Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/106

98 and tradesmen, who, like the Highland tailors of the last century, had plenty of tales for kindly and appreciative patrons; but some also amateurs, like Ingimund in Sturlunga Saga, and other persons of respectability who were known to possess the power of interesting their audience.

That the Icelanders possessed the gift of oral narration to an extreme degree is certain, and it is possible that they drew it from the sojourn so many of the settlers made in the Western Islands (as our British group was styled), where Celtic professional relaters of tales had long practised and had worked out a regular manner and method of telling heroic histories.

In comparison with the manner of the Irish masterpieces the Icelandic Saga style is more sober, more prosaic, less extravagant, more attentive to character, less alive to natural circumstance, more regular in method, less rich in vocabulary, poorer in invention, truer in record, than extant specimens of Gaelic story-telling.

The Icelandic story-teller proceeded to put the material he had gathered and was desirous to work up into regular Saga form. He had a framework or skeleton which he clothed with his epic narrative. His chief topics, if he is relating a true tale of some Icelandic worthy, will be, after a statement of the names and place of habitation of his introductory personages, the birth and bringing-up of his hero; his first entrance upon man's estate, and the adventures by which his power was recognised; the main adventures upon which his fame rests; his death (often tragic, and accompanied by a carefully exacted vengeance, which satisfied the popular ethic), and the consequences, if they are of interest and necessary to complete the tale.

The first phase such a saga will assume is probably a short tale with just sufficient connections supplied by the narrator's art as will knit up the various isolated traditions he is using into an artistic and consistent whole.

We have few sagas of this form, but they can be traced without much difficulty beneath the later additions, and