LONGFELLOW Papers Presented at the Longfellow Commemorative Conference April 1-3, 1982

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Until his death in May 1982, Dr. Hiler was Professor of English, Emeritus, at the University of Washington in Seattle. He was the author of Longfellow and Scandinavia, as well as the editor of The Diary of Clara Crowninshield and The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 6 volumes).

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When I was asked to speak on the subject of Longfellow and Scandinavia, I agreed hastily, foolishly confident that I would have something new to say on an old subject. When one revisits the scenes of one's youth, objects once sharply etched seem strangely altered by time and memory; and the prospect of revisiting my forty-year-old study of Longfellow's relationship with the northern languages and literature encouraged me to believe that I would be obliged to smile indulgently at the dated quality of my youthful work. A sad happiness, however, if you will permit the oxymoron, requires me to say that the long interval between my first preoccupation with the subject and the present moment has not served to make me more enlightened, only less long-winded. What I have prepared, therefore, is a condensation of the facts and theories that I first collected as a graduate student, fresh with the enthusiasm of exploring an original subject and with admiration for Longfellow as a kindred scholar. Thus I break no new trails, make no new claims, alter no old conclusions. I simply revisit an old interest.

Some years ago a distinguished reviewer of the first two volumes of the Longfellow Letters, Mr. Louis Untermeyer, called me to task for remarking in my introduction that Longfellow had a "keen and expansive mind." "Expansive—never!" he thundered in the Saturday Review, implying that the poet, if not narrow-minded, was nevertheless unduly restrained by the religious, political, and literary perimeters of his day. It is perhaps presumptuous of me to argue with Untermeyer's judgment, particuarly as he is no longer with us to defend himself, but "expansive," in the sense of intellectual breadth, is, I think, a proper adjective to use in any attempt to define a New England literary mind that became involved with Scandinavia 150 years or so ago.

In the 1820s and 1830s Scandinavia was as little known in the United States as, one might say, Siberia is today. Its population was small (Sweden in 1835 had half as many people as Massachusetts today), its history was only vaguely known to Americans, its literary personalities generally unfamiliar. Northern Europe was an Ultima Thule to most New Englanders if, indeed, they gave it a thought. That Longfellow should become motivated to make the difficult journey to Scandinavia, learn Swedish and Danish, translate poetry from these languages, write original poetry on Nordic themes, and accumulate a unique library of Scandinavian literary works, is, it seems to me, an example of an expansive mind at work.

How Longfellow developed his interest in this remote region is a subject filled with ironies. It involved Rome in 1828; the Palazzo Crispoldi at No. 21 Piazza Navona, where Longfellow boarded with the family of a druggist named Innocenzo Persiani; and Giula, Persiani's eldest daughter, a twenty-five-year-old widow of provocative charms. Here in Rome, against a backdrop of animated conversazioni, music, and youthful infatuations, he made the acquaintance of Karl August Nicander, a Swedish poet of modest fame, eight years his senior, who shared his enthusiasm for the Palazzo Crispoldi and his romantic interest in the lovely Giula. Nicander introduced him to various members of the Scandinavian colony in Rome—writers, artists, sculptors, wealthy expatriates, and minor diplomats—and began painting idealized pictures of his northern homeland, perhaps secure in the belief that his new American friend would never test the reality of his descriptions. Thus Longfellow became indoctrinated with notions of Scandinavia as a land of long summer nights, pastoral refinement, and literary and artistic innovations. He returned to Bowdoin College in 1829 with the belief that Scandinavia represented a kind of northern Italy, cooler perhaps, and less spirited, but certainly worth a voyage of discovery, should the opportunity present itself.

