A third stage in the literary development of the heroic legends is represented by the written saga itself, which has evidently been formed by the welding together, with more or less skill as the case may be, of several distinct stories, and of more than one literary form. A particularly striking instance of this is to be found in the _Hervarar Saga_ with its stories of the Heroic and Viking Ages, the poems dealing with the fight on Sams¯, the primitive Riddles of Gestumblindi and the early poem of the battle between the Goths and Huns[14]. Something of the same kind has also taken place in the composition of the _ThÊttir of Nornagest_ and of _Sˆrli_ respectively, though into the former has entered a considerable element of folk-tale which is introduced with a certain _naÔvetÈ_ and no little skill alongside the old heroic legends. As has been already mentioned, these three sagas, like others of the same type, appear to have been written down in the late thirteenth or the early years of the fourteenth century. On the other hand most if not the whole of the _Saga of Hromund Greipsson_ appears to have been composed early in the twelfth century, but we do not know when it was first written down. A fourth stage is represented by the Icelandic _RÌmur_ which are for the most part rhyming metrical versions of the sagas and which date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As an illustration of this stage I have translated a few stanzas from the _GrÌplur_, a _RÌma_ based on an early form of the story of Hromund Greipsson[15]. The _RÌmur_ are, so far as we can judge, somewhat wearisome paraphrases of the prose stories, and while the metre and diction are elaborate in the extreme, the treatment of the story is often mechanical and puerile. Comparatively few of the _RÌmur_ have as yet been published and the _GrÌplur_ is the only one known to me which is primarily concerned with any of the sagas contained in this volume. The ballads, both Faroese and Danish[16], belong to a fifth stage in the life of heroic legend in the North; but their origin and history is by no means so clear as that of the _RÌmur_, and it is at present impossible to assign even approximate dates to more than a few of them with any degree of certainty. I have touched on this question at somewhat greater length below[17]; and I would only add here that some Danish and Swedish ballads, e.g. _Ung Sveidal_[18], _Thord af Haffsgaard_[19] and perhaps _Her Aage_[20], appear to be derived more or less directly from poems of the Viking Age, such as _Fjˆlsvinsm·l_, _Thrymskvitha_ and _Helgakvitha Hundingsbana I_--without any intermediate prose stage.