Another short story of the same class and the same family tradition (Vopnafjord), the story of _Thorstein Staffsmitten_, looks like a clever working-up of a stock theme--the quiet man roused.[67] The combat in it is less like the ordinary Icelandic fighting than the combats in the French poems, more especially that of Roland and Oliver in _Girart de Viane_; and on the whole there is no particular reason, except its use of well-known East-country names, to reckon this among the family histories rather than the romances. [Footnote 67: Translated by Mr. William Morris and Mr. E. Magnússon, in the same volume as _Gunnlaug_, _Frithiof_, and _Viglund_ (_Three Northern Love Stories_, etc., 1875).] Romantic Sagas of different kinds have been composed in Iceland, century after century, in a more or less mechanical way, by the repetition of old adventures, situations, phrases, characters, or pretences of character. What the worst of them are like may be seen by a reference to Mr. Ward's Catalogue of MS. Romances in the British Museum, which contains a number of specimens. There is fortunately no need to say anything more of them here. They are among the dreariest things ever made by human fancy. But the first and freshest of the romantic Sagas have still some reason in them and some beauty; they are at least the reflection of something living, either of the romance of the old mythology, or of the romantic grace by which the epic strength of _Njal_ and _Gisli_ is accompanied. There are some other romantic transformations of the old heroic matters to be noticed, before turning away from the Northern world and its "twilight of the gods" to the countries in which the course of modern literature first began to define itself as something distinct from the older unsuccessful fashions, Teutonic or Celtic. The fictitious Sagas were not the most popular kind of literature in Iceland in the later Middle Ages. The successors of the old Sagas, as far as popularity goes, are to be found in the _Rímur_, narrative poems, of any length, in rhyming verse; not the ballad measures of Denmark, nor the short couplets of the French School such as were used in Denmark and Sweden, in England, and in High and Low Germany, but rhyming verse derived from the medieval Latin rhymes of the type best known from the works of Bishop Golias.[68] This rhyming poetry was very industrious, and turned out all kinds of stories; the native Sagas went through the mill in company with the more popular romances of chivalry. [Footnote 68: Vigfusson, Prol. p. cxxxviii. _C.P.B._, ii. 392. The forms of verse used in the _Rímur_ are analysed in the preface to _Riddara Rímur_, by Theodor Wisén (1881).]