celand. In the main, the authors of
Iceland are unknown[2].

There are several well-marked periods, therefore, in Icelandic literary
production. The earliest was devoted to poetry, Icelandic being no
different from most other languages in the precedence of that form.
Before the settlement of Iceland, the Norse lands were acquainted with
songs about gods and champions, written in a simple verse form. The
first settlers wrote down some of these, and forgot others. In the
_Codex Regius_, preserved in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, we have a
collection of these songs. This material was published in the
seventeenth century as the _Saemundar Edda_, and came to be known as the
_Elder_ or _Poetic Edda_. Both titles are misnomers, for Saemund had
nothing to do with the making of the book, and _Edda_ is a name
belonging to a book of later date and different purpose.

This work--not a product of the soil as folk-songs are--is the fountain
head of Old Norse mythology, and of Old Norse heroic legends. _Voeluspa_
and _Havamal_ are in this collection, and other songs that tell of Odin
and Baldur and Loki. The Helgi poems and the Voelsung poems in their
earliest forms are also here.

A second class of poetry in this ancient literature is that called
"Skaldic." Some of this deals with mythical material, and some with
historical material. A few of the skalds are known to us by name,
because their lives were written down in later sagas. Egill
Skallagrimsson, known to all readers of English and Scotch antiquities,
Eyvind Skaldaspillir and Sigvat are of this group.

Poetic material that is very rich is found in Snorri Sturluson's work on
Old Norse poetics, entitled _The Edda_, and often referred to as the
_Younger_ or _Prose Edda_.

More valuable than the poetry is the prose of this literature,
especially the _Sagas_. The saga is a prose epic, characteristic of the
Norse countries. It records the life of a hero, told according to fixed
rules. As we have said, the sagas were based upon careers run in
Iceland's stormy time. They are both mythical and historical. In the
mythical group are, among others, the _Voelsunga Saga_, the _Hervarar
Saga_, _Frieththjofs Saga_ and _Ragnar Loethbroks Saga_. In the historical
group, the flowering time of which was 1200-1270, we find, for example,
_Egils Saga_, _Eyrbyggja Saga_, _Laxdaela Saga_, _Grettis Saga_, _Njals
Saga_. A branch of the historic sagas is the Kings' Sagas, in which we
find _Heimsk