ds can have been
quite a master, or that his work, if it existed, must have been
mutilated or disfigured by others. For the most is nowhere made,
except in the Glam fight and the last scenes on Drangey, of the
admirable situations provided by the story; and the presentation of
Grettir as a man almost everywhere lacks the last touches, while the
sagaman has simply thrown away the opportunities afforded him by the
insinuated amourettes with Steinvor and the daughters of the friendly
spirits, and has made a mere _fabliau_ episode of another thing of the
kind. Nevertheless the attractions of _Grettla_ are unique as regards
the mixture of the natural and supernatural; not inferior to any other
as illustrating the quaintly blended life of Iceland; and of the
highest kind as regards the conception of the hero--a not ungenerous
Strength, guided by no intellectual greatness and by hardly any
overmastering passion, marred by an unsocial and overbearing temper,
and so hardly needing the ill luck, which yet gives poetical finish
and dramatic force to the story, to cast itself utterly away. For in
stories, as in other games, play without luck is fatiguing and jejune,
luck without play childish. It is curious how touching is the figure
of the ill-fated hero, not wholly amiable, yet over-matched by
Fortune, wandering in waste places of a country the fairest spots of
which are little better than a desert, forced by his terror of
"Glam-sight" to harbour criminals far worse than himself, and well
knowing that they seek his life, grudgingly and fearfully helped by
his few friends, a public nuisance where he should have been a public
champion, only befriended heartily by mysterious shadowy personages of
whom little is positively told, and when, after twenty years of
wild-beast life, his deliverance is at hand, perishing by a
combination of foul play on the part of his foes and neglect on that
of his slave. At least once, too, in that parting of Asdis with
Grettir and Illugi, which ranks not far below the matchless epitaph of
Sir Ector on Lancelot, there is not only suggestion, but expression of
the highest quality:--

[Sidenote: _The parting of Asdis and her sons._]

"'Ah! my sons twain, there ye depart from me, and one death ye shall
have together, for no man may flee from that which is wrought for him.
On no day now shall I see either of you once again. Let one fate,
then, be over you both; for I know not what weal ye go to get for
yo