For six years Longfellow nourished a plan to visit Scandinavia while he served his apprenticeship as a teacher of modern languages at Bowdoin. Having been made more acutely aware of the northern languages and literature by his friend Nicander, he now studied with increased interest the occasional articles on Scandinavian subjects in the Foreign Quarterly Review, the North American Review, and other journals that came to his attention. He had acquired, furthermore, a small collection of Old Norse sagas in German translation which one may assume he read carefully, given his predilection for the past and for heroic tales. When therefore, in December 1834, the invitation came to succeed George Ticknor as Smith Professor at Harvard, he had convinced himself that Scandinavia offered a field of study which he might cultivate with little competition from his academic peers, provided he could obtain some first-hand knowledge of the subject. He thus determined to do the unusual and to give to Scandinavia a part of the "year or eighteen months" that President Quincy of Harvard allowed him for "a more perfect attainment of the German." He knew he was a linguist of more than ordinary ability, he was confident that he could learn Swedish and Danish in a few weeks of concentrated effort, and he looked forward to a delightful social experience in the company of Nicander and his literary friends.

Longfellow's summer in Sweden in 1835 was a failure, however, if measured against his expectations. He himself was responsible for a large part of this failure. He had not kept in touch with Nicander over the years, and he had neglected to inform him of his plan to visit Sweden. Thus, when he arrived in Stockholm on June 28 he found to his dismay that his former friend, on whom he depended for his introduction into the literary circles of the capital, was some sixty miles away in Nykoping. When he heard from Longfellow by letter, Nicander did not rush to the rescue, perhaps because even a short journey in those days was made long by the primitiveness of Swedish roads, but more likely because he found no difficulty in preferring the pleasures of his holiday to the demands of a friendship he had almost forgotten. He may also have been put off by Longfellow's confession that he was tethered to three females—his wife Mary and her two friends, Mary C. Goddard and Clara Crowninshield.

There was another difficulty that made the Swedish summer disagreeable, one never mentioned in Longfellow's letters or journal of this period. Mary Longfellow was pregnant, languishing in morning sicknesses and wishing she were anywhere but where she was. Although there is no evidence that she sought medical advice, Mary Longfellow was obviously in need of it. Three months after leaving Sweden, she died in Rotterdam as a result of infection following a miscarriage. Her constant malaise during three months in Sweden did much to cast a pall over Longfellow's summer in the North.

In a letter to his friend George Washington Greene, dated August 10, 1835, Longfellow provides the best evidence of his disillusionment with Sweden.

We have now been about two months in Sweden; and shall leave it without regret in about a fortnight, to return no more forever—I trust. From which pious ejaculation you will infer, that I have not been much pleased with my "Summer in the North." It is indeed so. Stockholm is a very pretty city;—"et quand on a dit cela, on a tout dit." There is no spirit—no life—no enterprise—in a word—"no nothing." Literature is in an abject condition; and notwithstanding the many great names, that adorn the armorial bearings of Sweden, you cannot help seeing all around you, that "la stupidite est d'uniforme." And then it is so cold here! It is August—but it is not summer. The rain it raineth every day; and the air is like November. I was simple enough to go out yesterday without a great-coat and umbrella; for which scandalous conduct I was drenched through by a tremendous rain; and pelted for fifteen minutes with hail-stones as large as peas. I was on the water, in an open boat. "O for a beaker full of the warm south!" I shall seek one soon. I wish it were to-day.

Still, despite these strictures, he accomplished much during the three long summer months. He studied the Swedish language diligently enough to merit his wife's proud remark that "Henry has become quite learned in the Swedish." Later, Gustaf Mellin, a minor novelist who befriended him, gave perhaps a more accurate appraisal of his progress when he wrote to Nicander that "Longfellow was well enough at home in reading the Swedish language when he left, but I thought that he took too much upon himself. I had to present him with my Finnish Bible and give him a couple of lessons in the pronunciation of the Finnish language. He pondered a great deal over old Latin dissertations concerning the Dalecarlian dialect and other things."

