SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Scandinavica for the 18th-century Common Reader 243
is another glimpse of eighteenth-century limitations.
In the Monthly's22 comments on Mathias's Runic Odes
it quoted with disapprobation some lines from The
Twilight of the Gods, complaining that the translator
improperly gives the Noms the attributes of the Parcae.
What the critic does not see is the yawning void between
the style of V pluspd and the current conventional Latinised
diction at its worst. There is some lack of dignity in
See Odin's offspring, Vidar bold
His sanguine course unfaultring hold.
Nought he fears the wolfish grin
'Pha , slaughter's minions round him din -
hut the real period piece follows:
No more this pensile mundane ball
Rolls thro the wide aereal hall;
Ingulphed sinks the vast machine
The Critical'? objected to the obscurity of these lines,
finding the whole thing strange - the myth, the person­
Clges, the ideas. Its comments on the diction are a fine
example of unawareness, of the man in the glass house
throwing stones. The translator must "have recourse
to the Norse tongue and plead . . . his close imitation of
the original, as he will not otherwise reconcile us to his
pensile mundane balls and murk curtain" - (and his
"printless majesty of walk", which, one suspects, derives
from the printless foot of Shakespeare's elves and is the
more inappropriate here). Still, the Monthly24 was willing
to commend sublimity in the V pluspd even if it misprints
it Volupsa, in its picture of chaos, Ragnar¢kr and
the renewal of the world. Readers would get a good idea
of the fierce courage of the North, and they could be
further instructed if they looked at Ragnar's cy gnea
22 Jlonthly Review LXV (1781), 426-7. Dr Farley does not relate the
style of the odes to that of contemporary diction.
23 Critical Review 52 (1781), 62.
24 Monthly Review LVII (1777), 174, review of Jeming-ham', Rise and
Progress of the Scandinavian Poetry.