[Footnote 162: Dr Vigfusson is exceedingly severe on the _Heimskringla_, which he will have to be only a late, weak, and rationalised compilation from originals like the oddly termed "Great O.T. Saga." But it is hard for a man to think hardly of the book in which, though only a translation, he first read how Queen Sigrid the Haughty got rid of her troublesome lovers by the effectual process of burning them _en masse_ in a barn, and how King Olaf died the greatest sea-death--greater even than Grenville's--of any defeated hero, in history or literature.] [Sidenote: _Classes and authorship of them._] Difficult as it may be to draw the line between intended history, which was always strongly "romanced" in form, if not intentionally in fact, and that very peculiar product of Icelandic genius the saga proper, in which the original domestic record has been, so to speak, "super-romanced" into a work of art, it is still possible to see it, if not to draw it, between the _Heimskringla_, the story of the Kings of Norway (made English after some earlier versions by Messrs Magnusson and Morris, and abstracted, as genius can abstract, by Carlyle), the _Orkneyinga_ and _Faereyinga_ Sagas (the tales of these outlying islands before the former came under Norwegian rule), the curious conglomerate known as the _Sturlunga Saga_ on the one hand, and the greater and lesser sagas proper on the other. The former are set down to the two great writers Snorri and Sturla, the one the chief literary light of Iceland in the first half of the thirteenth century, the other the chief light in the second, both of the same family, and with Ari Frodi the three greatest of the certainly known men of letters of the island. Conjecture has naturally run riot as to the part which either Snorri or Sturla may have taken in the sagas not directly attributed to either, but most probably dating from their time, as well as with the personalities of the unknown or little known poets and prosemen who shaped the older stories at about the same period. But to the historian who takes delight in literature, and does not care very much who made it provided it is made well, what has been called "the singular silence" as to authorship which runs through the whole of the early Icelandic literature is rather a blessing than otherwise. It frees him from those biographical inquiries which always run the risk of drawing nigh to gossip, and it enables him to concentrate attention on the literature itself.