The fact is, therefore, that he worked hard to overcome the difficulties presented by Nicander's failure to renew his friendship in person, by the domestic and social demands of his unhappy entourage, and by the miserable weather. In addition to his language study, he indulged in a favorite occupation—the buying of books for his own and for the Harvard library; he visited the university town of Uppsala and ventured northward to the famous iron mine of Dannemora; and he met and was entertained by a number of the Swedish literati of Stockholm as well as by several members of the Anglo-American colony in the city. If he left Sweden without regret, he also left it with the satisfaction that he had carried out his plan to the best of his ability.

The following two weeks in Denmark were happy by comparison with the three months in Sweden. Copenhagen was a more cosmopolitan city than Stockholm in 1835, and he found in Carl Rafn, the great Danish philologist and historian, the kind of literary guide he had hoped to have in Nicander. The result was a fortnight of intense but pleasurable activity. He attacked the Danish language vigorously, attended the theater, lost himself among the Viking artifacts in the Oldnordisk Museum, began several translations from Danish literature, and scoured the antiquarian bookshops on his mission for the Harvard library. When the time came for his departure, he regretted that he had to leave Denmark; he realized too late that he should have used Copenhagen instead of Stockholm as his base of operations during the Scandinavian summer. Had he done so, he might have come away with a deeper knowledge of the northern languages and literature. He would certainly have retained a more pleasant memory of the experiment.

During his young manhood in France, Spain, and Italy during 1826-1829, Longfellow so immersed himself in the cultures of these countries that we can with little hesitation call him a scholar of romance languages. By comparison, his knowledge of Scandinavian life, literature, and languages was superficial. He made no attempt to understand the economic conditions that were soon to send great waves of Scandinavian emigrants to America, and he consequently found the Swedes wanting in the social graces which he accepted as necessary in cultivated life. Furthermore, he let impatience rule his attempts to learn; and that impatience led him to the perusal of exotic dialects and literary works before he was ready to study them with ease. Under the circumstances, however, given the brevity of his sojourn in Sweden and Denmark, the logistic difficulties of his itinerary, and the fact that he was weighed down with the responsibility for a pregnant wife and two complaining companions, one can only be impressed that he learned as much as he did.

How Longfellow subsequently made use of his experience in Scandinavia is perhaps more interesting than the trials and tribulations of the experience itself. He had seen a good deal of the physical aspect of Sweden, having traveled from Gothenburg to Stockholm in a lumbering, Russian-built coach and from Stockholm to Gothenburg by cramped steamer on the Gota Canal; and he had filled his journal with impressions, not always commendatory, of dark forests, poor inns, hand-hewn log houses, peasants in native dress, village churches, and long summer twilights. During the next several years, as he gradually submerged his narrow scholarly interests beneath a desire to appeal to a wider audience, so, too, did he abandon his early enthusiasm for Dalecarlian dialects and old Swedish tomes in favor of exploiting an idealized Swedish country side in prose and poetry. This metamorphosis from philological scholar to creative author and poet is illustrated by his essay on the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér in the North American Review and, oddly enough, by his narrative poem on the French Acadians, Evangeline.

Longfellow introduced his review of Tegnér's Frithiofs Saga with a romanticized description of Swedish life, concocted from his journal notes and from a book entitled Ett År i Sverge (A Year in Sweden) by Christian Forssel. "The prose style," as I have written earlier, "betrays a conscious imitation of Irving, his first important literary model. With its correct proportions of Irvingesque sentimentality, quaintness, and gentle moralizing, the piece might well have been another chapter of Outre-Mer; the village church and pastor, lifeless babes, coffins, psalm books, a country wedding are all portrayed in the best Sketch Book tradition." [1] His picture of Sweden had only a marginal basis in the reality he had experienced in 1835. It was, in fact, what he had hoped to see when he made up his mind to visit the North. In time it came to replace in his mind the more mundane and disappointing events of his actual experience.

One of the most interesting parts of the essay is a description of the Swedish landscape.

