Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/85

67 retelling have changed them into pure myths. This is, for instance, true of the saga of Orvarodd (Arrow-Odd) and in a still more marked degree of the sagas of Ketil Hæng, of Grim Lodinkinn, and others, which are connected with the saga of Orvarodd and of others which all deal with Norwegian affairs.

In reference to Iceland, this love for the mythical is prominent in several of the family sagas, as, for example, in the Grettis Saga, where, however, fact decidedly predominates over fiction, while the reverse is the case in the Kjalnesinga saga. Finally this tendency develops completely into folk-tales, as in the saga of Bárd Snæfelláss and others. Among Norwegian fictions of this kind may be mentioned the sagas of Hromund Greipsson, of Gautrek and Herraud, and of Bose.

In this field, in which obscure and confused recollections of antiquity naturally, yet lingered for some time, there was still life, after literature had ceased to be produced, and all the northern lands, but especially Norway, are rich in folk-lore tales in which are found reminiscences of the olden time. The creation of folk-lore extends in the North as elsewhere into the remotest antiquity, into a time when there is not a single trace of the literary productions described in this work. When the literature of the middle ages, which surely for a