upon them by their intense realisation of the futility of human hopes
and schemings, of the terror and the tragedy of life, the vanity of its
desires, and the untravelled gloom or sleep, dreamless or dreamfull,
which lies beyond its end.

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.