Now, whether or no the present writer can be successful in popularizing any Icelandic translation, to those who complain, as some may, that his rendering is crudely modern, he replies that such is his deliberate intention, for so it seems to him did the old Icelanders tell their plain unvarnished tales. Art there was no doubt, in the arrangement of the story, an art which kept in mind the demands of the contemporary audience and which would in all probability have been modified to captivate a different taste. But the diction is throughout more straightforward, realistic, and unadorned than any other to be met with in literature. And as this treatment seems appropriate to the narration of historical facts, so as to bring conviction to the mind of the hearer, the author has perhaps even gone too far in his desire to emphasize this characteristic. In one respect he has certainly taken a liberty. The incidental impromptu verses which are incorporated in sagas would, in a literal rendering, be almost as incomprehensible as in the original Icelandic. Nearly every phrase, according to the convention of the time, involves a riddling circumlocution, something like Samson’s ‘Out of the eater came forth meat’. For example, the hymn of Herjulf’s Hebridean companion, a verse of which is given in the chapter on Bjarni, would read in a literal translation somewhat as follows:— ‘I pray the blameless monk-trier to assist my travels, may the lord of the high hall of the earth hold over me the hawk’s perch.’ Here ‘the blameless monk-trier’ is God, who tries the hearts of good men, ‘the high hall of the earth’ is the sky or heaven, and—most obscure of all—‘the hawk’s perch’ is the hand, an allusion to falconry. Only after unravelling these riddles does one arrive at the true meaning—‘Sinless God, who triest the hearts of thy saints, guide my wanderings; Lord of heaven, hold thy hand over me and so protect me.’ This ultimate meaning has been here paraphrased metrically, sacrificing the characteristics of early Scandinavian verse in the interests of a clear and intelligible historical narrative. And in the same way the translations of other incidental verses aim at reproducing the effect on the mind of an intelligent listener, rather than the mere words which produced that effect. Apart from these cases, the writer, while allowing himself a certain amount of freedom in passages upon which nothing turns, has sacrificed every other consideration to literalness where any argument may depend on the text.