An elegiac tone pervades all our old national
melodies, and, generally speaking, all that is of significance in
our history; for it rises from the very bottom of the nation's
heart. There is a certain joyousness (commonly attributed to the
French) which in the last instance is only levity. But the
joyousness of the North is fundamentally serious; for which reason
I have in Frithjof endeavored to give a hint of this brooding
melancholy in his repentance of the unintentional burning of the
temple, his brooding fear of Balder,
"Who sits in the sky, and the thoughts he sends down,
Which forever are clouding my mind."
It will be seen from this that Tegner was fully conscious of what he was
doing. He civilized Frithjof, because he was addressing a civilized
audience which would have taken little interest in the rude viking of
the eighth century, if he had been presented to them in all his savage
unrestraint. He did exactly what Tennyson did, when he made King Arthur
the model of a modern English gentleman and (by implication) a
Protestant a thousand years before Protestantism existed.
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