ABSTRACT
The Icelandic saga for some time was suspected of being, as a form of oral folk-lore, an importation from the Celtic countries, especially Ireland. What was chiefly responsible for the change of view was the discovery of genuine prose sagas among the peasantry of certain secluded valleys of Southern Norway. Whether there ever existed, in Ancient Rome, a regular prose saga of the Icelandic type, may of course justly be doubted. The prose saga is in its origins a family saga, that is, it is concerned with the genealogy of a given family, with the vicissitudes of each generation at least so far as it is represented by the oldest or most important branch, with public affairs only in so far as they concerned the family. The genealogical saga is in folk-lore what biography is in literary history, though it is apt to be more discreet.
