Tragic situations are to be found all through the Icelandic literature, only they are not always enough to make a tragedy. There is Nemesis in the end of Gudmund the Great, when his murdered enemy haunts him; but this is not enough to make his Saga an organic thing. The tragic problem of Alboin recurs, as was pointed out by the editors of _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_, in the prelude to _Vatnsdæla Saga_; but it stands by itself as one of the separate chapters in that history, which contains the plots of other tragedies also, without adopting any one of them as its single and overruling motive. These are instances of the way in which tragic imagination, or at any rate the knowledge and partial appreciation of tragic plots, may come short of fulfilment, and may be employed in a comparatively futile and wasteful form of literature. In the greater works, where the idea is fully realised, there is no one formal type. The Icelandic Sagas have different forms of success in the greater works, as well as different degrees of approximation to success in the more desultory and miscellaneous histories. _Njála_, which is the greatest of all the Sagas, does not make its effect by any reduction of the weight or number of its details. It carries an even greater burden of particulars than _Eyrbyggja_; it has taken up into itself the whole history of the south country of Iceland in the heroic age. The unity of _Njála_ is certainly not the unity of a restricted or emaciated heroic play. Yet with all its complexity it belongs to quite a different order of work from _Eyrbyggja_.