er of tales has been to explore them
rather than Wineland the Good. I have been more interested in Gudrid's
husbands and babies than I had need to be as an historian. I am sure
the tale is none the worse for it--and anyhow I can't help it. If I
read of a woman called Gudrid, and a handsome woman at that, I am bound
to know pretty soon what colour her hair was, and how she twisted it
up. If I hear that she had three husbands and outlived them all I
cannot rest until I know how she liked them, how they treated her; what
feelings she had, what feelings they had. So I get to know them as
well as I know her--and so it goes on. Wineland does not fail of
getting discovered, but meantime some new people have been born into
the world who do the business of discovering while doing their own
human business of love and marriage and childbirth.

All this, I say, is implicit in the saga-history. So it is, but it has
to be looked for. The saga listeners, I gather, took character very
much for granted, as probably Homer's audience did. Odysseus was full
of wiles, Achilles was terrible, Paris "a woman-haunting cheat," Gunnar
of Lithend a poet and born fighter, Nial a sage, and so on. The poet
gave them more than that, of course. Poetry apart, he did not disdain
psychology. There is plenty psychology in both _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_--less in the sagas, but still it is there. And when you come
to know the persons of these great inventions there is as much
psychology as any one can need, or may choose to put there--as much as
there is in _Hamlet_, as much as there is in _La Guerre et La Paix_.

In Kormak's Saga, for instance, which I put forward some years ago as
_A Lover's Tale_, is there no psychology? It is no way out of it to
put down Kormak's tergiversations to sorcery. I doubt if that was good
enough for the men who first heard the tale; it is certainly no good to
us. In the strange barbaric recesses of the tale of Gunnar Helming and
Frey's wife, what are we to make of it all unless we reckon with the
states of poor Sigrid's soul, married to a gog-eyed wooden god? How
came Halgerd to betray Gunnar to his foes, how came Nial to be burned
in his bed? Can one read _Laxdale_ and not desire to read through it
into the proud heart of Gudrun?

And having once begun with them one could go on, I believe, until the
hearts of all those fine, straight-dealing people were as plain to us
as those of our superfine, sophisticated mo