father, Scald-Grim. These have been padded out and increased to more than sixty: to these have been prefixed twenty-nine chapters, of which about a third seem to be founded on the Kings' Lives, the rest of them being mere expansions (as is much of the later part of the saga) of extant Landnáma-bóc entries. Not a single detail, save where a piece of Egil's poetry confirms the prose, or where there is obvious quotation or obvious local traditions, can be supposed by any observant student to be genuine.[1] Yet this very saga is still being referred to as "historical", and modern "scholars" talk of its "truth", and gravely dispute over the chronologic details of its wholly fictitious journeys, law-suits, and the like, to the astonishment and sometimes amusement of the critic.
As a second and final illustration here, I may take Færeyinga Saga (which I hope shortly to print in English), a beautiful story, wherein, though the traditional basis is not so fine or rugged as that of Egil's Saga, the compiler's pen has been more skilfully used. It falls into ten sections of fairly equal size; of these—
Four, or parts of four, preserve the genuine traditional local basis—a Thrond's Saga we might call it, from its heroic name, rather than Sagas of Sigmund and Leif.
Two are genuine work of the style of the Kings' Lives, and contain an episode of King Olave Tryggwesson's Life, touching the conversion of the Færeys or Faroes.
- ↑ With Egil's poetry I am not concerned here further than to note that Hofudlausn, as it stands, cannot be supposed genuine for the following reasons, which I owe to Dr. Vigfússon, December 1888, and with which I concur:—
1st. One notes the absence of exact historical allusion save in a few lines.
2nd. The king's eke-name and famous weapon, the axe, are never mentioned; the bow is, on the contrary, celebrated: a weapon consonant to a later time.
3rd. The metrical peculiarities are non-archaic and highly artificial.
4th. The style is wholly unlike that of the true fragments of Egil in his Sona-torrec.
