Plan of Njála
of Laxdæla
of Egils Saga 190
191
192 Vápnfirðinga Saga, a story of two generations 193 Víga-Glúms Saga, a biography without tragedy 193 Reykdæla Saga 194 Grettis Saga and Gísla Saga clearly worked out 195 Passages of romance in these histories 196 Hrafnkels Saga Freysgoða, a tragic idyll, well proportioned 198 Great differences of scale among the Sagas—analogies with the heroic poems 198

III

The Heroic Ideal

Unheroic matters of fact in the Sagas	200
Heroic characters	201
Heroic rhetoric	203
Danger of exaggeration—Kjartan in Laxdæla	204
The heroic ideal not made too explicit or formal	206

IV

Tragic Imagination

Tragic contradictions in the Sagas—Gisli, Njal	207
Fantasy	208
Laxdæla, a reduction of the story of Sigurd and Brynhild to the terms of common life	209
Compare Ibsen's Warriors in Helgeland	209
The Sagas are a late stage in the progress of heroic literature	210
The Northern rationalism	212
Self-restraint and irony	213
The elegiac mood infrequent	215
The story of Howard of Icefirth—ironical pathos	216
The conventional Viking	218
The harmonies of Njála and of Laxdæla	219 222
The two speeches of Gudrun	223

V

Comedy

The Sagas not bound by solemn conventions	225
Comic humours	226
Bjorn and his wife in Njála