vocabulary, his many pithy sayings, and the excellent variety of his
images"; but also of his feeling for grouping, his barbaric sense of
colour, and his stateliness. For he moves with resource and strength
both in prose and verse, and is often only hindered by his own wealth.
With no kind of critical tradition to chasten him, his force is often
misguided and his work shapeless; but he stumbles into many splendours.




FOLK LORE INDEX.

The mass of archaic incidents, beliefs, and practices recorded by the
12th-century writer seemed to need some other classification than a bare
alphabetic index. The present plan, a subject-index practically,
has been adopted with a view to the needs of the anthropologist and
folk-lorist. Its details have been largely determined by the bulk and
character of the entries themselves. No attempt has been made to
supply full parallels from any save the more striking and obvious old
Scandinavian sources, the end being to classify material rather than to
point out its significance of geographic distribution. With regard to
the first three heads, the reader who wishes to see how Saxo compares
with the Old Northern poems may be referred to the Grimm Centenary
papers, Oxford, 1886, and the Corpus Poeticurn Boreale, Oxford, 1883.




POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS.