The Icelandic Sagas

IN this brief outline of an extensive subject I have endeavoured to explain clearly not only what the Icelandic sagas are, but how it happened that they arose in a place so remote from the rest of Europe...The special reasons which explain it are fully stated in the first chapter,...the central Germanic area is not strongly represented; it is on the outmost borders, in Iceland, England, and southern Germany, that literary activity of a high order first manifests itself. This would appear to sugg