A second stage in the literary history of the North is represented
by the 'episodic' poems _Hjalmar's Death Song_ and the _Waking of
Angantyr_, both of which are attributed to the twelfth century by
Heusler and Ranisch[12]. Unlike the poem on the battle between the
Goths and the Huns, neither of these forms a story complete in
itself. They presuppose the existence of a saga in some form or other,
presumably oral, dealing at least with the fight at Samso; and the
existence of such a saga in the twelfth century is confirmed by the
account of the same event given by Saxo[13].

A third stage in the literary development of the heroic legends is
represented by the written saga itself, which has evidently been
formed by the welding together, with more or less skill as the case
may be, of several distinct stories, and of more than one literary
form. A particularly striking instance of this is to be found in the
_Hervarar Saga_ with its stories of the Heroic and Viking Ages,
the poems dealing with the fight on Samso, the primitive Riddles of
Gestumblindi and the early poem of the battle between the Goths and
Huns[14]. Something of the same kind has also taken place in the
composition of the _Thaettir of Nornagest_ and of _Soerli_ respectively,
though into the former has entered a considerable element of folk-tale
which is introduced with a certain _naivete_ and no little skill
alongside the old heroic legends. As has been already mentioned, these
three sagas, like others of the same type, appear to have been written
down in the late thirteenth or the early years of the fourteenth
century. On the other hand most if not the whole of the _Saga of
Hromund Greipsson_ appears to have been composed early in the twelfth
century, but we do not know when it was first written down.

A fourth stage is represented by the Icelandic _Rimur_ which are for
the most part rhyming metrical versions of the sagas and which date
from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As an illustration of
this stage I have translated a few stanzas from the _Griplur_, a
_Rima_ based on an early form of the story of Hromund Greipsson[15].
The _Rimur_ are, so far as we can judge, somewhat wearisome
paraphrases of the prose stories, and while the metre and diction
are elaborate in the extreme, the treatment of the story is often
mechanical and puerile. Comparatively few of the _Rimur_ have as yet
been published and the _Griplur_ is the only one known to me which