"
It would be interesting to note how the poet has attempted to solve a
problem so important and so difficult as this. In the first place, we
find in "Sigurd the Crusader" not a trace of a didactic purpose beyond
that of familiarizing the people with its own history, and this, as he
himself admits in the preface just quoted, is merely a secondary
consideration. He wishes to make all, irrespective of age, culture, and
social station, feel strongly the bond of their common nationality; and,
with this in view, he proceeds to unroll to them a panorama of simple
but striking situations, knit together by a plot or story which, without
the faintest tinge of sensationalism, appeals to those broadly human and
national sympathies which form the common mental basis of Norse
ignorance and Norse culture. He seizes the point in the saga where the
long-smouldering hostility between the royal brothers, Sigurd the
Crusader and Eystein, has broken into full blaze, and traces, in a
series of vigorously sketched scenes, the intrigue and counter-intrigue
which hurry the action onward toward its logically prepared climax--a
mutual reconciliation.
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