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have been due to manuscript corruptions, and to imperfect acquaintance with the poetic vocabulary and rules of the verse. Comparison and wise conjecture have already done much to remove these initial bars to the study of skaldic verse, and there is now no lack of reliable material on which to work. In no long time we may expect to see the whole of the Old Northern poetry in as satisfactory a form as that of Greece and Rome.

The point that remains is that of the boy with the alphabet,-is it worth while going through so much to learn so little? A verse of eight lines is apt when analyzed and translated, to dwindle down to some dozen words of very ordinary import, in which no poetry whatever is discernible. "Translating the Gaelic word for word is what spoils it," and it is probably a false method of translation that has ruined the reputation of the skalds as poets. The elocutionist who insists that verse is to be read as prose leaves no reason for writing in verse at all; and what "operæ pretium" is the skald to have for his alliterations and his as

sonances, if his work is to be judged by its value in unregenerate prose? The reader of the bald abstracts in the "Corpus poeticum boreale" may well be excused for seeing neither beauty nor poetry in what is there presented to him, but who would estimate a chorus of Aristophanes by its value even in the best translation? The translation ought to guide us back to the original, and not take its place.

It was not metre, however, but mythology, combined with their views of poetic diction, that made the skalas both diffuse and obscure. The kenning,

or device to avoid calling a spade a spade, or anything else by its own name,1 is the distinctive mark of all their verse; and Gröndal is right in saying that it is "the eternal theme which lies at the bottom of these com

1 A kenning is a phrase like "storm of the sword's edges"-battle; "wound-snake"=sword; "wound-snake's wielder" = warrior. The kennings for "man" in Gröndal's "Clavis Poetica" extends to thirty-three closely printed columns, probably some two thousand in all.

plaints that so little is to be made out of the poetry when one has got to understand it." It is, no doubt, extremely annoying to the beginner to find that some two lines of sonorous words, mainly perfect strangers to him, mean no more than "man," or "woman," or "ship;" and there is ample excuse for his saying in his haste that the whole of skaldic verse is vanity. He is not likely to appreciate the enthusiasm of Gröndal, who maintains that the kennings are the glory and beauty of the poetry,-"the magic veil which the poet casts over the idea. There is such an enchantment over all this poetry, that we become enchanted ourselves, and do not know up from down. These are the dragons of fabulous colors and forms which lie outside Beauty's enchanted castle, and when one them, they themselves become Beauty, the true poetical idea."

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We must plead guilty in the matter of the kennings, and we shall probably take the true view of them, if we remember that the skald was, above all, an artist in language and an authority on myths. In his verses he desired to display both of these accomplishments, and it is a feature by no

means confined to Northern literature if in the end the style overpowered the matter. Skaldic poetry is not simple and easy to understand, simply because it was never meant to be. If Thucydides wrote darkly εἴη βατὸς ἀλλὰ τοῖς λίαν σοφοῖς, linus assures us, so also the skald composed with the fear of his fellows before his eyes. When the poetic as

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pirant, fresh from the wilds of Ice

land, thrust himself into the king's hall in Norway, and asked leave to recite his panegyric, he knew that among his hearers would be the king's own skalds, ready to comment on any want of knowledge or want of skill he might display. Elaboration of allusion, of language, and of metre, was the standard that all aimed at. When Gunnlaug recited his poem to the Swedish King Olaf, the latter asked Hrafn for his opinion of it. "It is a

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high-sounding poem," said he, "but coarse and somewhat stiff, as Gunnlaug's own nature is." Then Hrafn recited his own poem, and Gunnlaug criticised it. "It is a pretty poem," he said, "as Hrafn himself is in appearance, but it has little show about it; and why," he added, "did you make only a flokk about the king? Did you not think him worth a drápa?"

