appearing to Hrolf on the expedition to Sweden; and, as we know, the one has acquired important features (Bjarki's bear-ancestry and his renunciation of his kingdom) from the other. These circumstances render it highly probable that this is another of the Bjarki story's acquisitions from contact with the Siward saga. Incidents of this kind need not necessarily be used in one story as they are in another; saga literature abounds in evidence of this fact, as, for instance, Saxo's and the _Hrólfssaga's_ story of Hroar and Helgi, considered later. A feature of the _Hrólfssaga_ that is much more noteworthy in this connection and that has certainly been acquired from the Siward saga is that concerning the kind of monster slain by Bjarki at the court of Hrolf Kraki. When Siward's bear-ancestry had been transferred to Bothvar Bjarki, it followed as a matter of course that Bjarki must no longer be represented as killing a bear. Siward had driven a dragon, which had killed men and cattle in great numbers, from one of the Orkney Islands; and it is in imitation of this exploit that Bjarki is represented as having slain a winged monster (dragon). This would be only another instance, in addition to those already mentioned, of the influence exerted by the story of Siward on the _Hrólfssaga_. Ordinarily, there was nothing about Bjarki's person that revealed or suggested that his father was a bear; but he was able to assume the shape of a bear, which, according to the _Hrólfssaga_, he did with terrible effect in the last battle of Hrolf and his warriors. Since he sustained such near relationship to the bear-family, it would be inappropriate to represent him as showing his prowess by killing a bear, for his sentiments toward that animal would, as a result of his own ancestry and the treatment his father had received, be those of sympathy rather than antipathy. His mother had told him the whole story of his ancestry and the maltreatment of his father, and it had aroused him to take most dire revenge. Consequently, he must be represented as having killed some other kind of ferocious beast, or monster, than a bear, and this naturally became the same kind of monster that Siward had overcome, namely a dragon. The fact that it was not uncommon at the time the saga was composed for a popular hero to be represented as having slain a dragon made it all the easier for the author of the _Hrólfssaga_ to imitate this feature of the Siward saga. It may be said that this is attributing too much consistency in one particular to a story that otherwise is a piece of patch-work. But the story of Bjarki's fight with the winged monster is not patch-work; it does not represent the poorest and latest form of the Bjarki legends, as Olrik says;[48] it is not an impossible story, as Panzer says;[49] nor is it "inconsequent and absurd," as Lawrence says.[50] Considering the time at which it was written, it is a well considered, well