pearance in Icelandic; but nothing
Icelandic makes its appearance elsewhere. For it is not to be supposed
for one moment that the _Nibelungenlied_, for instance, is the work of
men who wrote with the _Volsunga-Saga_ or the Gudrun lays before them,
any more than the _Grettis Saga_ is made up out of _Beowulf_. These
things are mere examples of the successive refashionings of traditions
and stories common to the race in different centuries, manners, and
tongues. Except as to the bare fact of community of origin they help
us little or not at all.

[Footnote 161: It is almost superfluous to insert, but would be
disagreeable to omit, a reference to the _Sturlunga Saga_ (2 vols.,
Oxford, 1879) and the _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_ (2 vols., Oxford,
1883) of the late Dr Vigfusson and Professor York Powell. The first
contains an invaluable sketch, or rather history, of Icelandic
literature: the second (though one may think its arrangement a little
arbitrary) is a book of unique value and interest. Had these two been
followed up according to Dr Vigfusson's plan, practically the whole of
Icelandic literature that has real interest would have been accessible
once for all. As it is, one is divided between satisfaction that
England should have done such a service to one of the great mediaeval
literatures, and regret that she has not done as much for others.]

[Sidenote: _The Saga._]

The reasons why Icelandic literature, in its most peculiar and
interesting form of the saga, did not penetrate abroad are clear
enough; and the remoteness and want of school-education in the island
itself are by no means the most powerful of them. The very thing which
is most characteristic of them, and which in these later times
constitutes their greatest charm, must have been against them in their
own time. For the stories which ran like an epidemic through Europe in
the years immediately before and immediately after 1200, though they
might be in some cases concerned directly with national heroes,
appealed without exception to international and generally human
interests. The slightest education, or the slightest hearing of
persons educated, sufficed to teach every one that Alexander and Caesar
were great conquerors, that the Story of Troy (the exact truth of
which was never doubted) had been famous for hundreds and almost
thousands of years. Charlemagne had had directly to do with the
greater part of Europe in peace or war, and the struggle with the
Sa