In reading the verses of the skalds, whether the single sonnets or the long poems, the question suggests itself, whether it is possible that they could have been clearly understood by those who heard them for the first time. The elaborate kennings, the parenthetical clauses, the insertion of parts of the burden in separate verses,1-all this must have laid a heavy tax on the attention of the hearers even although the style of poetry was familiar to them. This is shown by the fact that a modern Icelander finds the verses unintelligible without study, though every word may be familiar to him, and in reading the sagas aloud, the verses are nearly always omitted as conveying no meaning to the audience. It is perhaps going too far to say that they were "conundrums" to the poet's contemporaries, but in the sagas them, selves indications are not wanting that the meaning was sometimes difficult to follow. When Thorleif made bold to repeat his satire to its object, Earl Hákon, the latter was at first under the impression that there was praise in every verse. This may have been an exceptional piece of cleverness on the part of Thorleif, but one is inclined to think that various other poems could not have yielded a very distinct impression at their first hearing. The probability is that only when the verses were got by heart, did the meaning of each word and line become perfectly clear. This was certainly the case with much of the Old Irish verse, in which wisdom was intentionally darkened by obscurity of expression. An oral literature is not neces

1. As in Hallar-Stein's "Rekstefja," where it requires the last lines of three verses to make up the whole stef.

sarily a simple one, as we are sometimes inclined to think. It may be suspected that not seldom the unprofessional hearer of a drápa was in the position of the king of Greece, when Brian, the son of Tuireann, made his covert request for the famous pigskin. "That is a good poem," said the king, "only I do not understand a word of its meaning."

Even a skald might at times be imposed on in this way, if we are to give credit to the amusing anecdote of Sneglu-Halli, told in the saga of Harald Hardrádi. Halli was in England, and when all his preparations to sail for Norway were complete, he went to court and recited a poem to the English king. When the recitation was ended, the king asked a skald who was with him, what the merits of the poem might be. The skald answered that it was well done, whereupon the king asked Halli to stay there and let it be learned by others. "That may not be," said Halli, "I am all ready to depart, and can make no stay here." "Then," said the king, "your reward for the poem will be in accordance with the satisfaction we have out of it. Sit down there, and I shall make them pour silver over your head, and you shall have what sticks in your hair." Halli went outside first, got his hair smeared with tar, and made it stick out as much as possible, so that it caught a fair amount of the king's silver. But as for the poem, says the saga, it was all nonsense, made up as he went along.

We shall, therefore, in all likelihood, be doing no injustice to the skalds if we judge their work to a great exten though not entirely, from the formal side. Of its excellence in this respect there can be little question, considering the difficulties of the form. Lucilius, with his two hundred verses an hour stans pede in uno, had a slight task compared with the Old Northern poet. But the skald had an ample reward when his poem was completed. In the hall of some mighty king or earl, hung with shields and swords, and filled with famous war

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riors, he would pour fort

conned poem, with the ring of battle
in every line, till the listeners seemed
again to hear the clang of blades and
crash of shields from some hard-fought
fray, in which they themselves had
borne a manly part. This was a glory
well worthy the poet's pains, and
shield or sword or good gold-ring were
a sure addition to his treasures. It

needs no understanding of their mean-
ing to feel the effect of the sounding
lines of Hallfred or Sighvat, Arnorr
or Sturla! and it is not the poet's fault
if the effect he aimed at is lost, when
the wreathed folds of his verse are
shaken out into plain prose.

his well- from an indisposition to give the nec-
essary time to it. One can well under-
stand that a translator of Heims-
kringla, for instance, should feel im-
patient at the even flow of Snorri's
prose being broken up by these pol-
ished boulders of verse. They can
hardly be thrown aside, but they are
to be got round as easily
and as
quickly as possible, and a rough ren-
dering into English rhyme enables
the translator to go on again with the
prose narrative. This is scarcely fair
treatment either of the skald or of
Snorri, who relied on the verses for
his facts, and inserted them to adorn
his tale. If full justice is not to be
done to the technique of the verses, it
would be much better to omit them al-
together. To render them worthily it
would be necessary either to practise
the writing of dróttkvætt in English-
which would be no impossible feat-or
to adopt some equally complex metre
more in accordance with the spirit of
English rhythms. The kennings, no
doubt, would have to be largely aban-
doned. Their allusions are too recon-
dite for the general reader, and the
want of variety in English inflections
would
them awkward to
handle. Some natural expansion of
the poet's thought might be required
to fill their place, but this need not al-
together spoil the faithfulness of the
rendering.

