We may notice too the little vignettes that appear from time to time both in the poetry itself and in the prose narrative, some of which is evidently derived from lost verses.--Hervˆr standing at sunrise on the summit of the tower and looking southward towards the forest; Angantyr marshalling his men for battle and remarking drily that there used to be more of them when mead drinking was in question; great clouds of dust rolling over the plain, through which glittered white corslet and golden helmet, as the Hunnish host came riding on. The dialogue between Hervˆr and Angantyr, despite a certain melodramatic element in the setting, is treated with great delicacy and poetic feeling, and an atmosphere of terror and mystery pervades the whole poem. The midnight scene in the eerie and deserted burial-ground, the lurid flickering of the grave fires along the lonely beach, the tombs opening one by one as the corpses start to life--all these work on the imagination and create an atmosphere of dread. The poet understood the technique of presenting the supernatural, and he is deliberately vague and suggestive. Much more is implied than is stated, and much is left to the imagination. The greatest charm of the poem, however, lies in the sympathetic treatment of Hervˆr. The Hervˆr of the prose narrative is perfectly consistent with the Hervˆr of the poem, but at the same time the poem--which is probably more than a century older than the saga--would lead us to conclude that her character was not correctly understood by the writer of the saga. Obviously unsympathetic, he denounces her with an indignation which would have made the writer of the poem smile. "She grew up to be a beautiful girl ... but as soon as she could do anything it was oftener harm than good; and when she had been checked she escaped to the woods.... And when the Earl heard of it he had her caught and brought home." The picture which the poem presents to us is that of a high-spirited girl, headstrong and impulsive, not unlike Brynhild in the Vˆlsung story. When she goes to the barrows, every nerve is strung up to gain the treasure that has fired her imagination: What care I though the death-fires blaze, They sink and tremble before my gaze, They quiver out and die! But a reaction comes when she holds the sword in her hands at last: Surely in terror I drew my breath Between the worlds of life and death When the grave fires girt me round. Surveying the saga as a whole, perhaps the most striking feature is its extraordinary diversity of interest. It would be difficult to find elsewhere in Norse literature--or indeed perhaps in any literature--so great a variety of subjects and of literary forms brought together within such narrow limits.