Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/42

 of the Northmen what Livy did for the history of the Romans. The traditionary works of the predecessors of Livy in his historical field, the sagas of the Romans, have unfortunately not reached us. The ancient Roman writers themselves regret that the songs and legends, the sagas from which the historical accounts of their ancestors are derived, and which it appears from two passages in Cicero were extant in the time of the elder Cato, and, like the sagas of the Northmen, were sung or recited at feasts, had fallen into oblivion. Such documents in verse or prose are common to the early history of every people, and on such and on the similar transmission of them by memory, the historical Scriptures of the Old Testament themselves rest. These sagas have been preserved among the Northmen, or at least have not perished so entirely but that the sources from which their historian Snorro drew his information may be examined. They constitute the body of literature of which the list of sagas given above is an imperfect catalogue—imperfect because many sagas, songs, or other compositions referred to in those which are extant no longer exist, and probably never had been taken out of the traditionary state, in which they existed then as matter of memory, and been fixed in writing. If we consider the scarcity of the material—parchment—in the middle ages, even in the oldest Christianised countries of Europe, and the still greater scarcity of scribes, and men of learning and leisure, who would bestow their time and material on any subjects but monastic legends