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that there is only form and nothing more in the verse of the skalds. They are not to be talked of all in one breath; some were true poets, and others were mere versifiers, as in any other literature of the same extent. It must also be borne in mind that many of the separate verses in the sagas are of very doubtful authenticity. The saga-editors of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries did not hesitate to put verses of their own manufacture into the mouths of their heroes. Such, for instance, are the verses in Grettis Saga, which need not be laid to the outlaw's charge. That such verses should have much poetic value is hardly to be expected. But where the verses are genuine, there is often true poetry in the thought which underlies the skald's artificial expression, and it only requires a thorough acquaintance with his language, and some sympathy with his conception of the poetic ideal, to discover a real beauty in his work. To translate it adequately is difficult, often well-nigh impossible, because the kennings are not available in a modern rendering, and in them lies the poetic adornment of thought. Whatever be the value of his verses, it is doing the skald an injustice to translate them into prose, or

even

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into ordinary English verse. This is a task which the English translators of sagas have not come out of as well as could be wished, probably

render

are

Only when this method of translation is properly carried out will English readers have any opportunity of forming a fair judgment of the quality of skaldic verse. Their opinion then would probably be, that the truth lay very much between the two views with which we started. The verses scarcely to be called "inspired," and "grand and sublime" are not the natural adjectives for them; but they have an accuracy of form that removes them from any charge of being "rude," nor are they always "tumid and obscure enough to be utterly worthless." They have no mean value in many respects-artistic, poetic, linguistic and historical, but perhaps no one is likely to find much enjoyment in them, who

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is not thoroughly versed in the language and learning of the skalds themselves.

W. A. CRAIGIE.

Constantine the Great made his capital at Byzantium, about fifty miles farther west than Nicomedia and also on the Sea of Marmora. The new site had all the advantages of the old one. 1 for the fifty miles of road connecting the two points (the only paved road in the present Turkish Empire) brought it near to the land routes to the east, while its sea communications gave it an importance without parallel. For a hundred miles the Sea of Marmora is separated from the Black Sea by a strip of hilly ground from twenty-five to thirty miles across. This land belt is pierced at its centre by the Channel of the Bosphorus, a zigzag loch or fiord eighteen miles long from sea to sea, varying in width from half a mile to a mile. Immediately beyond the entrance from the Sea of Marmora, on the west or left hand side of the strait, a small, deep loch runs up into the land for about three miles, forming a safe and capacious harbor with an entrance some four hundred yards across. This is the Golden Horn, and Constantine built his city on the triangular spur between the harbor and the Sea. North of the harbor lies the suburb of Galata, and on a hill above it the suburb of Pera, while on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus opposite the Golden Horn is the suburb of Scutari.

From The National Review. THE VALUE OF CONSTANTINOPLE. When Diocletian, at the end of the third century, found it necessary to concentrate his attention upon his eastern frontier, and upon the interior of Asia Minor, where the spread of Christianity was causing him deep anxiety, he establisued his residenc at Nicomedia, the modern Ismid, at the extreme eastern end of the Sea of Marmora. Nicomedia was and is the starting-point on the way into Asia Minor. The Roman road ran a few miles south to Nicæa, and then struck due east to Angora and Sebasteia (now Sivas), from which roads led eastward into Armenia, and south-eastward to the Euphrates at Samosata (Samsat). From Angora in ancient times, a road led straight to the great pass through the Taurus, known as the Gate of Cilicia, and thence to Tarsus and Adana and round the Gulf of Alexandretta to Antioch. In Turkey today there are no roads, but the chief caravan track still begins at Ismid and follows the direction of the old Roman road. There are two other routes leading from the Sea of Marmora to the Taurus. One of them goes from Ismid by Eskischehr to Iconium (Konia), and the other to the same place from Broussa by Kutaia and Afiun. From Ismid there is a direct inland route to Amasia and thence to Samsun on the coast, as well as a route which keeps near or follows the coast to Sinope and Trebizond. A line drawn from Broussa to Iconium, then to the pass through the Taurus, and thence to Sivas and Amasia, encloses the great central district of Asia Minor, which, being walled in by rugged hills on the south, has its natural communi. cations with the Sea of Marmora.

