Now the conditions of this art of story-telling in Iceland were unusually favourable to the maintenance of an accurate tradition. In the first place, as may be seen from the instance cited, the practice was to all intents and purposes contemporaneous with the occurrence of the events described. In the second place, a point which will fall to be developed later on, it is evident that the taste of the Icelandic audience was intensely practical and unimaginative. Superstitions no doubt there were, in Iceland as throughout the whole world of this and indeed far later periods, but even their ghosts and supernatural occurrences are treated by this people, far more than by any other with whose works I am conversant, as something all in the day’s work. The Icelander did not want, like the Celt or the later Romancers, to surround his heroes with an atmosphere of picturesque mythology; his principal desire was to learn in the utmost detail exactly how everything was done, with the dates, genealogies, and circumstances relevant to the story to which he was listening. I have mentioned the word genealogies, and this brings me to the last factor which operated in favour of the accuracy of oral tradition in Iceland. The colony was from its very nature composed of a great number of more or less connected families, equal in social status, and known to each other to consist of men of like passions with themselves. There was no king, no outstanding heroic personality, round whose unapproachable majesty the flattering tongues of courtiers could weave their myths and fictions. The saga-teller moreover was not, like the bards and shenachies of the Scottish Highlands, the appanage of a single family. He moved from place to place, whiling away the monotony of the Arctic winter with his histories, and the hero of one locality was in another an ancestor or a member of a family in no way superior to the persons who were gathered to hear the tale. Each listener was deeply versed in genealogy, a subject which was clearly regarded as of primary importance. Most great families, by dint of intermarriage, were connected with at all events some of the characters which were introduced into almost any saga, and the necessity of reciting correctly before the most critical of audiences the intricate ramifications of all the family trees occurring in the course of the narrative must have been the best possible discipline to produce a school where accuracy was placed above every other consideration.