mere stuff of
romance as we see them in these poems. Whether Arthur was a real
person or not, the same to an even greater extent is true of him. The
kings and their knights appealed to Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans,
Italians alike, because they were not obtrusively English, German,
Italian, or French. But the sagas are from the first and to the (at
least genuine) last nothing if not national, domestic, and personal.
The grim country of ice and fire, of joekul and skerry, the massive
timber homesteads, the horse-fights and the Viking voyages, the
spinning-wheel and the salting-tub, are with us everywhere; and yet
there is an almost startling individuality, for all the sameness of
massacre and chicanery, of wedding and divorce, which characterises
the circumstances. Gunnar is not distinguished from Grettir merely by
their adventures; there is no need of labels on the lovers of Gudrun;
Steingerd in Kormak's Saga and Hallgerd in Njal's, are each something
much more than types of the woman with bad blood and the woman with
blood that is only light and hot. And to the unsophisticated reader
and hearer, as many examples might be adduced to show, this
personality, the highest excellence of literature to the sophisticated
scholar, is rather a hindrance than a help. He has not proved the ways
and the persons; and he likes what he has proved.

To us, on the contrary, the characteristics of saga-work, at which a
glance has been made in the foregoing paragraphs, form its principal
charm, a charm reinforced by the fact of its extraordinary difference
from almost all other literature except (in some points) that of the
Homeric poems. Although there is a good deal of common form in the
sagas, though outlawry and divorce, the quibbles of the Thing and the
violence of ambush or holmgang, recur to and beyond the utmost limits
of permitted repetition, the unfamiliarity of the setting atones for
its monotony, and the individuality of the personages themselves very
generally prevents that monotony from being even felt. The stories are
never tame; and, what is more remarkable, they seldom or never have
the mere extravagance which in mediaeval, at least as often as in
other, writing, plays Scylla to the Charybdis of tameness. Moreover,
they have, as no other division of mediaeval romance has in anything
like the same measure, the advantage of the presence of _interesting_
characters of both sexes. Only the Arthurian story can approach them
h