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The Story of Grettir the Strong is the title of Morris and Magnusson’s version of the Grettis Saga.  The version impresses the reader as one made with loving care by artistic hands.  Certainly English readers will read no other translation of this work, for this one is satisfactory as a version and as an art-work.  English readers will here get all the flavor of the original that it is possible to get in a translation, and those who can read Icelandic if put to it, will prefer to get Grettla through Morris and Magnusson.  All the essentials are here, if not all the nuances.

The reader unfamiliar with sagas will need a little patience with the genealogies that crop out in every chapter.  The sagaman has a squirrel-like agility in climbing family trees, and he is well acquainted with their interlocking branches.  There are chapters in the Grettis Saga where this vanity runs riot, and makes us suspect that Iceland differed little from a country town of to-day in its love for gossip about the family of neighbors whose names happen to come into the conversation.  If the reader will persevere through the early chapters, until Grettir commands exclusive attention, he will come to a drama which has not many peers in literature.  The outlaw kills a man in every other chapter, but this record is no vulgar list of brutal fights.  Not inhuman nature, but human nature is here shown, human nature struggling with unrelenting fate, making a grand fight, and coming to its end because it must, but without ignominy.  How fine a touch it is that refuses to the outlaw’s murderer the price set upon Grettir’s head, because the getting of it was through a “nithings-deed,” the murder of a dying man!  William Morris was most felicitous in envoys and dedicating poems, and in the sonnet prefixed to this translation he was particularly happy.  The first eight lines describe the hero of the saga—­the last six lines the significance of this literary creation: 

    A life scarce worth the living, a poor fame
    Scarce worth the winning, in a wretched land,
    Where fear and pain go upon either hand,
    As toward the end men fare without an aim
    Unto the dull grey dark from whence they came: 
    Let them alone, the unshadowed sheer rocks stand
    Over the twilight graves of that poor band,
    Who count so little in the great world’s game!

    Nay, with the dead I deal not; this man lives,
    And that which carried him through good and ill,
    Stern against fate while his voice echoed still
    From rock to rock, now he lies silent, strives
    With wasting time, and through its long lapse gives
    Another friend to me, life’s void to fill.

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