In the vast solitudes around him [the anciend Skald], the heart of Nature beat against his own. From the midnight gloom of groves the deep-voiced pines answered the deeper-voiced and neighboring sea . . .

He [the modern Skald] dwells in that land, where the sound of the sea and the midnight storm are the voices of tradition, and the great forests beckon to him, and in mournful accents seem to say, "Why has thou tarried so long?"

Almost primeval simplicity reigns over this Northern land—almost primeval solitude and stillness . . . Around you are forests of fir. Overhead hang the long, fan-like branches, trailing with moss, and heavy with red and blue cones.

When one remembers that Longfellow had never been in Nova Scotia, it is not surprising that this impression of a Swedish countryside became, in hexameters, the famous introduction to Evangeline.

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

Thus Sweden became Acadia, an example not only of poetic license, but also of the influence of Scandinavia on an American skald.

If a minor poet, Karl August Nicander, motivated Longfellow to explore the possibilities of the northern languages and literature, a major poet, Bishop Esaias Tegnér became the dominant Scandinavian influence on his literary career. Longfellow did not meet Tegnér in Sweden, but within a week of his arrival in Stockholm he acquired a copy of Frithiofs Saga and of the bishop's minor poems. As the weeks passed and his knowledge of Swedish improved, Longfellow came to recognize in Tegnér a kindred spirit, a romantic idealist whose poetical theory embraced the freedom of the past and the law of love while eschewing the "deeds of blood" that had characterized his Viking ancestors. Thus, in Frithiofs Saga, a tale of Vikings, Tegnér idealized a violent and lawless age, much as Longfellow, in Evangeline, romanticized the fate of lovers who had been subjected to a cruel and terrible oppression. The two poets, so unlike in background, profession, and habit, were nevertheless unusually compatible in their attitudes toward the past and its delineation in poetry.

Longfellow left evidence of his admiration for Tegnér in his letters and journal, in his appreciative essay in the North American Review, in a poem—"Tegnér's Drapa"—on the occasion of the poet's death, in a number of abortive translations from his poetry, and in his only complete translation of a Swedish poem, "The Children of the Lord's Supper." In his essay on Tegnér he illustrated his remarks with several translated excerpts from Frithiofs Saga. These fragments won Tegnér's praise as the best he had seen in English, and they caused a number of his admirers to regret that he did not translate the entire heroic poem. As translations they show a high technical skill and a remarkable fidelity to the original Swedish, for Longfellow had already formed his opinion that literalness in translation was the key to success. Nevertheless, he chose not to continue with Frithiofs Saga, possibly because there were already several English translations in print, and decided instead to turn Tegnér's "Nattvardsbarnen"—"The Children of the Lord's Supper"—into comparable English hexameters.

"The Children of the Lord's Supper" deserves emphasis, in any consideration of Longfellow's development as a poet, as a testing ground for the measure, unorthodox in English, that he was later to employ in Evangeline and The Courtship of Miles Standish. One must say in the beginning that Swedish, with its greater proportion of words that are natural dactyls, lends itself more easily than English to the composition of hexameter lines. Longfellow's translation, therefore, while it is successful as an exercise in capturing the mood and meaning of the Swedish poem, is less successful in reproducing its hexameters. That Longfellow recognized the difficulty is apparent from his initial reluctance to publish the poem. In the end, however, he overcame his misgivings, moved by the encouragement of friends and by his own admiration of the original, and permitted the translation to appear in Ballads and Other Poems in 1842. Discriminating readers will recognize that "The Children of the Lord's Supper" can be merged with Evangeline with little alteration of its tone, meter, or spirit. Thus did a Swedish bishop contribute to Longfellow's first great success in narrative poetry.

Denmark provided no literary figure comparable to Tegnér as a catalyst in Longfellow's poetical career. A case could be made, however, for his preferring Danish literature to Swedish, just as he preferred Copenhagen to Stockholm. From the moment he began his fortnight's residence in the Danish capital, he found himself fascinated by old Danish ballads, and he was not to lose interest in them for the rest of his life. In "To an Old Danish Songbook," written in 1845, he recalled the

Days departed, half-forgotten,
When in dreamy youth I wandered
By the Baltic,—
When I paused to hear
The old ballad of King Christian
Shouted from suburban taverns
In the twilight.

And he went on to imagine how

Once some ancient Scald
In his bleak, ancestral Iceland,
Chanted staves of these old ballads
To the Vikings.

This fascination with Danish ballads led him to a number of well-turned translations—"King Christian," "The Elected Knight," and "The Mother's Ghost"—as well as several experimental translations that remained in manuscript. In the back of his mind, during the years when he was still searching for the key to poetical achievement, he entertained the notion of trying to create an American ballad literature on the model of the Danish. Thus one can say, I believe, that Ballads and Other Poems, published six years after his sojourn in Scandinavia, had at least part of its genesis in the Danish ballad collections that Longfellow treasured in his personal library.

It is ironic that the two works for which Longfellow is best known for his exploitation of Scandinavian themes—"The Skeleton in Armor" and "The Saga of King Olaf"—were only tenuously connected with his actual experience in Sweden and Denmark. They might have been written, indeed, had he never visited Scandinavia, for they are the products of imaginative voyages in his own library among translated sagas and runic poems, mostly in English and German. They represent, furthermore, the basic qualities of his creative talent: his ability to conjure up the past, to refine and romanticize events, to narrate in poetic form.

Longfellow's knowledge of the Old Norse language and literature was rudimentary, and although he seems to have lectured on the subject at Harvard, he made no claim of being an authority on the subject. "My knowledge of Icelandic Literature," he wrote in 1879, "is limited to the two Eddas, the Heimskringla, and some of the Sagas." If this is not enough to establish him as a scholar of Old Norse, it was certainly adequate to enable him to imagine landscapes he had not actually seen, Vikings he had not met in the paler images of their descendants and events that had no counterparts in his own experience. What he did have, in large measure, was a fascination with the sea, an interest in the Norse explorations of the New England coast, and a creative philosophy, shared with Tegnér, that enabled him to "draw a curtain on the violence and brutal reality of the ancient legends of the North at the same time that he brought to full poetic bloom the wild freedom, the vigor of life, [2] and the emotions of the heart which were potential in the saga literature."

In 1838, during his first months as a Harvard professor, Longfellow entertained the notion of composing "a series of ballads, or a Romantic poem on the deeds of the first bold Viking, who crossed to this western world; with storm spirits and devil machinery under water." [3] Sixteen months later he refined the idea by constructing an outline for a poem in nine cantos to be called "The Saga of Hakon Jarl," referring to it as one of the "great literary plans" in his brain. Nothing came of it. Perhaps he lacked a catalyst for his inspiration. If so, it is interesting to speculate what might have happened if his muse had been provoked into action by news of the discovery of the Kensington Stone, a spurious rune stone found sixty years later in the wilds of Minnesota. That clever forgery, by a sly Swedish-American farmer with a runic dictionary recounts the adventures of a Viking party which crossed Hudson's Bay to Lake Winnipeg and then traversed the wilderness by a series of lakes and portages to central Minnesota. Longfellow, indulging in a fantasy similar to that of the Minnesota farmer, might have given the infamous stone a poetic legitimacy that would have delighted romanticists to this day.

Denied the inspiration of the Kensington Stone by the simple fact of chronology, Longfellow was moved, however, by two questionable contemporary "relics" of Viking colonization in the New World, the Round Tower at Newport and the Fall River Skeleton. Both tower and skeleton had captured the imagination of historical buffs and Norsophiles, although neither has ever been convincingly established as of Viking origin. For Longfellow, they supplied new incentives for pursuing his idea of a Viking poem. In December 1839 he reduced his plan of an heroic treatment of the theme to that of a simple ballad, and the result was "The Skeleton in Armor." The poem was an amalgam of literary influences: a rhyme scheme borrowed from Michael Drayton's "Battle of Agincourt"; an invocation to the "fearful guest" with "hollow breast" taken from his own translation of Uhland's "Der Schwarze Ritter"; details from Tegnér's Frithiofs Saga, the Heimskringla, Campbell's "Lord Ullin's Daughter," and Shelley's "The Fugitive"; and marginal notes, in the Knickerbocker Magazine version of the poem, in the manner of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Nevertheless, Longfellow was undoubtedly correct in his opinion that he had succeeded "in giving the whole a Northern air," [4] and for once he received a compliment from Poe, who called the ballad the "only true poem" in Ballads and Other Poems. Longfellow's reputation as a poet had not yet improved his bargaining power in the market place, however, and he sold the ballad to Lewis Gaylord Clark of the Knickerbocker for $25.

The popular success of "The Skeleton in Armor" encouraged Longfellow in the belief that he should make further poetic voyages into the misty world of dragon ships and berserkers, and the idea of an epic treatment of the subject lay in the back of his mind for the next several years. On October 18, 1848, he recorded a variation on the theme in his "Book of Suggestions": "Ymer. A poem on the Giants of the Northern Mythology. The subject is very grand. It should be in blank verse." Shortly afterwards he wrote an experimental 111 lines, describing the genesis of the Giants of the Frost in the Chaos of the Odinic mythology, and ending with the creation of the earth and of man by Odin, Vili, and Ve. The experiment could only have been disappointing to him. His pentameters were prosaic and lacked the resonance and vitality that the subject demanded. He knew he was not ready for the clarions, kettle drums, and bassoons of such a Wagnerian opus and perhaps never would be. He laid the fragment aside and it remained forgotten among his papers.

On February 25, 1859—the subject of a major poem on a Scandinavian theme having now lain in his mind for over twenty years—Longfellow remarked in his journal that "a very good Poem might be written on the 'Saga of King Olaf,' who converted the North to Christianity." The time had now come for a final assault on the project. He returned to Samuel Laing's translation of the Heimskringla, reviewed Tegnér's Frithiofs Saga, consulted the collection of Icelandic sagas in the Harvard library, and outlined a poem which would narrate, in a series of inter-connected ballads, the coming of Christianity to the heathen pirates of the North. In six weeks, between October 24 and December 9, 1860, he wrote twenty-one of the poem's twenty-two parts (the first, "The Challenge of Thor," having been composed as early as 1849). The finished poem lay unpublished until 1863 when it appeared as the Musician's first tale in Tales of a Wayside Inn.

"The Saga of King Olaf" is without doubt the most ambitious and the most successful of Longfellow's poems on a Scandinavian theme. Young Theodore Roosevelt, preparing for Harvard, read it with his brand of strenuous enthusiasm; George William Curtis commended it in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly; and strangers and friends from far and near wrote to praise and congratulate. The reason for the poem's popularity is not hard to find. "For once the gentler side of [Longfellow's] nature was subordinated," wrote Professor George Rice Carpenter, "and he sang gladly of fighting and rapine." It may be somewhat off the mark to imply that Longfellow's "gentler side" was always an inhibiting factor in his poetry, but it can hardly be denied that "The Saga of King Olaf" is the better for the robustness of its subject matter. It is a hale and hearty poem.

The guests were loud, the ale was strong,
King Olaf feasted late and long;
The hoary Scalds together sang;
O'erhead the smoky rafters rang.

As a narrative poet, Longfellow had an unquestionable talent which he applied with vigor to such typically Scandinavian conceptions as "The Skerry of Shrieks," iron beards and forked beards, war horns, death drinks, and long serpents. Those who think of Longfellow as merely the purveyor of moral tags and sentimental effusions need only read "The Saga of King Olaf" to be disabused.

