omanced" in form, if not intentionally in
fact, and that very peculiar product of Icelandic genius the saga
proper, in which the original domestic record has been, so to speak,
"super-romanced" into a work of art, it is still possible to see it,
if not to draw it, between the _Heimskringla_, the story of the Kings
of Norway (made English after some earlier versions by Messrs
Magnusson and Morris, and abstracted, as genius can abstract, by
Carlyle), the _Orkneyinga_ and _Faereyinga_ Sagas (the tales of these
outlying islands before the former came under Norwegian rule), the
curious conglomerate known as the _Sturlunga Saga_ on the one hand,
and the greater and lesser sagas proper on the other. The former are
set down to the two great writers Snorri and Sturla, the one the chief
literary light of Iceland in the first half of the thirteenth century,
the other the chief light in the second, both of the same family, and
with Ari Frodi the three greatest of the certainly known men of
letters of the island. Conjecture has naturally run riot as to the
part which either Snorri or Sturla may have taken in the sagas not
directly attributed to either, but most probably dating from their
time, as well as with the personalities of the unknown or little known
poets and prosemen who shaped the older stories at about the same
period. But to the historian who takes delight in literature, and does
not care very much who made it provided it is made well, what has been
called "the singular silence" as to authorship which runs through the
whole of the early Icelandic literature is rather a blessing than
otherwise. It frees him from those biographical inquiries which always
run the risk of drawing nigh to gossip, and it enables him to
concentrate attention on the literature itself.

This literature is undoubtedly best exemplified, as we should expect,
in the wholly anonymous and only indirectly historical sagas of the
second division, though it is fair to say that there is nothing here
much finer than such things as the famous last fight of King Olaf in
the _Heimskringla_, or as many other incidents and episodes in the
history-books. Only the hands of the writers were freer in the others:
and complete freedom--at least from all but the laws of art--is never
a more "nobil thing" than it is to the literary artist.

[Sidenote: _The five greater sagas._]

There seems no reason to quarrel with the classification which divides
the sagas proper i