It is hoped that it is not doing the average Englishman an injustice to say that the word ‘saga’ generally conveys to his mind an utterly false idea. Very often he seems to think of a saga as poetry; almost invariably as romance. In view of this it is perhaps necessary to point out that almost all we know of the early history of Scandinavia, and all that we know in the cases of Iceland and Greenland, is derived from what can only be described as saga literature. Saga simply means story, originally a story told by word of mouth, often in the lifetime of those whose achievements it celebrated; and the great mass of the earlier sagas aimed at historical truth, not of course at the scientific accuracy of modern times, but at combining adherence to facts with the exigencies of picturesque narrative, like the Books of Kings or any early historical works. In fact, as will be indicated later on (Part II, Chapter I), the historical saga of Iceland compares favourably with the early history of most other countries, for a variety of reasons. Probably the erroneous ideas current on the subject arise to some extent from what may be called the Morris tradition in translating sagas into English. The associations of the quaint language used in this convention are poetical and consequently romantic; the words are obsolete in modern prose, whereas the language of pure saga of the historical period is prosaic to the verge of baldness, the statement of facts so direct and terse as to be almost crude. Why then should we be told that men ‘hove into a cheapingstead’ rather than that they came to a market? Why should we have ‘hight’ for named, ‘mickle’ for much or many or great, ‘may’ for girl or maiden, ‘yeasay’ for consent, and so forth? It serves no purpose except to show that at some bygone period Scandinavian left its traces on the English language, and produces an idea of the character of the literature translated which is the very reverse of the true one. What one should aim at reproducing in a translation—and particularly a translation with an historical purpose—is surely the effect produced on the audience for which the original was composed. It may be right in translating Homer to avoid crude modernism, for Homer was archaic to the people of any known historical period, but when we have one Icelander telling another how his grandfather or even his nearer contemporary fared at the hands of other men living under precisely the same conditions as the listener, surely it is wrong to make use of English calling insistently and continually for the help of a glossary.