retla, and others, to
escape the repetition or the word Saga, after that of the person or
place to which the story belongs. It combines the idea of the subject
and the telling in one word.]

[Footnote 3: Many particulars mentioned in the Saga as wonderful are no
wonders to us. Thus in the case of Gunnar's bill, when we are told that
it gave out a strange sound before great events, this probably only
means that the shaft on which it was mounted was of some hard ringing
wood unknown in the north. It was a foreign weapon, and if the shaft
were of lance wood, the sounds it gave out when brandished or shaken
would be accounted for at once without a miracle.]

[Footnote 4: There can be no doubt that it was considered a grave
offence to public morality to tell a Saga untruthfully. Respect to
friends and enemies alike, when they were dead and gone, demanded that
the histories of their lives, and especially of their last moments,
should be told as the events had actually happened. Our own Saga affords
a good illustration of this, and shows at the same time how a Saga
naturally arose out of great events. When King Sigtrygg was Earl
Sigurd's guest at Yule, and Flosi and the other Burners were about the
Earl's court, the Irish king wished to hear the story of the Burning,
and Gunnar Lambi's son was put forward to tell it at the feast on
Christmas day. It only added to Kari's grudge against him to hear Gunnar
tell the story with such a false leaning, when he gave it out that
Skarphedinn had wept for fear of the fire, and the vengeance which so
speedily overtook the false teller was looked upon as just retribution.
But when Flosi took up the story, he told it fairly and justly for both
sides, "and therefore," says the Saga, "what he said was believed".]

[Footnote 5: Oeresound, the gut between Denmark and Sweden, at the
entrance of the Baltic, commonly called in English, The Sound.]

[Footnote 6: That is, he came from what we call the Western Isles or
Hebrides. The old appellation still lingers in "Sodor (i.e. the South
isles) and Man".]

[Footnote 7: This means that Njal was one of those gifted beings who,
according to the firm belief of that age, had a more than human insight
into things about to happen. It answers very nearly to the Scottish
"second sight".]

[Footnote 8: Lord of rings, a periphrasis for a chief, that is, Mord.]

[Footnote 9: Earth's offspring, a periphrasis for woman, that is, Unna.]

[Footnote 10: "Oyce