found no fit expression but in verse, could stretch its
limbs, as it were, and be told in prose. Something of Irish influence
is again felt in this new departure and that marvellous new growth, the
saga, that came from it, but is little more than an influence. Every
people find some one means of expression which more than all else suits
their mood or their powers, and this the Icelanders found in the saga.
This was the life of a hero told in prose, but in set form, after a
regular fashion that unconsciously complied with all epical requirements
but that of verse--simple plot, events in order of time, set phrases for
even the shifting emotion or changeful fortune of a fight or storm,
and careful avoidance of digression, comment, or putting forward by
the narrator of ought but the theme he has in hand; he himself is never
seen. Something in the perfection of the saga is to be traced to the
long winter's evenings, when the whole household, gathered together at
their spinning, weaving, and so on, would listen to one of their number
who told anew some old story of adventure or achievement. In very truth
the saga is a prose epic, and marked by every quality an epic should
possess. Growing up while the deeds of dead heroes were fresh in memory,
most often recited before the sharers in such deeds, the saga, in its
pure form, never goes from what is truth to its teller. Where the saga,
as this one of the Volsungs is founded upon the debris of songs and
poems, even then very old, tales of mythological heroes, of men quite
removed from the personal knowledge of the narrator, yet the story is
so inwound with the tradition of his race, is so much a part of his
thought-life, that every actor in it has for him a real existence. At
the feast or gathering, or by the fireside, as men made nets and women
spun, these tales were told over; in their frequent repetition by men
who believed them, though incident or sequence underwent no change,
they would become closer knit, more coherent, and each an organic whole.
Gradually they would take a regular and accepted form, which would ease
the strain upon the reciter's memory and leave his mind free to adorn
the story with fair devices, that again gave help in the making it
easier to remember, and thus aided in its preservation. After a couple
of generations had rounded and polished the sagas by their telling and
retelling, they were written down for the most part between 1141 and
1220, and so muc