of the original that it is possible to get in a translation, and
those who can read Icelandic if put to it, will prefer to get _Grettla_
through Morris and Magnusson. All the essentials are here, if not all
the nuances.

The reader unfamiliar with sagas will need a little patience with the
genealogies that crop out in every chapter. The sagaman has a
squirrel-like agility in climbing family trees, and he is well
acquainted with their interlocking branches. There are chapters in the
_Grettis Saga_ where this vanity runs riot, and makes us suspect that
Iceland differed little from a country town of to-day in its love for
gossip about the family of neighbors whose names happen to come into the
conversation. If the reader will persevere through the early chapters,
until Grettir commands exclusive attention, he will come to a drama
which has not many peers in literature. The outlaw kills a man in every
other chapter, but this record is no vulgar list of brutal fights. Not
inhuman nature, but human nature is here shown, human nature struggling
with unrelenting fate, making a grand fight, and coming to its end
because it must, but without ignominy. How fine a touch it is that
refuses to the outlaw's murderer the price set upon Grettir's head,
because the getting of it was through a "nithings-deed," the murder of a
dying man! William Morris was most felicitous in envoys and dedicating
poems, and in the sonnet prefixed to this translation he was
particularly happy. The first eight lines describe the hero of the
saga--the last six lines the significance of this literary creation:

A life scarce worth the living, a poor fame
Scarce worth the winning, in a wretched land,
Where fear and pain go upon either hand,
As toward the end men fare without an aim
Unto the dull grey dark from whence they came:
Let them alone, the unshadowed sheer rocks stand
Over the twilight graves of that poor band,
Who count so little in the great world's game!

Nay, with the dead I deal not; this man lives,
And that which carried him through good and ill,
Stern against fate while his voice echoed still
From rock to rock, now he lies silent, strives
With wasting time, and through its long lapse gives
Another friend to me, life's void to fill.

2.

In the three volumes of _The Earthly Paradise_, published by William
Morris in 1868-1870, there are three poems which hail from Old Norse
original