SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

242 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
but they are "intractable materials" for poetry. The
writer obviously thinks little of other people's "Runic
hobby-horse, even though it were the wolf Fenris that
is to break his chains at the general conflagration and
swallow the sun".
The age of enlightenment could hardly be expected to
swallow Fenrir. No great advance in appreciation had
been made since the lukewarm reception the Monthly
had given Percy's Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, in
176320: though all had been previously published, and
"known to some few of the learned" thev "are rare and
singular enough to excite the curiosity of the English
Reader if it be not already sufficiently gratified with
specimens of this kind of poetry" . The reviewers quoted
Percy's opinion that the Scandinavians had "an amazing
fondness for poetry, a quality less known than their
valour, ferocity, contempt of death and passion for
liberty" Readers were told that the North, in its isolation
and because of its late conversion to Christianity,
had preserved more of the old poetry than other nations,
and that Iceland spoke the old tongue in the greatest
purity - "Hence it is that such as study the originals
of our own language have constantly found it necessary
to call in the assistance of this ancient sister dialect."
The Review does not think Percy has made the best
choice of poems, but quotes The Incantation of Hervor
at length.
To the modern reader, it is surprising to find a footnote
taking Percy to task for keeping "dwarfs" as the rendering
of duergar-"the ancient Scandinavians did not mean
human creatures short of stature, but a kind of inferior
demons ... something like our fairies". 21 Surely this
20 XXVIII (1763), 28r-6.
21 The reviewer was not being aberrant. Standard dictionaries support
him. Bailey gives only "A person of a very low stature". Dyche and
Pardon "a person, tree. etc., that is much shorter than is common or
usual" Johnson is aware of other possibilities but they are no help for
Norse myth - "An attendant on a lady or knight in romance" (as in
Spenser).