broken out of his mouth and he fell into a swoon in his high seat. But as
Fritiof was passing out of the temple, he saw the ring on the hand of
Helge's wife, who was warming an image of Balder by the fire. He seized
the ring on her hand, but it stuck fast and so he dragged her along the
floor toward the door and then the image fell into the fire. The wife of
Halfdan tried to come to her assistance, only to let the image she was
warming by the fire fall into the flames. As the image had previously
been anointed, the flames shot up at once and soon the whole house was
wrapped in fire. Fritiof, however, got the ring before he went away. But
as he walked out of the temple, said the people, he flung a firebrand at
the roof, so that all the house was wrapped in flames. Of the violent
feeling that, according to Tegnér, racked Fritiof's soul as he went into
exile or of the deep sense of guilt that latter hung as a pall over his
life there is no mention in the original. Here we touch upon the most
thoroughgoing change that Tegnér made in the character of his hero. He
invested him with a sentimentality, a disposition towards melancholy, an
accusing voice of conscience that torments his soul until full atonement
has been won, that are modern and Christian in essence and entirely
foreign to the pagan story. On this point Tegnér: "Another peculiarity
common to the people of the North is a certain disposition for melancholy
and heaviness of spirit common to all deeper characters. Like some
elegiac key-note, its sound pervades all our old national melodies, and
generally whatever is expressive in our annals, for it is found in the
depths of the nation's heart. I have somewhere or other said of Bellman,
the most national of our poets:

'And work the touch of gloom his brow o'shading,
A Northern minstrel-look, a grief in rosy red!'

For this melancholy, so far from opposing the fresh liveliness and