Content area
Full Text
A LATVIAN POET, Uldis Berzins, who is fairly familiar with Icelandic poetry and visited our country not too long ago, told me that what he missed in our poems was the "peril" or "precariousness" inherent in human existence, whereas nature was a predominant and overshadowing theme in most Icelandic poems. This comment is valid in so far as it takes note of a lack of an overtly "philosophical" or "existential" content in most Icelandic poetry, but it overlooks the fact that nature can be malevolent as well as benevolent, and both aspects are richly treated in our poetry.
Nature's malevolent aspect has certainly been one of the staples of our history since the settlement of the island in the late ninth century. One might suitably say that the forces of nature have in fact been man's principal adversary over the past millennium, and they have played a significant part in our poetry, forcing man to recognize his smallness and insignificance when faced with the awesome splendor and destructive capabilities of nature. Natural catastrophes have been a constant refrain to our history, and obviously they have colored our outlook, fostered our fatalism, and inspired many a good writer to grand poetic performances.
Descriptions of nature are comparatively rare in ancient literature. Nature did not become a substantial subject of writers or other artists until the eighteenth century, when Jean Jacques Rousseau and Romanticism elevated nature to a higher power, endowing it with a value of its own. It became at once a source of pleasure and inspiration, and a kind of link between man and his origins.
In the medieval classical literature of Iceland, the Sagas and the Eddas, nature descriptions are very rare. The most famous exception to that rule is probably the comment of Gunnar of Hlidarendi in Njal's Saga (75), as he is being driven into exile, when his horse stumbles and throws him: "Fair is the slope, fairer it seems than I have ever seen it before, with whitening grain and the home field mown; and I shall ride back home and not go abroad at all."
Here a genuine feeling for nature seems to be expressed, yet it is not seen with the eyes of an esthete or an artist, but...