Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/109

Rh inane variations, invariably spoilt in the transfer, of genuine motiven. There is other forged matter harder to deal with.

(i) The amplification of a fact into a narrative, as, for example, in Egil's Saga, the possible fact that Egil fought at Brunanburh is amplified into an incredible and baseless account of the battle, as minute and impossible as the parallel inventions of the Pseudo-Ingulf. Such amplifications do not deceive the elect, but they completely bamboozle the run of readers, and find, as Ingulf has, ardent and uncritical defenders. The forgery in these cases is really pretty easy to distinguish from the legitimate epic story: the latter is always idiomatic and beautiful, the former flat, dull, prosy.

(j) The amplification of a verse or allusion into a narrative. Harder to detect, because a verse sometimes floats a traditional explanation upon it; and such a case must be distinguished from a case where the compiler or restorer has got hold of a scrap of verse, fixed it in a new framework, and supplied a mass of fiction to surround and set it off.

(k) Forged verses. Such are common.

(l) Scraps of old law and pseudo-archaic law; as, for example, in Nial's Saga.

(m) The amplification of personal or place-names. This is far more common than has been acknowledged hitherto, and there are Icelandic sagas largely built up on such untrustworthy foundations.

Let us take two instances of the way a saga has been manufactured by the scribe's pen as distinct from the way the genuine materials were rounded off by the storyteller's lips.

I will take Egil's Saga for one: first, as it has lately been clearly translated in a cheap and handy form by Mr. C. W. Green, and is therefore accessible to every English folk-lore student; and, secondly, because the translator has on this question referred his readers to the "Northern Editors", Einar Thordarson (1856) and Finnur Jonsson (1888),