Epic and Romance. W. P. Ker

in Beowulf abstract types 165 The adventures and sentiments commonplace, especially in the fight with the dragon 168 Adventure of Grendel not pure fantasy 169 Grendel's mother more romantic 172 Beowulf is able to give epic dignity to a commonplace set of romantic adventures 173

       CHAPTER III

THE ICELANDIC SAGAS

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I

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Iceland and the Heroic Age

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The close of Teutonic Epic—in Germany the old forms were lost, but not the old stories, in the later Middle Ages	179
England kept the alliterative verse through the Middle Ages	180
Heroic themes in Danish ballads, and elsewhere	181
Place of Iceland in the heroic tradition—a new heroic literature in prose	182

II

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Matter and Form

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The Sagas are not pure fiction	184
Difficulty of giving form to genealogical details	185
Miscellaneous incidents	186
Literary value of the historical basis—the characters well known and recognisable	187
The coherent Sagas—the tragic motive	189
Plan of Njála of Laxdæla of Egils Saga	190 191 192
Vápnfirðinga Saga, a story of two generations	193
Víga-Glúms Saga, a biography without tragedy	193
Reykdæla Saga	194
Grettis Saga and Gísla Saga clearly worked out	195
Passages of romance in these histories	196
Hrafnkels Saga Freysgoða, a tragic idyll, well proportioned	198
Great differences of scale among the Sagas—analogies with the heroic poems	198

III

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The Heroic Ideal

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Unheroic matters of fact in the Sagas	200
Heroic characters	201
Heroic rhetoric	203
Danger of exaggeration—Kjartan in Laxdæla	204
The heroic ideal not made too explicit or formal	206

IV

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Tragic Imagination

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Tragic contradictions in the Sagas—Gisli, Njal	207
Fantasy	208
Laxdæla, a reduction of the story of Sigurd and Brynhild to the terms of common life	209
Compare Ibsen's Warriors in Helgeland	209
The Sagas are a late stage in the progress of heroic literature