And yet the "Saga," despite its success, is also a reminder to us of the poet's major weakness. For years he had dreamed of an epic poem on a subject which he, of all American poets, was best qualified by virtue of his experience and knowledge to bring to fruition. But in the final analysis he could respond only with ballads.

Longfellow's knowledge of Swedish and Danish, his extensive but random reading in the literature of Scandinavia, and his summer in the North in 1835 made him as much of an authority on Scandinavia as one would be likely to find in New England before the Civil War. In the beginning, as I have said, his interest was a scholarly one, as evidenced by his study of dialects and old manuscripts and by his membership in the Nordiske Oldskriftsselskab (The Society of Northern Antiquaries). In the end, indeed shortly after he assumed his Harvard professorship, that interest evolved into a strictly literary one in which he made use of his knowledge in a creative, poetic way. Thus the actual experience in Sweden and Denmark—lands where he found no picturesque ruins, no spectacular scenery (it is to be remembered that he did not visit Norway), no cheerful peasantry, and only inclement weather—was of minor significance in his life. The fact is that he gradually came to ignore it as an unpleasant interlude associated in his mind with the illness and death of his first wife.

But this is not to say that the idea of Scandinavia was unimportant to him. As we have seen, he developed in his imagination two distinct conceptions of the North. He transformed contemporary Scandinavia into what he had expected before he traveled there. This mental image was the land of Nicander's patriotic and inflated descriptions, a misty, pastoral land, a Baltic Spain, quite removed from the poverty, harsh climate, and ignorant peasantry of actuality. He made use of his idealized reconstruction in his essay on "Life in Sweden," in Evangeline, and in his nostalgic lyric "To an Old Danish Songbook." Eventually, as I have previously written, "he came to accept this impression as part of his own experience and, . . . Scandinavia was blended into his general concept of Europe as a modern Arcadia of legend and romance." [5] If he preferred the wines of France and Italy, he also enjoyed, on occasion, the aquavit of Scandinavia.

Longfellow's other conception was of historical Scandinavia, of Vikings and long ships, rocky headlands, and the churning sea. Since he had never been to Norway or Iceland, this Scandinavia was strictly a world of his imagination, stimulated by the forceful prose of the ancient sagas. This world, too, he altered for poetic reasons. Sharing the literary philosophy of Tegnér, that the heroic element in the saga literature should be retained while the raw, savage, and barbaric elements ought to be eliminated or at least softened, Longfellow closed his eyes to the grosser and yet well—founded facts of Viking life. "The Saga of King Olaf," for all its atmosphere of masculine heroics, is in reality an expurgated poem. Perhaps we would not have it otherwise, but it is important to remember that Longfellow refined his material in accordance with his creative instincts.

The "Scandinavian Connection," if I may borrow a modern expression, runs like a bright thread through Longfellow's life. Removing it would not change the basic pattern of his literary achievement, although it is difficult to disassociate Longfellow from "The Skeleton in Armor," "The Saga of King Olaf," even of "The Children of the Lord's Supper." The "connection" also served another useful purpose in that Longfellow's exploitation of it brought Scandinavia to the attention of his thousands of admirers. His correspondence reveals that he was frequently appealed to as an authority on the northern languages and literature; and there can be no doubt that his interest in the subject stimulated the interest of others.

The "Scandinavian Connection" was, as I have said, a life-long relationship. On January 5, 1881, fourteen months before his death, Longfellow thanked a correspondent for the gift of the Orkneyinga Saga, translated from the Icelandic. "This is my most valuable New Year's present," he wrote, "and I value it very highly." An interest begun in the exhuberant days of his youth had persevered into his old age.

NOTES

¹Andrew Hilen, Longfellow and Scandinavia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947), p. 35.

²Ibid., p. 61.

³Henry W. Longfellow, MS Journal, May 3, 1838. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

⁴Andrew Hilen, ed., The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966), II, p. 269.

⁵Longfellow and Scandinavia, p. 107.