ABSTRACT

It is a strange thing that one rich branch of Northern literature (the Islendinga Sagas) [a footnote explains these as ‘those which relate to Icelanders of the Heroic Age’] has never been examined with a view to discover the echoes of old long-lost Teutonic ballads which are undoubtedly to be found there. The fact is that sufficient attention has not been paid to the comparative physiology and psychology of the Saga. The criticism of the last century, which took as literal truth all that was not absolutely miraculous in old literature, had survived far too long among scholars with respect to these epic tales, which from their very style and phrases are as clearly the creations of imagination as the Song of Roland or the ballad of Edom o’Gordon. They treat indeed of real personages, real events, real utterances, but the whole is seen in that golden ‘light that never was on sea or land,’ in fact, to coin a needful word, epicised. There was no Chinese wall between the Icelandic Sagas and the outer Teutonic world, the men that composed them had their heads full of older cycles of story and song, and is it not probable that they would weave much of their old stock of stories or incident here, a personage there, into the prose epics they were making?