laws, the real story of whose career is mixed up with the mythical adventures of Beowulf, here put down to Gretti, and with late romantic episodes and fabulous folk-tales (Dr Vigfusson would ascribe the best parts of this saga to Sturla; its last editor, whose additions would be better away, must have touched it up about 1300; Messrs Morris and Magnusson have Englished it), and the stories of the Lightwater Men and Liot O' Vall (1009-60). Gudmund the Mighty and his family and neighbours are the heroes of these tales, which form a little cycle. The Banda-manna Saga (1050-60), the only comedy among the sagas, is also a northern tale; it relates the struggles of a plebeian who gets a chieftaincy against the old families of the neighbourhood, whom he successfully outwits; Öl-kofra Thattr is a later imitation of it in the same humorous strain. The sagas of the north are rougher and coarser than those of the west, but have a good deal of individual character.
Of the east. Of tales relating to the east there survive the Weapon-firth cycle,—the tales of Thorstein the White (c. 900), of Thorstein the Staffsmitten (c. 985), Englished by Mr Morris, of Gunnar Thidrand's Bane (1000-1008), and of the Weapon-firth Men (975-990), all relating to the family of Hof and their friends and kin for several generations,—and the story of Hrafnkell Frey's Priest (c. 960), the most idyllic of sagas and best of the eastern tales. Of later times there are Droplaug's Sons' Saga (997-1007), written probably about 1110, and preserved in the uncouth broken style of the original (a brother's revenge for his brother's death is the substance of it; Brand-krossa Thattr is an appendix to it), and the tales of Thorstein Hall of Side's Son (c. 1014), and his brother Thidrandi (c. 996), which belong to the cycle of Hall o' Side's Saga, unhappily lost; they are weird tales of bloodshed and magic, with idyllic and pathetic episodes.
Of the south. The sagas of the south are either lost or absorbed in that of Nial (970-1014), a long and complex story into which are woven the tales of Gunnar, Nial, and parts of others, as Brian Boroimhe, Hall o' Side, &c. It is, whether we look at style, contents, or legal and historical weight, the foremost of all sagas. It deals especially with law, the sole bond of a rough heathen community, and contains in itself, as it were, at once the pith and the moral of all early Icelandic history. Its hero Nial, type of the good lawyer, is contrasted with its villain Mord, the ensample of cunning, chicane, and legal wrong-doing; and a great part of the saga is taken up with the three cases and suits of the divorce, the death of Hoskuld, and the burning of Nial, which are given with great minuteness and care. The number and variety of its dramatis personæ give it the liveliest interest throughout. The women Hallgerda, Bergthora, and Ragnhild are as sharply contrasted as the men Gunnar, Skarphedin, Flosi, and Kari. The pathos of such tragedies as the death of Gunnar and Hoskuld and the burning is interrupted by the humour of the Al-thing scenes and the intellectual interest of the legal proceedings. The plot dealing first with the life and death of Gunnar, type of the chivalry of his day, then with the burning of Nial by Flosi, and how it came about, and lastly with Kari's revenge on the burners, is the ideal saga-plot, and affords ample room for the finest treatment of incident. The author must have been of the east, a good lawyer and genealogist, and have composed it about 1250, to judge from various internal evidence. It has been overworked by a later editor, c. 1300, who inserted many spurious verses. It has been translated by Sir G. Dasent.
Of Greenland and North America. Relating partly to Iceland, but mostly to Greenland and Wineland (N. America), are the sagas of the Floe-Men (985-90), a good story of the adventures of Thorgils and of the struggles of shipwrecked colonists in Greenland, a graphic and terrible picture; and of Eirik the Red (990-1000), two versions, one northern (Flatey-book), one western, the better (in Hawk's Book, and AM. 557, translated by the Rev. J. Sephton), the story of the discovery of Greenland and Wineland (America) by the Icelanders at the end of the 9th century. Later are the story of Thormod and Thorgeir, the Foster Brethren (1015-30), a very interesting story, told in a quaint romantic style, of Thorgeir, the reckless henchman of King Olaf, and how his death was revenged in Greenland by his sworn brother the true-hearted Thormod Coalbrow's poet, who afterwards dies at Sticklestad. The tale of Einar Sookisson (c. 1125) may also be noticed. The lost saga of Poet Helgi, of which only fragments remain, was also laid in Greenland.
Besides complete sagas, such as have been noticed, there are embedded in the Kings' Lives numerous small thættir or episodes, small tales of Icelanders adventures, often relating to poets and their lives at the kings courts; one or two of these seem to be fragments of sagas now lost. Among the more notable are those of Orm Storolfsson, Ogmund Dijtt, Halldor Snorrason, Thorstein Oxfoot, Hromund Halt, Thorwald Tasaldi, Svadi and Arnor Herlingar-nef, Audunn of Westfirth, Sneglu-Halli, Hrafn of Hrutfiord, Hreidar Heimski, Gisli Illugison, Ivar the poet, Gull-Æsu Thord, Einar Skulason the poet, Mani the poet, &c.
