The Sagas 123 



ancestor of the possessor, though he may be very remote. 

 Of the Irish ancestors of the Scandinavians, whatever 

 number there may have been, the largest proportion 

 were probably to be found among the early settlers in 

 Iceland. 



It was in the south-west of Iceland, in the home of 

 the earliest settlers, that arose Icelandic literature 

 strictly so called. We cannot call the old Scandinavian 

 'poetry in any true sense Icelandic. But the 2^'^'ose litera- 

 ture, the literature of the Sagas, is so distinctly. And 

 we may believe that, like the Edda poetry, though in a 

 somewhat different fashion, this literature is the out- 

 come of a fusion of the Celtic and the northern spirit. 



How much of the literature of Europe at large may 

 be clue to fusion of a nature similar to this ! As J. 

 K. Green has said, there is something appropriate in the 

 fact that our great national poet was born just upon the 

 border line, where the population preponderantly Teu- 

 tonic, English, runs into a population which is probably 

 still by blood preponderantly Celtic. In French litera- 

 ture, again, we know that that -which has carried the 

 day, and decreed what was to be the ultimate form of 

 the French language, has been the literature of northern 

 France, of the langue cVoil, not that of the southern 

 languc cVoc ; and it is in the north of France alone that 

 there is any considerable infusion of Frankish (Teutonic) 

 blood with the original Celtic. Goethe and Schiller were 

 both born in that part of Germany which was Celtic before 

 it was German : we cannot tell how large a Celtic ele- 

 ment remains in it. And Dante — who can guess of what 

 admixture of blood his may have been composed, made 

 up of Etruscan, of Celtic, of Latin, and of Lombardic 



