Fritiofs Saga
Fritiofs Saga retells an Old Norse legend of love and honor set in ancient Scandinavia. Frithiof, a yeoman's son of great strength and spirit, loves Ingeborg, the daughter of King Bele. After the king's death her brothers refuse the match and pledge her to the aging King Ring. Sent away on a perilous sea voyage, Frithiof returns to find the lovers' temple at Balder's grove, where in anger he causes a fire that brings down a curse of exile upon him. Years of wandering, atonement, and reconciliation follow before he is at last restored to honor and to Ingeborg.
Cast in twenty-four lyric cantos, the poem blends Viking-age myth with the romantic idealism of its nineteenth-century author. It celebrates courage, fidelity, reverence for the gods, and the taming of rash passion into mature self-mastery. Long regarded as Sweden's national epic and Tegnér's masterpiece, it gave Europe one of its most beloved visions of the Norse heroic spirit.
How it begins
Ever since the establishment, many years ago, of courses in Swedish in a few American colleges and universities the need of Swedish texts, supplied with vocabularies and explanatory notes after the model of the numerous excellent German and French editions, has been keenly felt. This need has become particularly pressing the last three years during which Swedish has been added to the curricula of a large number of high schools. The teachers in Swedish in these high schools as well as in colleges and universities have been greatly handicapped in their work by the lack of properly edited texts. It is clearly essential to the success of their endeavor to create an interest in the Swedish language and its literature, at the same time maintaining standards of scholarship that are on a level with those maintained by other modern foreign language departments, that a plentiful and varied supply of text material be furnished. The present edition of Tegnér's Fritiofs Saga aims to be a modest contribution to the series of Swedish texts that in the most recent years have been published in response to this urgent demand. Sweden has since the days of Tegnér been prolific in the creation of virile and wholesome literary masterpieces, but Fritiofs Saga by Tegnér is still quite generally accorded the foremost place among the literary products of the nation.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.