The plot of Laxdæla, the story of the Lovers of Gudrun, which is the Volsung story born again, became a commonplace of the same sort. It certainly had a good right to the favour it received. The plot of Laxdæla is repeated in the story of Gunnlaug and Helga, even to a repetition of the course of events by which Kjartan is defrauded. The true lover is left in Norway and comes back too late; the second lover, the dull, persistent man, contrasted with a more brilliant but less single-minded hero, keeps to his wooing and spreads false reports, and wins his bride without her goodwill. Compared with the story of Kjartan and Gudrun, the story of Gunnlaug and Helga is shallow and sentimental; the likeness to Frithiof is considerable.
The device of a false report, in order to carry off the bride of a man absent in Norway, is used again in the story of Thorstein the White, where the result is more summary and more in accordance with poetical justice than in Laxdæla or Gunnlaug. This is one of the best of the Icelandic short stories, firmly drawn, with plenty of life and variety in it. It is only in its use of what seems like a stock device for producing agony that it resembles the more pretentious romantic Sagas.
Another short story of the same class and the same family tradition (Vopnafjord), the story of Thorstein Staffsmitten, looks like a clever working-up of a stock theme—the quiet man roused.[67] The combat in it is less like the ordinary Icelandic fighting than the combats in the French poems, more especially that of Roland and Oliver in Girart de Viane; and on the whole there is no particular reason, except its use of well-known East-country names, to reckon this among the family histories rather than the romances.
Romantic Sagas of different kinds have been composed in Iceland, century after century, in a more or less mechanical way, by the repetition of old adventures, situations, phrases, characters, or pretences of character. What the worst of them are like may be seen by a reference to Mr. Ward's Catalogue of MS. Romances in the British Museum, which contains a number of specimens. There is fortunately no need to say anything more of them here. They are among the dreariest things ever made by human fancy. But the first and freshest of the romantic Sagas have still some reason in them and some beauty; they are at least the reflection of something living, either of the romance of the old mythology, or of the romantic grace by which the epic strength of Njal and Gisli is accompanied.
There are some other romantic transformations of the old heroic matters to be noticed, before turning away from the Northern world and its "twilight of the gods" to the countries in which the course of modern literature first began to define itself as something distinct from the older unsuccessful fashions, Teutonic or Celtic.
The fictitious Sagas were not the most popular kind of literature in Iceland in the later Middle Ages. The successors of the old Sagas, as far as popularity goes, are to be found in the Rímur, narrative poems, of any length, in rhyming verse; not the ballad measures of Denmark, nor the short couplets of the French School such as were used in Denmark and Sweden, in England, and in High and Low Germany, but rhyming verse derived from the medieval Latin rhymes of the type best known from the works of Bishop Golias.[68] This rhyming poetry was very industrious, and turned out all kinds of stories; the native Sagas went through the mill in company with the more popular romances of chivalry.
They were transformed also in another way. The Icelandic Sagas went along with other books to feed the imagination of the ballad-singers of the Faroes. Those islands, where the singing of ballads has always had a larger share of importance among the literary and intellectual tastes of the people than anywhere else in the world, have relied comparatively little on their own traditions or inventions for their ballad themes. Natural and popular as it is, the ballad poetry of the Faroes is derived from Icelandic literary traditions. Even Sigmund Brestisson, the hero of the islands, might have been forgotten but for the Færeyinga Saga; and Icelandic books, possibly near relations of Codex Regius, have provided the islanders with what they sing of the exploits of Sigurd and his horse Grani, as other writings brought them the story of Roncesvalles. From Iceland also there passed to the Faroes, along with the older legends, the stories of Gunnar and of Kjartan; they have been turned into ballad measures, together with Roland and Tristram, in that refuge of the old songs of the world.