If, however, it were not for the deficiency of feminine character (a deficiency which rehandlers evidently felt and endeavoured to remedy by the expedient of tacking on an obvious plagiarism from _Tristan_ as an appendix, ostensibly dealing with the avenging of the hero), the fifth, Grettis Saga or _Grettla_, would perhaps be the best of all. [Sidenote: _Its critics._] It is true that some experts have found fault with this as late in parts, and bolstered out with extraneous matter in other respects beside the finale just referred to. The same critics denounce its poetical interludes (see _infra_) as spurious, object to some traits in it as coarse, and otherwise pick it to pieces. Nevertheless there are few sagas, if there are any, which produce so distinct and individual an effect, which remind us so constantly that we are in Iceland and not elsewhere. In pathos and variety of interest it cannot touch _Njala_ or _Laxdaela_: in what is called "weirdness," in wild vigour, it surpasses, I think, all others; and the supernatural element, which is very strong, contrasts, I think, advantageously with the more business-like ghostliness of _Eyrbyggja_. After an overture about the hero's forebears, which in any other country would be as certainly spurious as the epilogue, but to which the peculiar character of saga-writing gives a rather different claim here, the story proper begins with a description of the youth of Grettir the Strong, second son to Asmund the Grey-haired of Biarg, who had made much money by sea-faring, and Asdis, a great heiress and of great kin. The sagaman consults poetical justice very well at first, and prepares us for an unfortunate end by depicting Grettir as, though valiant and in a way not ungenerous, yet not merely an incorrigible scapegrace, but somewhat unamiable and even distinctly ferocious. That, being made gooseherd, and finding the birds troublesome, he knocks them about, killing some goslings, may not be an unpardonable atrocity. And even when, being set to scratch his father's back, he employs a wool-comb for that purpose, much to the detriment of the paternal skin and temper, it does not very greatly go beyond the impishness of a naughty boy. But when, being promoted to mind the horses, and having a grudge against a certain "wise" mare named Keingala, because she stays out at graze longer than suits his laziness, he flays the unhappy beast alive in a broad strip from shoulder to tail, the thing goes beyond a joke. Also he is represented, throughout the saga, as invariably capping his pranks or crimes with one of the jeering enigmatic epigrams in which one finds considerable excuse for the Icelandic proneness to murder. However, in his boyhood, he does not go beyond cruelty to animals and fighting with his equals; and his first homicide, on his way with a friend of his father's to the Thing-Parliament, is in self-defence. Still, having no witnesses, he is, though powerfully backed (an all-important