Chapter Saga to Sailor King of S by Brewer's Readers Handbook

lover. Frithjof lived in the eighth century, and this saga was compiled at the beginning of the fourteenth century, a year or two after the Heimskringla. It is very interesting, because Tegnér, the Swedish poet, has selected it for his Idylls (1825), just as Tennyson has taken his idyllic stories from the Morte d’ Arthur or the Welsh Mabinogion. Tegnér’s Idylls have been translated into English by Latham (1838), by Stephens (1841), and by Blackley (1857).

3. The Swedish Saga or lay of Swedish “history” is the Ingvars Saga.

4. The Folks Saga or lay of Russian legendary history is the Egmunds Saga.

5. The Folks Sagas are stories from romance. From this ancient collection we have derived our nursery tales of Jack and the Bean-Stalk, Jack the Giant-Killer, the Giant who smelt the Blood of an Englishman, Blue Beard, Cinderella, the Little Old Woman cut Shorter, the Pig that wouldn’t go over the Bridge, Puss in Boots, and even the first sketches of Whittington and His Cat, and Baron Munchausen. (See Dasent: Tales from the Norse, 1859.)

6. Sagas of Foreign origin. Besides the rich stores of original tales, several foreign ones have been imported and translated into Norse, such as Barlaham and Josaphat, by Rudolf of Ems, one of the German minnesingers (see p. 90). On the other hand, the minnesingers borrowed from the Norse sagas their famous story embodied in the Nibelungen Lied, called the “German Iliad,” which is from the second part of Snorro Sturleson’s Edda.

Sagaman, a narrator of Sagas. These ancient chroniclers differed from scalds in several respects. Scalds were minstrels, who celebrated in verse the exploits of living kings or national heroes; sagamen were tellers of legendary stories, either in prose or verse, like Scheherazadê the narrator of the Arabian Nights, the mandarin Fum-Hoam the teller of the Chinese Tales, Moradbak the teller of the Oriental Tales, Feramorz who told the tales to Lalla Rookh, and so on. Again, scalds resided at court, were attached to the royal suite, and followed the king in all his expeditions; but sagamen were free and unattached, and told their tales to prince or peasant, in lordly hall or at village wake.

Sagamite , a kind of soup or tisan, given by American Indians to the sick.

Our virgins fed her with their kindly bowls
Of fever-balm and sweet sagamité.
   —Campbell: Gertrude of Wyoming, i. 19 (1809).

Sagan of Jerusalem (The), in Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, is mean for Compton bishop of London.

…the Sagan of Jerusalem,
Of hopeful soul, and noble stem;
Him in the western dome, whose weighty sense
Flows in fit words and heavenly eloquence.
   —Pt. i. 803-806.

Sage of Concord (The), Ralph Waldo Emerson, of Boston, United States, author of Literary Ethics (1838), Poems (1846), Representative Men (1850), English Traits (1856), and numerous other works (1803–1879).

In Mr. Emerson we have a poet and a protoundly religious man, who is really and entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science, past, present, or prospective. In his case, poetry, with the joy of a Bacchanal, takes her graver brother science by the hand, and cheers him with immortal laughter. By Emerson scientific conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer forms and warmer lines of an ideal world.—Tyndall Fragments of Science.

No one who has conversed with the Sage of Concord can wonder at the love which his neighbours feel for him, or the reverence with which he is regarded by the scholars of England and America.—Newspaper Biographical Sketch, May, 1879.