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grouped under the name of ‘fslendinga ségur (Icelandic Sagas), the 
action, as already mentioned, takes place in the tenth century and the 
beginning of the eleventh. The last of these sagas, however, the 
‘Bandamanna saga‘ (the Story of the Banded Men) is an exceplion in 
so far as the events, it relates, took place about the middle of that 
century. As the names of the sagas: Egils saga elc, imply, they are 
mostly biographies of single persons where the fortunes of the hero, 
from cradle to grave, are carefully recorded; but some of them are 
much more comprehensive and give not only the saga of the family, 
for several generations, but that of the whole district as well. Most of 
the sagas relate to the north and west of Iceland; there are a few 
short stories dealing with events in the eastern districts, and only two 
have their plots laid in the south. But complemental to the sagas and 
serving as a standard by which to test their reliability, stands that fa- 
mous compilation, called the ‘Landnimabdék’ (Book of Settlement or 
Land-take) which, quite unique of its kind and furnishing a detailed 
account of the colonization of the country, gives the names of most 
(if not all) the settlers with their genealogies and much historical mat- 
ter besides. To the same period as the sagas proper belong a number 
of short stories (Thaettir) of Icelanders, both poets, heroes, merchant 
mariners, men out of the common a. s. 0. They are a kind of snap- 
shots, taken of them while abroad with kings or great men, and show 
in a masterly way not only the magnanimity and firmness characteriz- 
ing our countrymen in those far-off days, their sagacity, daring and 
recklessly emulative spirits, but also the culture of the age. 
The Icelandic sagas are justly famous for their great literary merits: 
their style, at once stately and homely, abounds in short pithy sen- 
tences; every thought is expressed, every event related in the most suit- 
able language; the author’s firm grip of things and his keen eye for 
the individuality of his characters come by their own; there is in most 
of the sagas a strong undercurrent of fate, sometimes faintly present 
even in the opening chapters where the descent of the persons is 
traced, and sometimes appearing in dreams, darkly foreshadowing the 
whole course of events; we are struck with the noble tranquility of 
the author, his moderation and sober impartiality; always remaining 
behind the scene he lets his persons appear in words and deeds, as 
on a stage, each with his own particular mode of expression, his tricks 
of manner, his garb even. Nowhere is silence more eloquent, nowhere 
such vistas opened up between the lines as in the Icelandic sagas.