Page:Sturla the Historian.djvu/9

 Rh of this sort about his cousin and namesake, Sturla Sighvatsson, who was in practical life the perfection of that unscrupulous, light-hearted vanity which made all the sorrows of Iceland in those years.

'The Sturlung Age' is a name commonly given to the period described in the Sturlunga Saga—roughly, the first half of the thirteenth century, the time of the great faction fights in which the liberties of Iceland went under. The Sturlunga Saga, as we have it, is a composite work; only part of it (and scholars are not agreed how much of it) is the work of Sturla, son of Thord. But he, the grandson of the founder of the house, wrote at any rate a large part of the history; there is no doubt of that, so that for this time there exists not only a contemporary chronicle, but the memoirs of one who was most intimately concerned, himself one of the persons in the drama.

And his work is the completion of Icelandic prose. It is hardly a metaphor to say that it is the mind of Iceland, expressing itself in the best way at the end of the old Icelandic life. Sturla's work is the Icelandic habit of thought and vision applied to the writer's own experience, whereas in the heroic Sagas it had dealt with things of a former age.

The beauty of it in both cases is its impartiality. But this is naturally more remarkable and surprising in the later than the earlier history. Sturla had been in the thick of it all himself, in many moss-trooping raids and forays; he had seen his kinsmen cut down; he had been driven to make terms with their chief enemy; it was his own daughter who was snatched out of the fire of