Egil’s Saga Read Online Free

age.
    The two essential facts about the old faith which stand out clearly amid much that is doubtful and obscure are, first, its fatalism, and secondly, the relation of fellowship between men and the Gods.
    Fatalism is in the deep foundations of the old Northern mythology. Beyond death, beyond the joys of Valhalla, looms the shadow of Ragnarok—of that
Dies Iræ
, when the Wolf shall be loosed and Midgard’s Worm shall come, and heaven and earth and the blessed Gods themselves shall pass away in catastrophic ruin. The terrors of that Day are foretold in one of the grandest of the Eddic poems, the
Völospá
, from which, to show the spirit of doom and desolation that informs the ultimate things in this creed, I will quote some verses, beginning with the crowing of the cocks in the three worlds to usher in the “One fight more—the best and the last”:
    Sate on the howe there and strake harp-string
    The Grim Wife’s herdsman, glad Eggthér.
    Crow’d mid the cocks in Cackle-spinney
    A fair-red cock who Fialàr hight.
    Crowéd in Asgarth Comb-o’-Gold,
    Fighters to wake for the Father of Hosts.
    But another croweth to Earth from under:
    A soot-red cock from the courts of Hell.—
    Garm bayeth ghastful at Gnipa’s cave
:
    The fast must be loos’d and the Wolf fare free
.
    Things forgot know I, yea, and far things to come:
    The Twilight of the Gods; the grave of Them that conquer’d.
    Brother shall fight with brother, and to bane be turnéd:
    Sisters’ offspring shall spill the bands of kin.
    Hard ’tis with the world: of whoredom mickle:
    An axe age, a sword age: shields shall be cloven;
    A wind age, a wolf age, ere the world’s age founder.
    Mimir’s children are astir: the Judge up standeth,
    Even with the roar of the Horn of Roaring.
    High bloweth Heimdall: the Horn is aloft;
    And Odin muttereth with Mimir’s head.
    Shuddereth Yggdrasill’s Ash on high,
    The old Tree groaneth, and the Titans are unchain’d.—
    Garm bayeth ghastful at Gnipa’s cave
:
    The fast must be loos’d and the Wolf fare free
.
    What aileth the Aesir? What aileth the Elves?
    Thundereth all Jotunheim: the Aesir go to Thing.
    The Dwarf-kind wail afore their doors of stone,
    The rock-walls’ warders.—
Wist ye yet
,
or what
?
    Hrym driveth from the east, holdeth shield on high.
    Jormungand twisteth in Titan fury.
    The Worm heaveth up the seas: screameth the Eagle:
    Slitteth corpses Neb-pale: Nail-fare saileth.
    A Keel fareth from the west: come must Muspell’s
    Legions aboard of her, and Loki steereth.
    Fare the evil wights with the Wolf all;
    Amidst them is Byleist’s brother in their faring.
    Surt from the south cometh, switch-bane in hand;
    Blazeth the sun from the sword of the Death-God:
    The granite cliffs ciash, and the great gulfs sunder;
    The Hell-dead walk the way of Hell, and the Heavens are riven.
    It is against this gloomy background of fatalism and foredoom that the men and women of the sagas play out their lives. This, like a thick black shadow of darkness, shadows their every word and deed, yet leaves them proud, and practical, and unafraid. Count Hermann Keyserling has said, with profound insight, that the belief in predestination is always grandiose in effect where its disciples possess proud souls. And he speaks of the fatalism of Islam in words that might have been spoken of the Northmen: “The fatalism of the Moslem, like that of the original Calvinist, and in contradiction to that of the Russian, is the expression not of weakness but of strength. He neither trembles before the terrible God in whom he believes, nor does he hope for His particular benevolence, nor does he suffer himself to be driven at will by fate: he stands there, proud and inwardly free, opposite to the Superior Power, facing eternity with the same equanimity as he faces death”. * Such a mind we see everywhere in the sagas: in the terrible Skarphedinn when, before the burning of Bergthorsknoll, he chooses the hazard of defending the house