SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

lI8 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
approves of. sO These arguments please Hallr so well
that he is baptised and chooses Michael as his guardian
angel. It is probable that King Olafr was the first to have
St Michael's toast drunk in Norway."!
I have now given an account, as best I can, of where and
when the poem was composed, of the environment and the
conditions of the poet. The next step is to listen for the
characteristics of the man in the poem, and to try to make
it a little clearer how it came to be composed.
2. The author of Voluspa was one of the wisest men of
his age, and had received such education as a tenthcentury
Icelander had available to him. It is rather
difficult for the children of the twentieth century to
visualise such a man - possessed of less knowledge than
any child of confirmation age today, but at the same time
having a clearer reason and wiser thought than most
educated men of our time, whom specialisation has made
narrow of vision, and whom the multifariousness and
whirligig of present-day life have made unsteady and
butterfly-like in their thought. But if we think of the
earliest sages of Greece - or of the wisest countryfolk of
Iceland - this can somewhat shorten the distance
between us and him. A serious pondering of the
deepest reasons of being, perpetually allied to a
battle for life, conversations with other wise men searching
for the same thing, travel and communication with many
people, alternating with great seclusion and solitude - all
this goes far to counter-balance school and books in
acquiring true education. For this reason one may safely
reckon that the author of Voluspa often went to the
Alpingi or to visit his friends, even in other parts of the
country. It is also probable that he went abroad one or
8. Njdls saga, ch. 100.
81 On the cult of St Michael ct. for instance F. Paasche, 'St. Michael og hans
engle', Edda I (1914), 33-74.