im popular; twice other
outlaws come to abide with him, and, after longer or shorter time, try
for his richly priced head, and though they lose their own lives,
naturally make him more and more desperate. Once he is beset by his
enemy Thorir with eighty men; and only comes off through the backing
of his ghostly friend Hallmund, who not long after meets his fate by
no ignoble hand, and Grettir cannot avenge him. Again, Grettir is
warmly welcomed by a widow, Steinvor of Sand-heaps, at whose dwelling,
in the oddest way, he takes up the full _Beowulf_ adventure and slays
a troll-wife in a cave just as his forerunner slew Grendel's mother.
But in the end the hue and cry is too strong, and by advice of friends
he flies to the steep holm of Drangey in Holmfirth--a place where the
top can only be won by ladders--with his younger brother Illugi and a
single thrall or slave. Illugi is young, but true as steel: the slave
is a fool, if not actually a traitor. After the bonders of Drangey
have done what they could to rid themselves of this very damaging and
redoubtable intruder, they give up their shares to a certain Thorbiorn
Angle. Thorbiorn at first fares ill against Grettir, whose outlawry is
on the point of coming to an end, as none might last longer than
twenty years. With the help of a wound, witch-caused to Grettir, and
the slave's treacherous laziness, Thorbiorn and his crew climb the
ladders and beset the brethren--Grettir already half dead with his
gangrened wound. The hero is slain with his own short-sword; the brave
Illugi is overwhelmed with the shields of the eighteen assailants, and
then slaughtered in cold blood. But Thorbiorn reaps little good, for
his traffickings with witchcraft deprive him of his blood-money; the
deaths of his men, of whom Illugi and Grettir had slain not a few, are
set against Illugi's own; and Thorbiorn himself, after escaping to
Micklegarth (Constantinople) and joining the Varangians, is slain by
Thorstein Dromond, who has followed him thither and joined the same
Guard on purpose, and who is made the hero of the appendix above
spoken of.

[Sidenote: _Merits of it._]

The defects of this are obvious, and may be probably enough accounted
for in part by the supposition of the experts above referred to--that
the saga as we have it is rather later than the other great sagas, and
is a patchwork of divers hands. It may perhaps be added, as a more
purely literary criticism, that no one of these han