文档介绍：The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga)
The Story of the Volsungs
(Volsunga Saga)
with Excerpts from the Poetic Edda.
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The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga)
INTRODUCTION
It would seem fitting for a Northern folk, deriving the greater and
better part of their speech, laws, and customs from a Northern root, that
the North should be to them, if not a holy land, yet at least a place more to
be regarded than any part of the world beside; that howsoever their
knowledge widened of other men, the faith and deeds of their forefathers
would never lack interest for them, but would always be kept in
remembrance. One cause after another has, however, aided in turning
attention to classic men and lands at the cost of our own history. Among
battles, "every schoolboy" knows the story of Marathon or Salamis, while
it would be hard indeed to find one who did more than recognise the name,
if even that, of the great fights of Hafrsfirth or Sticklestead. The language
and history of Greece and Rome, their laws and religions, have been
always held part of the learning needful to an educated man, but no trouble
has been taken to make him familiar with his own people or their tongue.
Even that Englishman who knew Alfred, Bede, Caedmon, as well as he
knew Plato, Caesar, Cicero, or Pericles, would be hard bestead were he
asked about the great peoples from whom we sprang; the warring of
Harold Fairhair or Saint Olaf; the Viking (1) kingdoms in these (the
British) Western Isles; the settlement of Iceland, or even of Normandy.
The knowledge of all these things would now be even smaller than it is
among us were it not that there was one land left where the olden learning
found refuge and was kept in being. In England, Germany, and the rest of
Europe, what is left of the traditions of pagan times has been altered in a
thousand ways by foreign influence, even as the peoples and their speech
have been by the influx of foreign blood; but Iceland held to the