But though we can thus trace to some extent the authorship of the unwritten materials from which the Saga was framed, there is nothing to show where or by whom it was written. There is proof, however, that it was known in Iceland in the first half of the thirteenth century. Its earlier chapters, down to the division of the Earldom between Thorfinn and Brúsi, are incorporated into the Olaf Saga of Snorri Sturluson, and are there cited as from the “Jarla Saga,” or Saga of the Earls. It must therefore have been in existence as a completed work before 1241, the date of Snorri’s death. The compiler of the Fagrskinna, which is shown by internal evidence to have been written between 1222 and 1225, also quotes from it, by the title of “Jarla Sagan.” The closing chapters of the Orkneyinga Saga, in its present form, recording the burning of Bishop Adam, could not have been written before 1222; but, as it is stated in the last chapter that the terrible retribution exacted by the Scottish King for the murder of the Bishop was still in fresh memory, it may very well have been completed before 1225. No manuscript of the Jarla Saga is known to exist, and the original form of what is now called “The Orkneyinga Saga” is thus matter of conjecture. We know it only as the substance of its earlier chapters was given by Snorri previous to 1241, and in the expanded version of the Flateyjarbók, where it is pieced into the Sagas of Olaf Tryggvi’s son and Olaf the Holy. The Flateyjarbók, however, is nearly a century and a half later than Snorri’s work, having been written between the years 1387 and 1394. The object of the present issue being simply to provide a plain, readable, and unadorned translation of the Orkneyinga Saga (which has been hitherto inaccessible to the English reader), it has been deemed advisable to adhere to the form of the Saga adopted by its first editor Jonæus, though not to Jonæus’s text, which is by no means free from corruptions. The Christiania edition of the Flateyjarbók, printed literally from the manuscript, has afforded the means of rectifying the text where necessary; and the expanded version of the earlier chapters given in the Flateyjarbók has also been translated and inserted as an appendix, for the sake of the fuller details which it supplies of the earlier history of the Earldom. In one sense it might have been desirable to have compiled a text which would have given the fullest history of the Orkney Earls, but this would not have been the “Orkneyinga Saga.” It would have necessitated the collection and critical collation of all the passages in all the Sagas and early writings relating to the history of the Northmen in Scotland—a work which has long been in progress in abler hands, and under more favourable auspices.