To us, on the contrary, the characteristics of saga-work, at which a glance has been made in the foregoing paragraphs, form its principal charm, a charm reinforced by the fact of its extraordinary difference from almost all other literature except (in some points) that of the Homeric poems. Although there is a good deal of common form in the sagas, though outlawry and divorce, the quibbles of the Thing and the violence of ambush or holmgang, recur to and beyond the utmost limits of permitted repetition, the unfamiliarity of the setting atones for its monotony, and the individuality of the personages themselves very generally prevents that monotony from being even felt. The stories are never tame; and, what is more remarkable, they seldom or never have the mere extravagance which in mediaeval, at least as often as in other, writing, plays Scylla to the Charybdis of tameness. Moreover, they have, as no other division of mediaeval romance has in anything like the same measure, the advantage of the presence of _interesting_ characters of both sexes. Only the Arthurian story can approach them here, and that leaves still an element of gracious shadowiness about the heroines, if not the heroes. The Icelandic heroine has nothing shadowy about her. Her weakest point is the want of delicacy--not in a finicking sense by any means--which a rough promiscuous life to begin with, and the extreme facility and frequency of divorce on the other, necessarily brought about. But she is always, as the French have it, a "person"--when she is good, a person altogether of the best; even when she is bad, a person seldom other than striking and often charming. [Sidenote: _Fact and fiction in the sagas._] There is, of course, Icelandic literature in prose outside of the sagas--the great law code (_Gragas_ or _Greygoose_), religious books in the usual plenty, scientific books of a kind, and others. But the saga, the story, was so emphatically the natural mould into which Icelandic literary impulse threw itself, that it is even more difficult here than elsewhere at the time to separate story and history, fiction and fact. Indeed the stricter critics would, I believe, maintain that every saga which deserves the name is actually founded on fact: the _Laxdaela_ no less than the _Heimskringla_,[162] the story of Kormak no less than that of Jarl Rognwald. A merely and wholly invented story (they hold, and perhaps rightly) would have been repugnant to that extraordinarily business-like spirit which has left us, by the side of the earlier songs and later sagas, containing not a little of the most poetical matter of the whole world, the _Landnama Bok_ of Ari Frodi, a Domesday-book turned into literature, which is indeed older than our time, but which forms a sort of commentary and companion to the whole of the sagas by anticipation or otherwise.