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BSTEODUCiTION. 69
take a hasty glance at the character and contents of
the most prominent among them. "We say " of Ice-
land," for, although -many of them record events
wholly out of Iceland, and they are written in the
language common to the Norsemen before the dis-
covery of Iceland, which is therefore properly called
the " Old Norse," still they were written by Iceland-
ers and preserved on the island, therefore the litera-
ture which they embody is properly Icelandic.
Saga, in its original meaning, was a Saying, a
Spoken, narration, and when these " sayings " came
to be written down, they still retained the name
which had become established, and Saga came to
signify a written history, a book of traditions or
sayings.
The Old-Icelanders did not distinguish very criti-
cally between mythic and historic narrative. In the
fresh life of a primitive heathen people, in whom the
imagination is active, and the Actual and the Imaginary
are not very clearly separated, fiction becomes
real, and reality becomes poetical. The ideal world
of Gods and Heroes was not believed in as existing
merely in the poet's fancy, but as an outward*
physical reality, like the human world around them.
Therefore every narration was called a Saga
whether mythical, poetical, or purely historical, so
that the Sagas embrace every prbse narration,
every general, local, or family history, every biography
of a Skald, a chieftain or a priest, as well as
the mythic histories of the Yolsungar, the Tnglin-
gar, &c.—in short, the whole historical literature of