h was their form impressed upon the mind of the folk,
that when learned and literary works appeared, they were written in the
same style; hence we have histories alike of kingdoms, or families, or
miracles, lives of saints, kings, or bishops in saga-form, as well as
subjects that seem at first sight even less hopeful. All sagas that have
yet appeared in English may be found in the book-list at end of this
volume, but they are not a tithe of those that remain.

Of all the stories kept in being by the saga-tellers and left for our
delight, there is none that so epitomises human experience; has within
the same space so much of nature and of life; so fully the temper and
genius of the Northern folk, as that of the Volsungs and Niblungs, which
has in varied shapes entered into the literature of many lands. In
the beginning there is no doubt that the story belonged to the common
ancestral folk of all the Teutonic of Scando-Gothic peoples in the
earliest days of their wanderings. Whether they came from the Hindu
Kush, or originated in Northern Europe, brought it with them from Asia,
or evolved it among the mountains and rivers it has taken for scenery,
none know nor can; but each branch of their descendants has it in one
form or another, and as the Icelanders were the very crown and flower of
the northern folk, so also the story which is the peculiar heritage of
that folk received in their hands its highest expression and most noble
form. The oldest shape in which we have it is in the Eddaic poems, some
of which date from unnumbered generations before the time to which most
of them are usually ascribed, the time of the viking-kingdoms in the
Western Isles. In these poems the only historical name is that of
Attila, the great Hun leader, who filled so large a part of the
imagination of the people whose power he had broken. There is no doubt
that, in the days when the kingdoms of the Scando-Goths reached from the
North Cape to the Caspian, that some earlier great king performed his
part; but, after the striking career of Attila, he became the recognised
type of a powerful foreign potentate. All the other actors are
mythic-heroic. Of the Eddaic songs only fragments now remain, but
ere they perished there arose from them a saga, that now given to the
readers of this. The so-called Anglo-Saxons brought part of the story to
England in "Beowulf"; in which also appear some incidents that are again
given in the Icelandic saga of "Grettir