In regard to the credibility of the sagas, the northern writers recognize the change which came over the oral traditionary chronicles when the romancing spirit was introduced from the more southern countries, at a time while the copies of the sagas which we now have were making, after having been for so long a time orally handed down; but they are not so successful in making plain what influence this imported spirit had on particular sagas, which we are asked to receive as historical records. They seem sometimes to forget that it is not necessary to have culture, heroes, and impossible occurrences to constitute a myth. A blending of history and myth prompts Horn to say “that some of the sagas were doubtless originally based on facts, but the telling and re-telling have changed them into pure myths.” The unsympathetic stranger sees this in stories that the patriotic Scandinavians are over-anxious to make appear as genuine chronicles.[597] It is certainly unfortunate that the period of recording the older sagas coincides mainly with the age of this southern romancing influence.[598] It is a somewhat anomalous condition when long-transmitted oral stories are assigned to history, and certain other written ones of the age of the recorded sagas are relegated to myth. If we would believe some of the northern writers, what appears to be difference in kind of embellishment was in reality the sign that separated history from fable.[599] Of the interpreters of this olden lore, Torfæus has been long looked upon as a characteristic exemplar, and Horn[600] says of his works that they are “perceptibly lacking in criticism. Torfæus was upon the whole incapable of distinguishing between myth and history.”[601] [Illustration: RUIN AT KATORTOK. After a cut in Nordenskjöld’s _Exped. till Grönland_, p. 371, following the _Meddel. om Grönland_, vi. 98.] Erasmus Rask, in writing to Wheaton in