ere, and that leaves still an element of gracious shadowiness about
the heroines, if not the heroes. The Icelandic heroine has nothing
shadowy about her. Her weakest point is the want of delicacy--not in a
finicking sense by any means--which a rough promiscuous life to begin
with, and the extreme facility and frequency of divorce on the other,
necessarily brought about. But she is always, as the French have it, a
"person"--when she is good, a person altogether of the best; even when
she is bad, a person seldom other than striking and often charming.

[Sidenote: _Fact and fiction in the sagas._]

There is, of course, Icelandic literature in prose outside of the
sagas--the great law code (_Gragas_ or _Greygoose_), religious books
in the usual plenty, scientific books of a kind, and others. But the
saga, the story, was so emphatically the natural mould into which
Icelandic literary impulse threw itself, that it is even more
difficult here than elsewhere at the time to separate story and
history, fiction and fact. Indeed the stricter critics would, I
believe, maintain that every saga which deserves the name is actually
founded on fact: the _Laxdaela_ no less than the _Heimskringla_,[162]
the story of Kormak no less than that of Jarl Rognwald. A merely and
wholly invented story (they hold, and perhaps rightly) would have been
repugnant to that extraordinarily business-like spirit which has left
us, by the side of the earlier songs and later sagas, containing not a
little of the most poetical matter of the whole world, the _Landnama
Bok_ of Ari Frodi, a Domesday-book turned into literature, which is
indeed older than our time, but which forms a sort of commentary and
companion to the whole of the sagas by anticipation or otherwise.

[Footnote 162: Dr Vigfusson is exceedingly severe on the
_Heimskringla_, which he will have to be only a late, weak, and
rationalised compilation from originals like the oddly termed "Great
O.T. Saga." But it is hard for a man to think hardly of the book in
which, though only a translation, he first read how Queen Sigrid the
Haughty got rid of her troublesome lovers by the effectual process of
burning them _en masse_ in a barn, and how King Olaf died the greatest
sea-death--greater even than Grenville's--of any defeated hero, in
history or literature.]

[Sidenote: _Classes and authorship of them._]

Difficult as it may be to draw the line between intended history,
which was always strongly "r