[Footnote 18:] Bugge's edition of the Saemundar Edda, p. 352 ff.; also Ker, Epic and Romance, p. 114 etc.; Vigfússon and Powell, Corpus Poeticum Boreale (Oxford, 1883), Vol. i, p. 501 ff.
[Footnote 19:] C. P. B., Vol. i, pp. 175 and 501 ff.
[Footnote 20:] C. P. B., Vol. i, p. 502 ff.
[Footnote 21:] Always, however, with the proviso that, owing to the avowed literary origin of many of them, the Faroese ballads to some extent form a class by themselves; cf. General Introduction to Part ii, p. 166 below.
[Footnote 22:] Cf. Chadwick, The Heroic Age (Cambridge, 1912), p. 95.
[Footnote 23:] Cf. the Introduction to the Saga of Hervör and Heithrek, p. 81 f. below.
[Footnote 24:] Copenhagen, 1901.
INTRODUCTION TO THE THÁTTR OF NORNAGEST
This story occurs as an episode in the long Saga of Olaf Tryggvason—to be distinguished from the shorter Saga of Olaf Tryggvason contained in the Heimskringla and translated by Morris and Magnússon in the Saga Library[1]. The best known manuscript (F) of the longer saga is the Flateyjarbók which comes from the island of Flatey in Breithifjörth off the west of Iceland, and was written between 1386 and 1394. The second (S) is the Codex Arn. Magn. 62 in the Royal Library (at Copenhagen), which, like the former, contains a fragment only of the Saga of Olaf Tryggvason, but includes the Tháttr of Nornagest. This ms. dates, in all probability, from shortly after the middle of the fourteenth century. Finally, besides several paper mss. (comparatively late and unimportant), there is a ms. A (number 2845 of the Royal Library at Copenhagen) dating from the fifteenth century, in which the tháttr stands by itself.