But saga-literature had nothing of this appeal. It was as indifferently and almost superciliously insular as the English country-house novel itself, and may have produced in some of the very few foreigners who can ever have known it originally, something of the same feelings of wrath which we have seen excited by the English country-house novel in our own day. The heroes were not, according to the general ideas of mediæval Europe, either great chiefs or accomplished knights; the heroines were the very reverse of those damsels "with mild mood" (as the catch-word in the English romances has it) whom the general Middle Age liked or thought it liked. An intricate, intensely local, and (away from the locality) not seldom shocking system of law and public morality pervaded the whole. The supernatural element, though in itself it might have been an attraction, was of a cast quite different from the superstitions of the South, or even of the Centre; and the Christian element, which was to the Middle Ages the very air they breathed, was either absent altogether or present in an artificial, uneasy, and scanty fashion.
Of scenery and character.
Yet all these things were of less importance than another, which is, after all, the great differentia, the abiding quality, of the sagas. In the literature of the rest of Europe, and especially in the central and everywhere radiating literature of France, there were sometimes local and almost parochial touches—sometimes unimportant heroes, not seldom savage heroines, frequently quaint bits of exotic supernaturalism. But all this was subdued to a kind of common literary handling, a "dis-realising" process which made them universally acceptable. The personal element, too, was conspicuously absent—the generic character is always uppermost. Charlemagne was a real person, and not a few of the incidents with which he was connected in the chansons were real events; but he and they have become mere stuff of romance as we see them in these poems. Whether Arthur was a real person or not, the same to an even greater extent is true of him. The kings and their knights appealed to Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians alike, because they were not obtrusively English, German, Italian, or French. But the sagas are from the first and to the (at least genuine) last nothing if not national, domestic, and personal. The grim country of ice and fire, of jökul and skerry, the massive timber homesteads, the horse-fights and the Viking voyages, the spinning-wheel and the salting-tub, are with us everywhere; and yet there is an almost startling individuality, for all the sameness of massacre and chicanery, of wedding and divorce, which characterises the circumstances. Gunnar is not distinguished from Grettir merely by their adventures; there is no need of labels on the lovers of Gudrun; Steingerd in Kormak's Saga and Hallgerd in Njal's, are each something much more than types of the woman with bad blood and the woman with blood that is only light and hot. And to the unsophisticated reader and hearer, as many examples might be adduced to show, this personality, the highest excellence of literature to the sophisticated scholar, is rather a hindrance than a help. He has not proved the ways and the persons; and he likes what he has proved.
To us, on the contrary, the characteristics of saga-work, at which a glance has been made in the foregoing paragraphs, form its principal charm, a charm reinforced by the fact of its extraordinary difference from almost all other literature except (in some points) that of the Homeric poems. Although there is a good deal of common form in the sagas, though outlawry and divorce, the quibbles of the Thing and the violence of ambush or holmgang, recur to and beyond the utmost limits of permitted repetition, the unfamiliarity of the setting atones for its monotony, and the individuality of the personages themselves very generally prevents that monotony from being even felt. The stories are never tame; and, what is more remarkable, they seldom or never have the mere extravagance which in mediæval, at least as often as in other, writing, plays Scylla to the Charybdis of tameness. Moreover, they have, as no other division of mediæval romance has in anything like the same measure, the advantage of the presence of interesting characters of both sexes. Only the Arthurian story can approach them here, and that leaves still an element of gracious shadowiness about the heroines, if not the heroes. The Icelandic heroine has nothing shadowy about her. Her weakest point is the want of delicacy—not in a finicking sense by any means—which a rough promiscuous life to begin with, and the extreme facility and frequency of divorce on the other, necessarily brought about. But she is always, as the French have it, a "person"—when she is good, a person altogether of the best; even when she is bad, a person seldom other than striking and often charming.
Fact and fiction in the sagas.
There is, of course, Icelandic literature in prose outside of the sagas—the great law code (Gragas or Greygoose), religious books in the usual plenty, scientific books of a kind, and others. But the saga, the story, was so emphatically the natural mould into which Icelandic literary impulse threw itself, that it is even more difficult here than elsewhere at the time to separate story and history, fiction and fact. Indeed the stricter critics would, I believe, maintain that every saga which deserves the name is actually founded on fact: the Laxdæla no less than the Heimskringla,[162] the story of Kormak no less than that of Jarl Rognwald. A merely and wholly invented story (they hold, and perhaps rightly) would have been repugnant to that extraordinarily business-like spirit which has left us, by the side of the earlier songs and later sagas, containing not a little of the most poetical matter of the whole world, the Landnama Bok of Ari Frodi, a Domesday-book turned into literature, which is indeed older than our time, but which forms a sort of commentary and companion to the whole of the sagas by anticipation or otherwise.
Classes and authorship of them.
Difficult as it may be to draw the line between intended history, which was always strongly "romanced" in form, if not intentionally in fact, and that very peculiar product of Icelandic genius the saga proper, in which the original domestic record has been, so to speak, "super-romanced" into a work of art, it is still possible to see it, if not to draw it, between the Heimskringla, the story of the Kings of Norway (made English after some earlier versions by Messrs Magnusson and Morris, and abstracted, as genius can abstract, by Carlyle), the Orkneyinga and Færeyinga Sagas (the tales of these outlying islands before the former came under Norwegian rule), the curious conglomerate known as the Sturlunga Saga on the one hand, and the greater and lesser sagas proper on the other. The former are set down to the two great writers Snorri and Sturla, the one the chief literary light of Iceland in the first half of the thirteenth century, the other the chief light in the second, both of the same family, and with Ari Frodi the three greatest of the certainly known men of letters of the island. Conjecture has naturally run riot as to the part which either Snorri or Sturla may have taken in the sagas not directly attributed to either, but most probably dating from their time, as well as with the personalities of the unknown or little known poets and prosemen who shaped the older stories at about the same period. But to the historian who takes delight in literature, and does not care very much who made it provided it is made well, what has been called "the singular silence" as to authorship which runs through the whole of the early Icelandic literature is rather a blessing than otherwise. It frees him from those biographical inquiries which always run the risk of drawing nigh to gossip, and it enables him to concentrate attention on the literature itself.
This literature is undoubtedly best exemplified, as we should expect, in the wholly anonymous and only indirectly historical sagas of the second division, though it is fair to say that there is nothing here much finer than such things as the famous last fight of King Olaf in the Heimskringla, or as many other incidents and episodes in the history-books. Only the hands of the writers were freer in the others: and complete freedom—at least from all but the laws of art—is never a more "nobil thing" than it is to the literary artist.
The five greater sagas.