was set on by an overwhelming force, was not easily won, and least of all a man of such prowess as Grettir, except by shot; for he might at a moment’s notice take his stand in the rock above his head, where one side only gives the chance of an onset, and where there is an ample supply of loose stones, large and small, on the Peak side of the rock to defend oneself; on three sides sheer rocks hem in the position, and those overhead are many times the height of a man’s.’

P. 208.  Knave-game.  Perhaps the truer rendering would have been ‘nut-game,’ if indeed ‘hnet tafl’ here stands not for ‘hnef-tafl,’ as we at first supposed.  It is undoubtedly true that among the early games of Iceland the ‘hettafl,’ ‘hnottafl,’ was a distinct kind of game, as was also the ‘hneftafl,’ ‘hnefatafl,’ knave-game.  If we follow the text as it stands, the game that Thorbiorn played is supposed to have borne some resemblance to what is now called in Iceland ‘refskak,’ fox-play, anglice ‘fox and geese,’ the aim of which is, by twelve pieces, called lambs, to bring the fox into such a position as to leave him no place to move, whichso way he turns.

P. 240.  Pied-belly we call the Ram, although the saga seems to mean that he was called Autumn-belly, which is a name of little, if of any, sense at all.  We suppose that haus-moegottr, p. 169, and haust-magi, p. 184, is one and the same thing, the t having spuriously crept into the text from a scribe’s inadvertence.

P. 243 (cpr. 207, 225, 272).  ‘In such wise Grettir lost his life, &c.’  The hardest thing to account for, or to bring to an intelligible issue in Grettir’s saga, is the incongruity between the statements as to his age at his death and the number of years of his outlawry, as compared with the truthful account of the events told in the saga itself.  From the time when Grettir slew his first man, all the events of the saga may be traced clearly year for year up to his death, and their truthfulness is borne out whensoever they chance to run parallel to events mentioned in other trustworthy sagas, and they fall in with the right time nearly without an exception.  But the statement on the page referred to above, that he was fourteen years old when he slew Skeggi, that he was twenty when he dealt with Glam; twenty-five when he fell into outlawry, and forty-four when he was slain, is utterly confuted by the chronology of the saga itself.

These numbers given above are obviously made to fall in with the story in page 225 about the talk of the time of his outlawry at the Thing.  The question is stated to have been this:  whether he had been a fraction of the twentieth year an outlaw, his friends hoping that in such case a part might count pro toto.  But the truth of the matter was that he had neither been an outlaw for a fraction of the twentieth year, nor even for anything like nineteen years.  He was outlawed at the Thing held in 1016, his year of outlawry dated from Thing to Thing; this talk befell in 1031, consequently he had been full fifteen years and no fraction of a year in outlawry.  The story, therefore, of the twenty years, or nineteen years and a fraction, of outlawry falls utterly to the ground when brought to the test of the actual facts as recorded in the saga.