But, despite of this, it is not to be supposed that this episode at the Thing in 1031 is brought in at random and without any cause.  There are two obvious reasons for assigning twenty years to the length of Grettir’s outlawry, and for bringing into the tale a discussion on that subject just where it is done.  The one we may call the reason of traditional belief, the other the reason of dramatic effect.  Grettir was indisputably for all reasons the greatest of Icelandic outlaws, and the fond imagination of his biographers at all times urged them to give the longest endurance to the time of his outlawry above all outlaws, without inquiring closely as to whether it agreed with the saga itself or not.  The other, or the dramatic motive, lies in bringing in the discussion on this long outlawry just at this particular Thing of 1031; for it was obviously the teller’s object to suggest to the reader the hope of the great outlaw’s legal restoration to the cherished society of man just before the falling of the crushing blow, in order to give an enhanced tragic interest to his end, and he undoubtedly succeeds in doing this.  To these reasons, besides others less obvious, we imagine this main inconsistency in Grettir’s saga is to be ascribed.

Nevertheless, it is worth observing that blunders of scribes may have in a measure been at work here.  If we are not mistaken most of the existing MSS. of our saga state that when he fell (p. 243) ’he was one winter short of—­var hanum vetri fatt a’—­whatever number of years they give as his age.  And we venture the suggestion that originally the passage ran thus:  var hanum vetri fatt a half iv{tugum},[21] i.e., he lacked one winter of thirty-five years, when he was slain.  If a subsequent scribe committed the easy blunder of dropping I before V, the reading of our original (Edition, 53) would be the natural result, and an offspring of that same blunder would also as easily be the other reading, common to one class of the Grettir MSS.:  var hanum vetri fatt i v{tugum} or i hinum v. tug, by dropping the syllable ‘half.’

[Footnote 21:  A man of twenty, thirty, forty, &c., is in the Icelandic expressed by the adjective tvitugr, pritugr, fertugr; a man twenty-five, thirty-five, &c., is half-pritugr, half-fertugr, &c.; the units beyond the tens are expressed by the particle um, a man of twenty-one, thirty-seven, or forty-nine, is said to have einn (i.e., vetr. winter) um = beyond, tvitugt, sjoe um þritugt, niu um fertugt, &c.]

If the whole passage on page 243, beginning with the words quoted in the commencement of this note, be not indeed a later interpolation, we believe that all that follows the words, ’till the time when he dealt with Glam, the Thrall,’ must, indeed, be taken as an interpolation of later commentators.