full abstracts of the contents of
one can give much idea of them. On the other hand, the attentive
reader of a single saga can usually give a very good guess at the
general nature of any other from a brief description of it, though he
must of course miss the individual touches of poetry and of character.
And though I speak with the humility of one who does not pretend to
Icelandic scholarship, I think that translations are here less
inadequate than in almost any other language, the attraction of the
matter being so much greater than that of the form. For those who will
not take the slight trouble to read Dasent's _Njala_, or Morris and
Magnusson's _Grettla_, the next best idea attainable is perhaps from
Sir Walter Scott's abstract of the _Eyrbyggja_ or Mr Blackwell's of
the Kormak's Saga, or Mr Gosse's of _Egla_. Njal's Saga deals with the
friendship between the warrior Gunnar and the lawyer Njal, which,
principally owing to the black-heartedness of Gunnar's wife Hallgerd,
brings destruction on both, Njal and almost his whole family being
burnt as the crowning point, but by no means the end, of an intricate
series of reciprocal murders. For the blood-feuds of Iceland were as
merciless as those of Corsica, with the complication--thoroughly
Northern and not in the least Southern--of a most elaborate, though
not entirely impartial, system of judicial inquiries and
compensations, either by fine or exile. To be outlawed for murder,
either in casual affray or in deliberate attack, was almost as regular
a part of an Icelandic gentleman's avocations from his home and daily
life as a journey on viking or trading intent, and was often combined
with one or both. But outlawry and fine by no means closed the
incident invariably, though they sometimes did so far as the feud was
concerned: and there is hardly one saga which does not mainly or
partly turn on a tangle of outrages and inquests.

[Sidenote: Njala.]

[Sidenote: Laxdaela.]

As _Njala_ is the most complete and dramatic of the sagas where love
has no very prominent part except in the Helen-like dangerousness, if
not exactly Helen-like charm, of Hallgerd, of whom it might certainly
be said that

"Where'er she came,
She brought Calamity";

so _Laxdaela_ is the chief of those in which love figures, though on
the male side at least there is no lover that interests us as much as
the hapless, reckless poet Kormak, or as Gunnlaug Serpent's-Tongue.
The _Earthly Paradi