"Haggard, H Rider- Eric Brighteyes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haggard H. Rider)

"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