1 26 Norway and the Norwegians 



Egypt and Assyria, or between either and the great 

 confederacy of the Hittites. Yet out of the petty 

 quarrels between the Achoean-Pelasgians in the west 

 and the Asiatic-Pelasgians in the east grew the Epic 

 Poetry of Greece. 



Making allowance for the difference between prose 

 and poetry, the development of the Icelandic Saga is, 

 probably, no bad reflex of the development of the Greek 

 Epic. As in the earlier literature, a number of smaller 

 ballads must have preceded the long poems which have 

 come down to us, and must have, by a special art, been 

 combined together to form these long poems ; so in 

 Iceland the short fireside stories have been combined to 

 form the Sagas that we know ; and a great deal of art 

 has been used in making this combination. It seems 

 extraordhiary to us that such poems as the Homeric 

 ones could ever have been committed to memory entire. 

 We cannot be certain how far they were so, or how far 

 the hand of the redactor is present, though concealed, in 

 the written version. The Sagas present the same diffi- 

 culty. They were, of course, eventually committed to 

 writing ; and how far the written form actually repre- 

 sents the narrated form we cannot be certain. On the 

 whole, however, it seems to represent it pretty exactly, 

 which is the same as saying that the long Sagas that we 

 know were once preserved by oral tradition only. 



It is thought that the full bloom of the Saga period 

 dates from about the beginning of the eleventh century ; 

 that is to say, just after Iceland had become Christian, 

 when the people were quieting down, and when, there- 

 fore, deeds such as those which the tales narrate were 

 growing less frequent year by year. We can imagine 



