This literature is undoubtedly best exemplified, as we should expect, in the wholly anonymous and only indirectly historical sagas of the second division, though it is fair to say that there is nothing here much finer than such things as the famous last fight of King Olaf in the _Heimskringla_, or as many other incidents and episodes in the history-books. Only the hands of the writers were freer in the others: and complete freedom--at least from all but the laws of art--is never a more "nobil thing" than it is to the literary artist.
There seems no reason to quarrel with the classification which divides the sagas proper into two classes, greater and lesser, and assigns position in the first to five only--the Saga of Burnt Njal, that of the dwellers in Laxdale, the _Eyrbyggja_, Egil's Saga, and the Saga of Grettir the Strong. It is very unlucky that the reception extended by the English public to the publications of Mr Vigfusson and Professor York Powell, mentioned in a note above, did not encourage the editors to proceed to an edition at least of these five sagas together, which might, according to estimate, have been done in three volumes, two more containing all the small ones. Meanwhile _Njala_--the great sagas are all known by familiar diminutives of this kind--is accessible in English in the late Sir G.W. Dasent's well-known translation;[163] the _Eyrbyggja_ and _Egla_ in abstracts by Sir Walter Scott[164] and Mr Gosse;[165] _Laxdæla_ has been treated as it deserves in the longest and nearly the finest section of Mr Morris's _Earthly Paradise_;[166] and the same writer with Dr Magnusson has given a literal translation of _Grettla_.[167]
[Footnote 163: _The Story of Burnt Njal._ Edinburgh, 1861.]
[Footnote 164: Included in the Bohn edition of Mallet's _Northern Antiquities_.]
[Footnote 165: _Cornhill Magazine_, July 1879.]
[Footnote 166: "The Lovers of Gudrun;" _November_, part iii. p. 337, original edition. London, 1870.]
The lesser sagas of the same group are some thirty in number, the best known or the most accessible being those of Gunnlaug Serpent's-Tongue, often printed in the original,[168] very short, very characteristic, and translated by the same hands as _Grettla_;[169] _Viga Glum_, translated by Sir Edmund Head;[170] _Gisli the Outlaw_ (Dasent);[171] _Howard_ or _Havard the Halt_, _The Banded Men_, and _Hen Thorir_ (Morris and Magnusson)[172]; _Kormak_, said to be the oldest, and certainly one of the most interesting.[173]