. Here, during the reign of the Danish King Harald Blaataud, a castle or fortress was built, which served at first to overawe the new Danish conquests in Pomerania. This fortress was first called Hjumsborg, and after- wards Jdnisborg, and is always mentioned by Saxo Grammaticus as Julinum. It was under Palnatoke, a chieftain of great strategic ability and independence of character, that the place first became famous in the history of the North. Palnatoke threw off the do- minion of the Kings of Denmark, and founded a kind of common- wealth at Jomsborg. He was a Pagan, and detested the rapidly increasing power of Christianity in Scandinavia ; he took advantage of the low ebb of the strength of the Danish monarchy to ally himself with the King of the Wends, in whose possession Jomsborg nominally was. He then set himself to strengthen the position of his fortress ; he enlarged the harbour in such a way that three
hundred long-ships could lie at anchor within the castle walls ; great gates shut in the entrance with iron doors, and above these was a stone fort, provided with archers. One side of the castle looked out into the sea, audit was beyond comparison the strongest naval fortress of the age. The laws given by Palnatoke to his men were of the most extraordinary kind. We give them here in Dr. Dasent's words, as he in his turn has found them in the twenty- fourth chapter of the Jonisvileinga Saga:— " No man might be older than thirty or younger than eighteen on ad- mission. No one might stay in the company who yielded to a warrior equipped with the same arms as himself. Every man who entered was bound to make a solemn vow to avenge each of the others as he would his messmate or his own brother. No man was to slander one of the band, or to spread any news till its publication was sanctioned by the captain of the band. If ho did so, he was at once expelled. Even in the case of the paramount duty of that age, the sacred obligation to avenge a blood relation, if two such natural enemies met in the company, the captain was to settle what atonement should be made in money, and then the blood-.feud was to abate. All the spoil which the band took was to be shared in common, and if sold, sold for the good of all. If any one was convicted of holding anything back, ho was to be at once expelled; and if, in any trouble or contest, any one so forgot himself as to utter a word of complaint or fear, he was regarded as a coward, and forced to leave the company. All admissions were to be decided by the valour and prowess of the applicant, and no considerations of kinship or favour were to be listened to. Last, and not least, no one was to be absent from the castle longer than three nights without the captain's leave, and no woman was ever to be admitted into it."
This last clause is, perhaps, the most remarkable in a series of rules almost without parallel in the annals of wild and uncivilised peoples. That a race of uncultured and passionate pirates, totally unaccustomed to self-restraint in any form, should have submitted to discipline so rigid as this, and should have carried on the internal economy of such a curious monastic republic for many years with immense success, is a signal testimony to the wonderful genius of Palnatoke, a man who was long remembered in Scan- dinavia as a kind of demon, sharing with Hakon, Jarl of Norway, the sinister fame of having been the last great champion of the Pagan religion. Under Palnatoke, Jomsborg became the most important State in the whole North of Europe, starting into supremacy as suddenly as Thebes did under Epaminondas, and doomed to a downfall as rapid. The death of Palnatoke was the
real signal for decline, though the commonwealth continued to
flourish for another generation, since with him expired the pagan Bradbury, • 1itan Agnew neand (Poems
faith, a faith which, promising as it did renewed life and vigour in Valhalla to those only who died fighting, gave a value to physical strength and a purpose to valorous enterprise that on milder creed could imitate or sustain. The chronology of this period of history is entirely uncertain ; there is reason to believe, however, that the institution of the rules just recorded did not take place much after A.D. 985. Dr. Dasent takes up the story just after the death, or, as some legends say, the retirement of Palnatoke, and continues it to the end, the miserable defeat of the Jomsvikings in the Voe of Hjiirung.
The first volume is occupied with a description of the appear- ance and institutions of Jomsborg, and the innovations introduced by Palnatoke's immediate successor, Sigvald, who almost imme- diately slackened the severity of the original laws, permitting women to enter the castle, and men to stay longer away than the code permitted. We wonder that Dr. Dasent, who dwells to excess on these innovations, has not drawn attention to the remarka- ble political crisis of the moment. Denmark, under Svend Tveskja,g, had recovered much of its early power ; and Christianity, so influen- tial a generation earlier, had declined so rapidly in Denmark that no religious difficulty could possibly prevent Svend and Sigvald from coalescing. Once peacefully united, Denmark and Jomsborg would have formed a power against which no State in the North of Europe would have dared to oppose itself, but, unfortunately for Paganism, they sought to overpower one another, and brought ruin on themselves. Dr. Dasent tells with great spirit the curious trick Sigvald played on Svend, when he caught him on board ship, and carried him off as prisoner, first to Jomsborg, and after- wards to the Court of Burislaf, King of the Wends, whose daughter King Svend gained his liberty by marrying.
The second volume recounts how the Joinsvikings prepared to make war upon Hakon, Jarl of Norway. It must be confessed that the excitement of the chapters flags a little, notwithstanding all the draughts of "stinging mead" and "funeral ale," the long conversations, not derived from the saga, but from the learned translator's inner consciousness, and the one event of the volume, the burning of Tonsberg, now the mildest of little country towns, but then the capital of Norway. The third volume is full of incident, but of a kind to frighten into fits the "young person" for whom three-volume novels are supposed to be compiled. We seem to float in a mist of blood, there is nothing but hacking of limbs and crushing of skulls from beginning to end. Even as the relation of an old-world battle, the story becomes much too wire-drawn. One might expect that a modern writer would condense the long-winded descriptions of an ancient chronicler, but instead of doing that, Dr. Dasent gives us the tale even more in solution than does the poet in the saga. The history of the final battle in the "Toe of Hjiirung, where the Jomsviking,s were finally defeated, occupies more than 180 pages. But there are more intolerable things than this,—the description of how Kark cut the Viking's throat on p. 203, the beheading of the captives in chapter xiv., the horrible death of Bui on p. 167, all these and many more are incidents too loathsome to be minutely recounted in a popular book, which the author is sure that every one will read, because it is so "very amusing," and so refreshing, in contrast with our own humdrum existence. We advise our readers to get the first volume of the Vilcings in the Baltic, in which we are introduced to a most curious and unfamiliar phase of early Scandinavian life, but we assure them that they will find the second and third neither " amusing " nor "refreshing."
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