Though the Sagas are entrancing, both as examples of literature of which there is but little in the world and because of their living interest, they are scarcely known to the English-speaking public.  This is easy to account for:  it is hard to persuade the nineteenth century world to interest itself in people who lived and events that happened a thousand years ago.  Moreover, the Sagas are undoubtedly difficult reading.  The archaic nature of the work, even in a translation; the multitude of its actors; the Norse sagaman’s habit of interweaving endless side-plots, and the persistence with which he introduces the genealogy and adventures of the ancestors of every unimportant character, are none of them to the taste of the modern reader.

“Eric Brighteyes” therefore, is clipped of these peculiarities, and, to some extent, is cast in the form of the romance of our own day, archaisms being avoided as much as possible.  The author will be gratified should he succeed in exciting interest in the troubled lives of our Norse forefathers, and still more so if his difficult experiment brings readers to the Sagas—­to the prose epics of our own race.  Too ample, too prolix, too crowded with detail, they cannot indeed vie in art with the epics of Greece; but in their pictures of life, simple and heroic, they fall beneath no literature in the world, save the Iliad and the Odyssey alone.

ERIC BRIGHTEYES

I

HOW ASMUND THE PRIEST FOUND GROA THE WITCH

There lived a man in the south, before Thangbrand, Wilibald’s son, preached the White Christ in Iceland.  He was named Eric Brighteyes, Thorgrimur’s son, and in those days there was no man like him for strength, beauty and daring, for in all these things he was the first.  But he was not the first in good-luck.

Two women lived in the south, not far from where the Westman Islands stand above the sea.  Gudruda the Fair was the name of the one, and Swanhild, called the Fatherless, Groa’s daughter, was the other.  They were half-sisters, and there were none like them in those days, for they were the fairest of all women, though they had nothing in common except their blood and hate.

Now of Eric Brighteyes, of Gudruda the Fair and of Swanhild the Fatherless, there is a tale to tell.

These two fair women saw the light in the self-same hour.  But Eric Brighteyes was their elder by five years.  The father of Eric was Thorgrimur Iron-Toe.  He had been a mighty man; but in fighting with a Baresark,[*] who fell upon him as he came up from sowing his wheat, his foot was hewn from him, so that afterwards he went upon a wooden leg shod with iron.  Still, he slew the Baresark, standing on one leg and leaning against a rock, and for that deed people honoured him much.  Thorgrimur was a wealthy yeoman, slow to wrath, just, and rich in friends.  Somewhat late in life he took to wife Saevuna, Thorod’s daughter.  She was the best of women, strong in mind and second-sighted, and she could cover herself in her hair.  But these two never loved each other overmuch, and they had but one child, Eric, who was born when Saevuna was well on in years.