The Sagas, being prose and having an historical tradition to take care of, are unable to reach the same intensity of passion as some of the heroic poems, the poems of _Helgi_ and of _Sigurd_. They are all the more epic, perhaps, on that account; more equable in their course, with this compensation for their quieter manner, that they have more room and more variety than the passionate heroic poems. These histories have also, as a rule, to do without the fantasies of such poetry as _Hervor and Angantyr_, or _Helgi and Sigrun_. The vision of the Queens of the Air, the return of Helgi from the dead, the chantings of Hervor "between the worlds," are too much for the plain texture of the Sagas. Though, as has already been seen in _Grettir_ and _Gisli_, this element of fantastic beauty is not wholly absent; the less substantial graces of mythical romance, "fainter and flightier" than those of epic, are sometimes to be found even in the historical prose; the historical tragedies have their accompaniment of mystery. More particularly, the story of the _Death of Thidrandi whom the Goddesses slew_, is a prose counterpart to the poetry of Sigrun and Hervor.[54] [Footnote 54: It is summarised in Dasent's _Njal_, i. p. xx., and translated in Sephton's _Olaf Tryggvason_ (1895), pp. 339-341.] There are many other incidents in the Sagas which have the look of romance about them. But of a number of these the distinction holds good that has been already put forward in the case of _Beowulf_: they are not such wonders as lie outside the bounds of common experience, according to the estimate of those for whom the stories were told. Besides some wonderful passages that still retain the visionary and fantastic charm of myth and mythical romance, there are others in which the wonders are more gross and nearer to common life. Such is the story of the hauntings at Froda, in _Eyrbyggja_; the drowned man and his companions coming home night after night and sitting in their wet clothes till daybreak; such is the ghastly story of the funeral of Víga-Styrr in _Heiðarvíga Saga_. Things of that sort are no exceptions to common experience, according to the Icelandic judgment, and do not stand out from the history as something different in kind; they do not belong to the same order as the dream-poetry of Gisli or the vision of Thidrandi. The self-denial of the Icelandic authors in regard to myth and pure romance has secured for them, in exchange, everything that is essential to strong dramatic stories, independent of mythological or romantic attractions.