Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/114

106 One is a pretty folk-tale, fairly well worked into the saga, of which, however, it clearly never was an integral part.

Three are flatly fictitious, without the slightest veridical foundation, and of the banal type of the worst additions to Nial's and other sagas.

Here is genuine material from two sources, mixed together and eked out with at least a third of fictitious and adventitious additions.

The composition of these two sagas in their present shape belongs to the first half of the thirteenth century. They were in no shape committed to writing before c. 1110, and what true tradition was written after that date had existed for some time (at least a century) on the lips of oral reciters. See Sturlunga Saga, 1878, Prolegomena, xlvii, xlviii, lxv, lxvi, xcii.

The moral of all this I must leave fellow-folk-lorists to apply. It is surely interesting to find a class of documents, wherein the various accretions to which a definite local tradition is liable are so clearly to be traced. It would be useful to set to work at classifying and examining this basal tradition, over which later formations, like superposed strata, have been flung. Such further examination, however, I must needs defer to another occasion.