



Produced by John Bickers; Dagny; Emma Dudding





ERIC BRIGHTEYES

by H. Rider Haggard




DEDICATION

Madam,

You have graciously conveyed to me the intelligence that during the
weary weeks spent far from his home--in alternate hope and fear,
in suffering and mortal trial--a Prince whose memory all men must
reverence, the Emperor Frederick, found pleasure in the reading of my
stories: that "they interested and fascinated him."

While the world was watching daily at the bedside of your Majesty's
Imperial husband, while many were endeavouring to learn courage in our
supremest need from the spectacle of that heroic patience, a distant
writer little knew that it had been his fortune to bring to such a
sufferer an hour's forgetfulness of sorrow and pain.

This knowledge, to an author, is far dearer than any praise, and it is
in gratitude that, with your Majesty's permission, I venture to dedicate
to you the tale of Eric Brighteyes.

The late Emperor, at heart a lover of peace, though by duty a soldier of
soldiers, might perhaps have cared to interest himself in a warrior of
long ago, a hero of our Northern stock, whose days were spent in strife,
and whose latest desire was Rest. But it may not be; like the Golden
Eric of this Saga, and after a nobler fashion, he has passed through the
Hundred Gates into the Valhalla of Renown.

To you, then, Madam, I dedicate this book, a token, however slight and
unworthy, of profound respect and sympathy.

I am, Madam,

Your Majesty's most obedient servant,

H. Rider Haggard.

November 17, 1889.

To H.I.M. Victoria, Empress Frederick of Germany.




INTRODUCTION

"Eric Brighteyes" is a romance founded on the Icelandic Sagas. "What is
a saga?" "Is it a fable or a true story?" The answer is not altogether
simple. For such sagas as those of Burnt Njal and Grettir the Strong
partake both of truth and fiction: historians dispute as to the
proportions. This was the manner of the saga's growth: In the early days
of the Iceland community--that republic of aristocrats--say, between the
dates 900 and 1100 of our era, a quarrel would arise between two great
families. As in the case of the Njal Saga, its cause, probably, was the
ill doings of some noble woman. This quarrel would lead to manslaughter.
Then blood called for blood, and a vendetta was set on foot that ended
only with the death by violence of a majority of the actors in the drama
and of large numbers of their adherents. In the course of the feud, men
of heroic strength and mould would come to the front and perform deeds
worthy of the iron age which bore them. Women also would help to
fashion the tale, for good or ill, according to their natural gifts
and characters. At last the tragedy was covered up by death and time,
leaving only a few dinted shields and haunted cairns to tell of those
who had played its leading parts.

But its fame lived on in the minds of men. From generation to generation
skalds wandered through the winter snows, much as Homer may have
wandered in his day across the Grecian vales and mountains, to find a
welcome at every stead, because of the old-time story they had to tell.
Here, night after night, they would sit in the ingle and while away
the weariness of the dayless dark with histories of the times when men
carried their lives in their hands, and thought them well lost if there
might be a song in the ears of folk to come. To alter the tale was one
of the greatest of crimes: the skald must repeat it as it came to him;
but by degrees undoubtedly the sagas did suffer alteration. The facts
remained the same indeed, but around them gathered a mist of miraculous
occurrences and legends. To take a single instance: the account of
the burning of Bergthorsknoll in the Njal Saga is not only a piece of
descriptive writing that for vivid, simple force and insight is scarcely
to be matched out of Homer and the Bible, it is also obviously true. We
feel as we read, that no man could have invented that story, though some
great skald threw it into shape. That the tale is true, the writer of
"Eric" can testify, for, saga in hand, he has followed every act of the
drama on its very site. There he who digs beneath the surface of the
lonely mound that looks across plain and sea to Westman Isles may still
find traces of the burning, and see what appears to be the black sand
with which the hands of Bergthora and her women strewed the earthen
floor some nine hundred years ago, and even the greasy and clotted
remains of the whey that they threw upon the flame to quench it. He may
discover the places where Fosi drew up his men, where Skarphedinn died,
singing while his legs were burnt from off him, where Kari leapt from
the flaming ruin, and the dell in which he laid down to rest--at every
step, in short, the truth of the narrative becomes more obvious. And yet
the tale has been added to, for, unless we may believe that some human
beings are gifted with second sight, we cannot accept as true the
prophetic vision that came to Runolf, Thorstein's son; or that of Njal
who, on the evening of the onslaught, like Theoclymenus in the Odyssey,
saw the whole board and the meats upon it "one gore of blood."

Thus, in the Norse romance now offered to the reader, the tale of Eric
and his deeds would be true; but the dream of Asmund, the witchcraft of
Swanhild, the incident of the speaking head, and the visions of Eric
and Skallagrim, would owe their origin to the imagination of successive
generations of skalds; and, finally, in the fifteenth or sixteenth
century, the story would have been written down with all its
supernatural additions.