The forged Icelandic sagas appear as early as the 13th century. They are very poor, and either worked up on hints given in genuine stories, or altogether apocryphal. Some of them have been composed within the present century.
History. About the year of the battle of Hastings was born one of the blood of Queen Aud, who founded the famous historical school of Iceland, and himself produced its greatest monument in a work which can only be compared for value with the English Domesday Book. Nearly all that we know of the heathen commonwealth Ari. may be traced to the collections of Ari. It was he too that fixed the style in which history should be composed in Iceland. It was he that secured and put into order the vast mass of fragmentary tradition that was already dying out in his day. And perhaps it is the highest praise of all to him that he wrote in his own “Danish tongue,” and so ensured the use of that tongue by the learned and cultured of after generations, when, had he chosen to imitate the learned of other lands, not only would the freshness and life of the northern history as we have it have been crushed out, but the vernacular literature (heightened and purified by his influence as it has now been) would have sunk and disappeared. Ari's great works are Konungabok, or The Book of Kings, relating the history of the kings of Norway from the rise of the Yngling dynasty down to the death of Harald Sigurdsson in the year of his own birth. This book he composed from the dictation of old men such as Odd Kolsson, who had preserved traditions in their family and got information from contemporaries, from the genealogical poems, and from the various dirges, battle-songs, and eulogia of the poets. It is most probable that he also compiled shorter Kings' Books relating to Denmark and perhaps to England. The Konungabok is preserved under the Kings' Lives of Snorri, parts of it almost as they came from Ari's hands, for example, Ynglinga and Harold Fairhair's Saga, and the prefaces stating the plan and critical foundations of the work, parts of it only used as a framework for the magnificent superstructure of the lives of the two Olafs, and of Harald Hardrada and his nephew Magnus the Good. The best text of Ari's Konungabok (Ynglinga, and the sagas down to but not including Olaf Tryggvason's) is that of Frisbók.
The Book of Settlements (Landnamabók) is a most wonderful performance, both in its scheme and carrying out. It is divided into five parts, the first of which contains a brief account of the discovery of the island; the other four, one by one taking a quarter of the land, describe the name, pedigree, and history of each settler in geographical order, notice the most important facts in the history of his descendants, the names of their homesteads, their courts and temples, thus including mention of 4000 persons, one-third of whom are women, and 2000 places. The mass of information contained in so small a space, the clearness and accuracy of the details, the immense amount of life which is somehow breathed into the whole, can hardly fail to astonish the reader, when he reflects that this colossal task was sketched out and accomplished by one man, for his collaborateur Kolskegg merely filled up his plan with regard to part of the east coast, a district with which Ari in his western home at Stad was little familiar. Landnamabók has reached us in two complete editions, one edited by Sturla, who brought down the genealogies to his own grandfather and grandmother, Sturla and Gudny, and one by Hawk, who traces the pedigrees still later to himself.
Ari also wrote a Book of Icelanders (Islendingabók, c. 1127), which has perished as a whole, but fragments of it are embedded in many sagas and Kings' Lives; it seems to have been a complete epitome of his earlier works, together with an account of the constitutional history, ecclesiastical and civil, of Iceland. An abridgment of the latter part of it, the little Libellus Islandorum (to which the title of the bigger Liber—Islendingabók—is often given), made by the historian for his friends Bishops Ketil and Thorlak, for whom he wrote the Liber (c. 1137). This charming little book is, with the much later collections of laws, our sole authority for the Icelandic constitution of the commonwealth, but, “much as it tells, the lost Liber would have been of still greater importance.” Kristni-Saga, the story of the christening of Iceland, is also a work of Ari's, “overlaid” by a later editor no doubt, but often preserving Ari's very words. This saga, together with several scattered tales of early Christians in Iceland before the Change of Faith (1002), may have made up a section of the lost Liber. Of the author of these works little personal is known. He lived in quiet days a quiet life; but he shows himself in his works, as Snorri describes him, “a man wise, of good memory, and a speaker of the truth.” Surely, if Thucydides is justly accounted the first political historian, Ari may be fitly styled the first of scientific historians.
Sæmund. A famous contemporary and friend of Ari is Sæmund (1056-1133), a great scholar and churchman, whose learning so impressed his age that he got the reputation of a magician. He was the friend of Bishop John, the founder of the great Odd-Verjar family, and the author of a Book of Kings from Harald Fairhair to Magnus the Good, in which he seems to have fixed the exact chronology of each reign. It is most probable that he wiote in Latin. The idea that he had anything to do with the poetic Edda, in general, or the Sun's Song in particular, is of course unfounded and modern.
The flame which Ari had kindled was fed by his successors in the 12th century. Eirik Oddsson (c. 1150) wrote the lives of Sigurd
