Historical Lectures and Essays. Charles Kingsley
by the waist, are hewing each other to death with the short axe, about some hot words over their ale. The loss of life, and that of the most gallant of the young, in those days must have been enormous. If the vitality of the race had not been even more enormous, they must have destroyed each other, as the Red Indians have done, off the face of the earth. They lived these Norsemen, not to live—they lived to die. For what cared they? Death—what was death to them? what it was to the Jomsburger Viking, who, when led out to execution, said to the headsman: “Die! with all pleasure. We used to question in Jomsburg whether a man felt when his head was off? Now I shall know; but if I do, take care, for I shall smite thee with my knife. And meanwhile, spoil not this long hair of mine; it is so beautiful.”
But, oh! what waste! What might not these men have done if they had sought peace, not war; if they had learned a few centuries sooner to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with their God?
And yet one loves them, blood-stained as they are. Your own poets, men brought up under circumstances, under ideas the most opposite to theirs, love them, and cannot help it. And why? It is not merely for their bold daring, it is not merely for their stern endurance; nor again that they had in them that shift and thrift, those steady and common-sense business habits, which made their noblest men not ashamed to go on voyages of merchandise. Nor is it, again, that grim humour—humour as of the modern Scotch—which so often flashes out into an actual jest, but more usually underlies unspoken all their deeds. Is it not rather that these men are our forefathers? that their blood runs in the veins of perhaps three men out of four in any general assembly, whether in America or in Britain? Startling as the assertion may be, I believe it to be strictly true.
Be that as it may, I cannot read the stories of your western men, the writings of Bret Harte, or Colonel John Hay, for instance, without feeling at every turn that there are the old Norse alive again, beyond the very ocean which they first crossed, 850 years ago.
Let me try to prove my point, and end with a story, as I began with one.
It is just thirty years before the Norman conquest of England, the evening of the battle of Sticklestead. St. Olaf’s corpse is still lying unburied on the hillside. The reforming and Christian king has fallen in the attempt to force Christianity and despotism on the Conservative and half-heathen party—the free bonders or yeoman-farmers of Norway. Thormod, his poet—the man, as his name means, of thunder mood—who has been standing in the ranks, at last has an arrow in his left side. He breaks off the shaft, and thus sore wounded goes up, when all is lost, to a farm where is a great barn full of wounded. One Kimbe comes, a man out of the opposite or bonder part. “There is great howling and screaming in there,” he says. “King Olaf’s men fought bravely enough: but it is a shame brisk young lads cannot bear their wounds. On what side wert thou in the fight?” “On the best side,” says the beaten Thormod. Kimbe sees that Thormod has a good bracelet on his arm. “Thou art surely a king’s man. Give me thy gold ring and I will hide thee, ere the bonders kill thee.”
Thormod said, “Take it, if thou canst get it. I have lost that which is worth more;” and he stretched out his left hand, and Kimbe tried to take it. But Thormod, swinging his sword, cut off his hand; and it is said Kimbe behaved no better over his wound than those he had been blaming.
Then Thormod went into the barn; and after he had sung his song there in praise of his dead king, he went into an inner room, where was a fire, and water warming, and a handsome girl binding up men’s wounds. And he sat down by the door; and one said to him, “Why art thou so dead pale? Why dost thou not call for the leech?” Then sung Thormod:
“I am not blooming; and the fair
And slender maiden loves to care
For blooming youths. Few care for me,
With Fenri’s gold meal I can’t fee;”
and so forth, improvising after the old Norse fashion. Then Thormod got up and went to the fire, and stood and warmed himself. And the nurse-girl said to him, “Go out, man, and bring some of the split-firewood which lies outside the door.” He went out and brought an armful of wood and threw it down. Then the nurse-girl looked him in the face, and said, “Dreadful pale is this man. Why art thou so?” Then sang Thormod:
“Thou wonderest, sweet bloom, at me,
A man so hideous to see.
The arrow-drift o’ertook me, girl,
A fine-ground arrow in the whirl
Went through me, and I feel the dart
Sits, lovely lass, too near my heart.”
The girl said, “Let me see thy wound.” Then Thormod sat down, and the girl saw his wounds, and that which was in his side, and saw that there was a piece of iron in it; but could not tell where it had gone. In a stone pot she had leeks and other herbs, and boiled them, and gave the wounded man of it to eat. But Thormod said, “Take it away; I have no appetite now for my broth.” Then she took a great pair of tongs and tried to pull out the iron; but the wound was swelled, and there was too little to lay hold of. Now said Thormod, “Cut in so deep that thou canst get at the iron, and give me the tongs.” She did as he said. Then took Thormod the gold bracelet off his hand and gave it the nurse-girl, and bade her do with it what she liked.
“It is a good man’s gift,” said he. “King Olaf gave me the ring this morning.”
Then Thormod took the tongs and pulled the iron out. But on the iron was a barb, on which hung flesh from the heart, some red, some white. When he saw that, he said, “The king has fed us well. I am fat, even to the heart’s roots.” And so leant back and was dead.
CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF-THE LORD 4
I wish to speak to you to-night about one of those old despotic empires which were in every case the earliest known form of civilisation. Were I minded to play the cynic or the mountebank, I should choose some corrupt and effete despotism, already grown weak and ridiculous by its decay—as did at last the Roman and then the Byzantine Empire—and, after raising a laugh at the expense of the old system say: See what a superior people you are now—how impossible, under free and enlightened institutions, is anything so base and so absurd as went on, even in despotic France before the Revolution of 1793. Well, that would be on the whole true, thank God; but what need is there to say it?
Let us keep our scorn for our own weaknesses, our blame for our own sins, certain that we shall gain more instruction, though not more amusement, by hunting out the good which is in anything than by hunting out its evil. I have chosen, not the worst, but the best despotism which I could find in history, founded and ruled by a truly heroic personage, one whose name has become a proverb and a legend, that so I might lift up your minds, even by the contemplation of an old Eastern empire, to see that it, too, could be a work and ordinance of God, and its hero the servant of the Lord. For we are almost bound to call Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, by this august title for two reasons—First, because the Hebrew Scriptures call him so; the next, because he proved himself to be such by his actions and their consequences—at least in the eyes of those who believe, as I do, in a far-seeing and far-reaching Providence, by which all human history is
Bound by gold chains unto the throne of God.
His work was very different from any that need be done, or can be done, in these our days. But while we thank God that such work is now as unnecessary as impossible; we may thank God likewise that, when such work was necessary and possible, a man was raised up to do it: and to do it, as all accounts assert, better, perhaps, than it had ever been done before or since.
True, the old conquerors, who absorbed nation after nation, tribe after tribe, and founded empires on their ruins, are now, I trust, about to be replaced, throughout the world, as here and in Britain at home, by free self-governed peoples:
The old order changeth, giving place to the new;
And God fulfils Himself in many
This lecture was given in America in 1874.