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

ancestors--a belief forced upon them by their intense realisation of
the futility of human hopes and schemings, of the terror and the
tragedy of life, the vanity of its desires, and the untravelled gloom
or sleep, dreamless or dreamfull, which lies beyond its end.

Though the Sagas are entrancing, both as examples of literature of
which there is but little in the world and because of their living
interest, they are scarcely known to the English-speaking public. This
is easy to account for: it is hard to persuade the nineteenth century
world to interest itself in people who lived and events that happened
a thousand years ago. Moreover, the Sagas are undoubtedly difficult
reading. The archaic nature of the work, even in a translation; the
multitude of its actors; the Norse sagaman's habit of interweaving
endless side-plots, and the persistence with which he introduces the
genealogy and adventures of the ancestors of every unimportant
character, are none of them to the taste of the modern reader.

"Eric Brighteyes" therefore, is clipped of these peculiarities, and,
to some extent, is cast in the form of the romance of our own day,
archaisms being avoided as much as possible. The author will be
gratified should he succeed in exciting interest in the troubled lives
of our Norse forefathers, and still more so if his difficult
experiment brings readers to the Sagas--to the prose epics of our own
race. Too ample, too prolix, too crowded with detail, they cannot
indeed vie in art with the epics of Greece; but in their pictures of
life, simple and heroic, they fall beneath no literature in the world,
save the Iliad and the Odyssey alone.





ERIC BRIGHTEYES



I

HOW ASMUND THE PRIEST FOUND GROA THE WITCH

There lived a man in the south, before Thangbrand, Wilibald's son,
preached the White Christ in Iceland. He was named Eric Brighteyes,
Thorgrimur's son, and in those days there was no man like him for
strength, beauty and daring, for in all these things he was the first.
But he was not the first in good-luck.

Two women lived in the south, not far from where the Westman Islands
stand above the sea. Gudruda the Fair was the name of the one, and
Swanhild, called the Fatherless, Groa's daughter, was the other. They
were half-sisters, and there were none like them in those days, for