word of the white Christ and were baptised, and lived by written law, and
did not avenge themselves by their own hands.

They were Christians now, but they did not forget the old times, the old
feuds and fightings and Bersarks, and dealings with ghosts, and with dead
bodies that arose and wrought horrible things, haunting houses and
strangling men. The Icelandic ghosts were able-bodied, well
"materialised," and Grettir and Olaf Howard's son fought them with
strength of arm and edge of steel. _True_ stories of the ancient days
were told at the fireside in the endless winter nights by story tellers
or Scalds. It was thought a sin for any one to alter these old stories,
but as generations passed more and more wonderful matters came into the
legend. It was believed that the dead Gunnar, the famed archer, sang
within his cairn or "Howe," the mound wherein he was buried, and his
famous bill or cutting spear was said to have been made by magic, and to
sing in the night before the wounding of men and the waking of war.
People were thought to be "second-sighted"--that is, to have prophetic
vision. The night when Njal's house was burned his wife saw all the meat
on the table "one gore of blood," just as in Homer the prophet
Theoclymenus beheld blood falling in gouts from the walls, before the
slaying of the Wooers. The Valkyries, the Choosers of the slain, and the
Norns who wove the fates of men at a ghastly loom were seen by living
eyes. In the graves where treasures were hoarded the Barrowwights dwelt,
ghosts that were sentinels over the gold: witchwives changed themselves
into wolves and other monstrous animals, and for many weeks the heroes
Signy and Sinfjotli ran wild in the guise of wolves.

These and many other marvels crept into the Sagas, and made the listeners
feel a shudder of cold beside the great fire that burned in the centre of
the skali or hall where the chief sat, giving meat and drink to all who
came, where the women span and the Saga man told the tales of long ago.
Finally, at the end of the middle ages, these Sagas were written down in
Icelandic, and in Latin occasionally, and many of them have been
translated into English.

Unluckily, these translations have hitherto been expensive to buy, and
were not always to be had easily. For the wise world, which reads
newspapers all day and half the night, does not care much for books,
still less for good books, least of all for old books. You can make no
mo