soon letters came to be some what familiar to the public mind. The earliest written efforts very naturally related to the lives of the Saints, which on Sundays and holy days were read in public for the edification of the people. During the eleventh century these exercises shared the public attention with those of the professional Saga-man, who still labored to hand down the oral versions of the national history and traditions. But in the beginning of the twelfth century the use of letters was extended, and, ere-long, the Saga-man found his occupation gone, the national history now being diligently gathered up by zealous students and scribes and committed to the more lasting custody of the written page. Among these was Ari Frode, who began the compilation of the Icelandic _Dooms-day Book_, which contained the records of all the early settlers. Scarcely less useful was Sæmund the Wise, who collected the poetical literature of the North and arranged it in a goodly tome. The example of these great men was followed, and by the end of the twelfth century all the Sagas relating to the pagan period of the country had been reduced to writing. This was an era of great literary activity, and the century following showed the same zeal. Finally Iceland possessed a body of prose literature superior in quantity and value to that of any other modern nation of its time.[59] Indeed, the natives of Europe at this period had no prose or other species of literature hardly worthy of the name; and, taken altogether, the Sagas formed the first prose literature in any modern language spoken by the people.[60] Says Sir Edmund Head, "No doubt there were translations in Anglo-Saxon from the Latin, by Alfred, of an earlier date, but there was in truth no vernacular literature. I cannot name," he says, "any work in high or low German prose which can be carried back to this period. In France, prose writing cannot be said to have begun before the time of Villehardouin (1204), and Joinville (1202). Castilian prose certainly did not commence before the time of Alfonso X (1252). Don Juan Manvel, the author of the _Conde Lucanor_, was not born till 1282. The _Cronica General de España_ was not composed till at least the middle of the thirteenth century. About the same time the language of Italy was acquiring that softness and strength which were destined to appear so conspicuously in the prose of Boccaccio, and the writers of the next century."[61] Yet while other nations were without a literature the intellect of Iceland was in active exercise, and works were produced like the _Eddas_ and the _Heimskringla_, works which being inspired by a lofty genius will rank with the writings of Homer and Herodotus while time itself endures.