The Book Age 139 



way Sagas which relate the doings of the Joins 

 Vikings. 



The most interesting, historically, of the whole series 

 of Sagas are those of which we have spoken above, 

 called the Lives of the Kings, — that is to say, of the kings 

 of Norway. At a later date, when writing had been 

 well established, the literary men of Norway set to 

 work, either simply to make copies and collections of 

 the older prose Sagas as they stood, or else to write 

 works in what we may call the ' Saga vein,' which were 

 founded partly on extant prose tales and partly on 

 fragments of verse. These latest and most elaborate 

 productions of the Icelandic prose muse must not be 

 confounded with the Sagas produced in the true Saga 

 age. Albeit tliey are made up of elements which date 

 from that era. 



This is the second age of Icelandic literature, and, as 

 distinguished from the true ' Saga era,' it may be called 

 the book age ; for, in point of fact, the word book (bok) 

 now begins to be employed. The father of this second 

 order of Icelandic literature — the true literature, if we 

 use the word in its etymological sense — is Ari the 

 Historian, Ari Frodi, as he was called by his country- 

 men. This Ari was a descendant of Aud the Wise, 

 and of Olaf the White, king of Dublin, of whom we 

 spoke in the last chapter. Ari's date is a.d. 1067- 

 1148. He was, we see (at any rate we shall see when 

 we come to the history of Norway), 1jorn the year after 

 Harald Sigurdsson, or Harald Hardradi, fell in England. 

 Three great works are attributed to this Ari Frodi, of 

 which one has been preserved as he wrote it ; the con- 

 tents of another have been handed down to us. but not 