In the generation after Diocletian,

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Constantinople in capable hands has unique advantages for its defence. So long as its owner has the superior fleet, the military attack, either from Europe or Asia, must proceed along ? peninsula fifty miles long and only half as broad. The assailant, therefore, is tied to a narrow front of attack, with his flanks exposed to the operations of the defending fleet. On either peninsula are splendid defensive positions. On the European side, about fifteen miles from the Bosphorus, the width of the peninsula is reduced by the Bay of Buyuk Chekmedje on the south, and the lake and marshes of Derkos on the north, to about fifteen miles. This position has in recent years been strongly fortified, and if properly armed and manned could hardly be taken by a frontal at

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tack. It is computed, however, that the necessary garrison would be not less than seventy thousand men. The banks of the northern half of the Bosphorus bristle with batteries, which are said to mount between four hundred and five hundred guns. On the south the chief defence of the city is the Dardanelles, the passage which connects the Sea of Marmora with the Ægean. The Dardanelles are one hundred and twenty-five miles from Constantinople, forty-three miles long, and vary in width from thirteen hundred to four thousand yards. strait is defended by works mounting something like six hundred and eighty guns. It will be evident that the de fence of Constantinople involves the judicious co-operation of an army and navy, and that its attack by an army alone must be always a difficult enterprise. The length and narrowness of the two straits is such that modern artillery properly employed would render the attempt even of ironclads to pass through them against the will of the defenders a most hazardous operation. An investment of the city would be practicable only in case the defender were without a navy, and the assailant had succeeded in passing some of his ships into the Sea of Marmora.

Constantine the Great, of course, intended his city to be the capital of the empire, which implies that it could dispose for its defence of an army and a navy on a level with the standard of the times. So long as that condition is fulfilled, Constantinople is probably more favorably situated for defence than any other city in the world. But a great capital implies much more than good local conditions of defence. It should be placed at some meeting point of necessary communications, so that it will always be a focus of intercourse. It is from this point of view that the importance of Constantinople is greatest. A magnificent safe harbor like the Golden Horn might well attract commerce even to some distance from its direct path, but Constantinople lies upon a route which must needs be followed by the whole trade of a

vast region. The Black Sea has a coast line of more than two thousand miles, to which the Sea of Azov adds six hundred more. To the Black Sea goes all the trade of the great navigable rivers, the Danube, the Dniester, the Dnieper, and the Don, with som portion of the trade of the Volga, transhipped to the Don. All this great trading area communicates by sea with the outside world only through the Bosphorus. Every increase in the prosperity of any district lying beside the Black Sea, or penetrated by one of its rivers, must bring with it a corresponding increase of the trade and shipping that passes and probably calls at the Golden Horn. If we take a larger view, and look at the natural directions of traffic between East and West, and between North and South, we find that Constantinople is the centre of a circle, of which radii run along the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf, along the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, and along the Nile. All these are natural and necessary directions of trade, and if at the present day some of them are unused, it is only because the Ottoman Turks, wherever they have settled, have destroyed industry, ruined agriculture, and rendered communication so precarious as to drive away trade.

The land trade of Constantinople has always been directed on the Asiatic side along the two groups of routes described above, and leading either to Armenia or to the Gulf of Alexandretta and the Upper Euphrates. In Europe there is one great natural route which can never lose its importance. It follows the line Adrianople, Philippopolis, Sofia, Nisch and the Valley of the Morava to the Danube, and into it branch the various roads crossing the Balkans from northern Bulgaria. In ancient times there was a Roman road from Constantinople along the northern shore of the Ægean to Saloniki, and thence across the mountains to the Adriatic at Durazzo. This was a strategical road, and can hardly be said to have followed a natural line; it has long ago passed into

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