Yet all these things were of less importance than another, which is, after all, the great _differentia_, the abiding quality, of the sagas. In the literature of the rest of Europe, and especially in the central and everywhere radiating literature of France, there were sometimes local and almost parochial touches--sometimes unimportant heroes, not seldom savage heroines, frequently quaint bits of exotic supernaturalism. But all this was subdued to a kind of common literary handling, a "dis-realising" process which made them universally acceptable. The personal element, too, was conspicuously absent--the generic character is always uppermost. Charlemagne was a real person, and not a few of the incidents with which he was connected in the _chansons_ were real events; but he and they have become mere stuff of romance as we see them in these poems. Whether Arthur was a real person or not, the same to an even greater extent is true of him. The kings and their knights appealed to Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians alike, because they were not obtrusively English, German, Italian, or French. But the sagas are from the first and to the (at least genuine) last nothing if not national, domestic, and personal. The grim country of ice and fire, of joekul and skerry, the massive timber homesteads, the horse-fights and the Viking voyages, the spinning-wheel and the salting-tub, are with us everywhere; and yet there is an almost startling individuality, for all the sameness of massacre and chicanery, of wedding and divorce, which characterises the circumstances. Gunnar is not distinguished from Grettir merely by their adventures; there is no need of labels on the lovers of Gudrun; Steingerd in Kormak's Saga and Hallgerd in Njal's, are each something much more than types of the woman with bad blood and the woman with blood that is only light and hot. And to the unsophisticated reader and hearer, as many examples might be adduced to show, this personality, the highest excellence of literature to the sophisticated scholar, is rather a hindrance than a help. He has not proved the ways and the persons; and he likes what he has proved.