The Minor Sagas must be treated more briefly. Gunnlaugs saga Ormstungu (The story of Gunnlaug Serpent's-Tongue) is a love-story of great charm. In Gislasaga the gloom of the Ice landic outlaw-life is strikingly depicted in the adventures of Gisli. A very unusual specimen of the minor saga is Bandaman nasaga, a comic story of manners in the north of Iceland in the th century, in which an intrigue of the old families banded against the pretensions of a wealthy parvenu, is handled in a spirit of broad humour. Among sagas which deal with the annals of Greenland and Vinland, a foremost place is taken by Floarnannasaga, which possesses peculiar interest from its de scription of the shipwreck of colonists on the coast of Greenland. We possess a late (13th century) recension of what must have been equally important as a record of the Greenland colony in the n th century, Fostbrwerasaga. Vigfusson formed a class of still shorter sagas than these, thaettir or "morsels" of narrative. At the close of the great period of the composition of all these anonymous sagas, a work of enormous length and value was composed or compiled by a poet and historian of great eminence, Sturla Thordsson (1214-84). About the year 127o he began to compile the mass of sagas known as Sturlungasaga. The theory that Sturla was the author of the whole of this bulky literature is now abandoned ; it is certain that Hrafns Saga Sveinbjarnar sonar, for instance, belongs to an earlier generation, and the same is true of GuJmundar Saga Goea. Vigfusson distinguished these and other sagas, which Sturla evidently only edited, from those which it is certain that he composed, and gathered the latter together under the title of Islendingasaga. To Sturla also are attributed two saga-biographies, the Haleonssaga and the Mag niissaga. It is a remarkable fact that while Icelandic saga-litera ture begins and ends with a definite figure of a writer, all that lies between is wholly anonymous. Ari was the earliest and Sturla the latest of the saga-writers of the classical period, but in the authors of Njdla and Laxdaela we have nameless writers whose genius was still greater than that of the pioneer and of the last representative of old Icelandic literature. These unknown men
deserve a place of honour among the best narrative-writers who have ever lived. In another class are the stories of bishops, Biskupasogur, which have considerable value as biographical material for reconstructing Icelandic social life in the 12th cen tury. The admirable saga of Bishop Larenzius (1266-1331) was composed by his private secretary, Einar Haflidason (1307-93), who also wrote Annals, and is the latest Icelandic biographer. After his time a long silence fell on the literature of the country, a silence not broken until the revival of Icelandic learning in the 17th century.
It is evident that a vast number of sagas must have perished; when we consider how many are preserved, we can only express amazement at the fecundity of the art of saga-telling in the classical peridd. The mss. in which what we have were preserved, were all of vellum, and there were no sagas written on paper until the time of Bishop Oddr, who died in 163o; there was an enor mous destruction of vellums during the dark ages. Af ter 1640 it became the practice to make transcripts on paper from the perishing vellum mss.
For the history of the sagas see the copious prolegomena to Dr. Gudbrandr VigfUsson's edition of the text of Sturlungasaga, published in 2 vols., by the Clarendon Press at Oxford in i878. See also the edition of Biskupasogur, issued by the same author, at Copenhagen, in 1858. Vigfusson and Mobius published the Fornsiigur or archaic sagas in 1860. In connection with the descents of Northmen on the shores of Britain particular interest attaches to the four volumes of sagas edited by VigfUsson for the "Rolls" series (1887-94). William Morris, who had done much to interpret the spirit of the sagas to English readers, and had published a translation of Grettissaga in 1869, started in 1891 the "Saga Library," in conjunction with E. Magniisson; of this a sixth volume appeared in 1905.
See also Jonsson, Den oldnorske og oldislandske Litteraturs Historie (Copenhagen, 1894-1901) ; F. W. Horn, Geschichte der Literatur des Skandinavischen Nordens (Leipzig, 1880). (E. G. ; R. P. Co.)