A right valiant, true old race of men." This is
a truer appreciation than Gray and Walpole had, eighty years before. In
the second place, Carlyle was not misled into thinking that valor in war
was the only characteristic of the rude Norseman, and skill in drinking
his only household virtue. "Beautiful traits of pity, too, and honest
pity." Then he tells of Baldur and Nanna, in his rugged prose account
anticipating Matthew Arnold. Other qualities of the literature appeal to
him. "I like much their robust simplicity; their veracity, directness of
conception. Thor 'draws down his brows' in a veritable Norse rage;
'grasps his hammer till the _knuckles grow white_." Again; "A great
broad Brobdignag grin of true humor is this Skrymir; mirth resting on
earnestness and sadness, as the rainbow on the black tempest: only a
right valiant heart is capable of that." Still again: "This law of
mutation, which also is a law written in man's inmost thought, has been
deciphered by these old earnest Thinkers in their rude style."

Thomas Carlyle, seeking to explain the worship of a pagan divinity,
chose Odin as the noblest example of such a hero. The picture of Odin he
drew from the prose Edda, mainly, and his purpose required that he
paint the picture in the most attractive colors. So it happened that our
English literature got its first _complete_ view of Old Norse ethics and
art. The memory of Gray's "dreadful songs" had ruled for almost a
century, and ordinary readers might be pardoned for thinking that Old
Norse literature, like Old Norse history, was written in blood. We have
seen that Gray's imitators perpetuated the old idea, and that even Scott
sanctioned it, and now we see England's emancipation from it. The grouty
old Scotchman of Craigenputtoch knew no more Icelandic than most of his
fellow countrymen (be it noted that he said: "From the Humber upwards,
all over Scotland, the speech of the common people is still in a
singular degree Icelandic, its Germanism has still a peculiar Norse
tinge"); but he saw far more deeply into the heart of Icelandic
literature than anybody before him. His emphasis of its many sidedness,
of its sincerity, its humanity, its simplicity, its directness, its
humor and its wisdom, was the signal for a change in the popular
estimation of its worth to our modern art. Since his day we have had
Morris and Arnold and a host of minor singers, and the nineteenth
century revival of interest in Old Norse literat