foul deed, and Kurt’s stern revenge.  We may be sure that as soon as each event recorded in the Saga occurred, it was told and talked about as matter of history, and when at last the whole story was unfolded and took shape, and centred round Njal, that it was handed down from father to son, as truthfully and faithfully as could ever be the case with any public or notorious matter in local history.  But it is not on Njala alone that we have to rely for our evidence of its genuineness.  There are many other Sagas relating to the same period, and handed down in like manner, in which the actors in our Saga are incidentally mentioned by name, and in which the deeds recorded of them are corroborated.  They are mentioned also in songs and Annals, the latter being the earliest written records which belong to the history of the island, while the former were more easily remembered, from the construction of the verse.  Much passes for history in other lands on far slighter grounds, and many a story in Thucydides or Tacitus, or even in Clarendon or Hume, is believed on evidence not one-tenth part so trustworthy as that which supports the narratives of these Icelandic story-tellers of the eleventh century.  That with occurrences of undoubted truth, and minute particularity as to time and place, as to dates and distance, are intermingled wild superstitions on several occasions, will startle no reader of the smallest judgment.  All ages, our own not excepted, have their superstitions, and to suppose that a story told in the eleventh century,—­when phantoms, and ghosts, and wraiths, were implicitly believed in, and when dreams, and warnings, and tokens, were part of every man’s creed—­should be wanting in these marks of genuineness, is simply to require that one great proof of its truthfulness should be wanting, and that, in order to suit the spirit of our age, it should lack something which was part and parcel of popular belief in the age to which it belonged.  To a thoughtful mind, therefore, such stories as that of Swan’s witchcraft, Gunnar’s song in his cairn, the Wolf’s ride before the Burning, Flosi’s dream, the signs and tokens before Brian’s battle, and even Njal’s weird foresight, on which the whole story hangs, will be regarded as proofs rather for than against its genuineness.[3]

But it is an old saying, that a story never loses in telling, and so we may expect it must have been with this story.  For the facts which the Saga-teller related he was bound to follow the narrations of those who had gone before him, and if he swerved to or fro in this respect, public opinion and notorious fame was there to check and contradict him.[4] But the way in which he told the facts was his own, and thus it comes that some Sagas are better told than others, as the feeling and power of the narrator were above those of others.  To tell a story truthfully was what was looked for from all men in those days; but to tell it properly and gracefully, and so to clothe the facts in fitting diction, was given to few, and of those few the Saga teller who first threw Njala into its present shape, was one of the first and foremost.