easonable to let the imagination go to work upon it? If Skarphedin
indeed took his father's death in that manner, is one not justified in
going to work with Skarphedin, to find out what manner of man he was
who could so express himself in supreme crisis? I trace a great deal
of our soldiers' crude jesting at death to their Scandinavian blood;
and nothing more intensely and painfully interesting has ever been
given to the imagination to work upon than their conduct in the face of
horror and sin of late, so dauntless, so blithe and so grim as it is.

Where heroism has been so shown on all sides of us in these three
dreadful years, it is no longer possible to pick and choose heroic
nations. One might otherwise have said that no such heroes were ever
given to the world as the heroes of Iceland. That they are not
accepted as such on all hands is no fault of the literature which
presents them; for that literature, like all great art, makes demands
upon its readers. It hands over the key, but if the lock is stiff it
will not give you oil for the wards. That you must find for yourself.
Oil for the wards is all I can pretend to here; and if I may say that I
have humanised a tale of endurance, and clothed demigods and shadows in
flesh and blood, I shall feel that I have done useful work, and bear
charges of vulgarisation with a philosophy which assures me that the
two terms are much of a muchness.

The great gestures, the large-scale maps, the grand manner are for
history and epic, but genre for the novel--and what _genre_ is so
momentous to it as the human? Let Homer describe the wrath of Achilles
and the passion of Hektor and Andromache. The novelist will want to
know what Briseis felt when she was handed from hero to hero, will pore
upon the matronly charity of Theano, the agony of the two young men
Achilles slew by Skamander, and find the psychology of these pawns in
the great game as enthralling as that of the high movers. I confess
that to me Gudrid, the many times a wife and the always sweet and
reserved, is more absorbing a tale than the discovery of Wineland. I
like the two running Scots better than their country, would barter all
Greenland for the tale of the winter sickness in Thorstan Black's
house. So much apology I feel moved to offer for having put down
Exploration from the chief place in the tale, and put up a wife and
mother.

As for the verse--Gudrid's Wardlock chant is adapted from the Lay of
Swip