The tendency of the human mind--and more especially of the Norse
mind--is to supply uncommon and extraordinary reasons for actions and
facts that are to be amply accounted for by the working of natural
forces. Swanhild would have needed no "familiar" to instruct her in her
evil schemes; Eric would have wanted no love-draught to bring about his
overthrow. Our common experience of mankind as it is, in opposition to
mankind as we fable it to be, is sufficient to teach us that the passion
of one and the human weakness of the other would suffice to these ends.
The natural magic, the beauty and inherent power of such a woman
as Swanhild, are things more forceful than any spell magicians have
invented, or any demon they are supposed to have summoned to their
aid. But no saga would be complete without the intervention of such
extraneous forces: the need of them was always felt, in order to throw
up the acts of heroes and heroines, and to invest their persons with
an added importance. Even Homer felt this need, and did not scruple to
introduce not only second sight, but gods and goddesses, and to bring
their supernatural agency to bear directly on the personages of his
chant, and that far more freely than any Norse sagaman. A word may be
added in explanation of the appearances of "familiars" in the shapes
of animals, an instance of which will be found in this story. It was
believed in Iceland, as now by the Finns and Eskimo, that the passions
and desires of sorcerers took visible form in such creatures as wolves
or rats. These were called "sendings," and there are many allusions to
them in the Sagas.

Another peculiarity that may be briefly alluded to as eminently
characteristic of the Sagas is their fatefulness. As we read we seem
to hear the voice of Doom speaking continually. "_Things will happen as
they are fated_": that is the keynote of them all. The Norse mind had
little belief in free will, less even than we have to-day. Men and women
were born with certain characters and tendencies, given to them in order
that their lives should run in appointed channels, and their acts bring
about an appointed end. They do not these things of their own desire,
though their desires prompt them to the deeds: they do them because they
must. The Norns, as they name Fate, have mapped out their path long and
long ago; their feet are set therein, and they must tread it to the end.
Such was the conclusion of our Scandinavian ancestors--a belief forced
upon them by their intense realisation of the futility of human hopes
and schemings, of the terror and the tragedy of life, the vanity of its
desires, and the untravelled gloom or sleep, dreamless or dreamfull,
which lies beyond its end.

Though the Sagas are entrancing, both as examples of literature of which
there is but little in the world and because of their living interest,
they are scarcely known to the English-speaking public. This is easy
to account for: it is hard to persuade the nineteenth century world to
interest itself in people who lived and events that happened a thousand
years ago. Moreover, the Sagas are undoubtedly difficult reading. The
archaic nature of the work, even in a translation; the multitude of its
actors; the Norse sagaman's habit of interweaving endless side-plots,
and the persistence with which he introduces the genealogy and
adventures of the ancestors of every unimportant character, are none of
them to the taste of the modern reader.

"Eric Brighteyes" therefore, is clipped of these peculiarities, and,
to some extent, is cast in the form of the romance of our own day,
archaisms being avoided as much as possible. The author will be
gratified should he succeed in exciting interest in the troubled lives
of our Norse forefathers, and still more so if his difficult experiment
brings readers to the Sagas--to the prose epics of our own race. Too
ample, too prolix, too crowded with detail, they cannot indeed vie in
art with the epics of Greece; but in their pictures of life, simple and
heroic, they fall beneath no literature in the world, save the Iliad and
the Odyssey alone.





ERIC BRIGHTEYES




I

HOW ASMUND THE PRIEST FOUND GROA THE WITCH

There lived a man in the south, before Thangbrand, Wilibald's son,
preached the White Christ in Iceland. He was named Eric Brighteyes,
Thorgrimur's son, and in those days there was no man like him for
strength, beauty and daring, for in all these things he was the first.
But he was not the first in good-luck.

Two women lived in the south, not far from where the Westman Islands
stand above the sea. Gudruda the Fair was the name of the one, and
Swanhild, called the Fatherless, Groa's daughter, was the other. They
were half-sisters, and there were none like them in those days, for they
were the fairest of all women, though they had nothing in common except
their blood and hate.

Now of Eric Brighteyes, of Gudruda the Fair and of Swanhild the
Fatherless, there is a tale to tell.

These two fair women saw the light in the self-same hour. But Eric
Brighteyes was their elder by five years. The father of Eric was
Thorgrimur Iron-Toe. He had been a mighty man; but in fighting with a
Baresark,[*] who fell upon him as he came up from sowing his wheat, his
foot was hewn from him, so that afterwards he went upon a wooden leg
shod with iron. Still, he slew the Baresark, standing on one leg and
leaning against a rock, and for that deed people honoured him much.
Thorgrimur was a wealthy yeoman, slow to wrath, just, and rich in
friends. Somewhat late in life he