been made by magic, and to sing in the night before the wounding of
men and the waking of war. People were thought to be "second-
sighted"--that is, to have prophetic vision. The night when Njal's
house was burned his wife saw all the meat on the table "one gore of
blood," just as in Homer the prophet Theoclymenus beheld blood
falling in gouts from the walls, before the slaying of the Wooers.
The Valkyries, the Choosers of the slain, and the Norns who wove the
fates of men at a ghastly loom were seen by living eyes. In the
graves where treasures were hoarded the Barrowwights dwelt, ghosts
that were sentinels over the gold: witchwives changed themselves
into wolves and other monstrous animals, and for many weeks the
heroes Signy and Sinfjotli ran wild in the guise of wolves.

These and many other marvels crept into the Sagas, and made the
listeners feel a shudder of cold beside the great fire that burned
in the centre of the skali or hall where the chief sat, giving meat
and drink to all who came, where the women span and the Saga man
told the tales of long ago. Finally, at the end of the middle ages,
these Sagas were written down in Icelandic, and in Latin
occasionally, and many of them have been translated into English.

Unluckily, these translations have hitherto been expensive to buy,
and were not always to be had easily. For the wise world, which
reads newspapers all day and half the night, does not care much for
books, still less for good books, least of all for old books. You
can make no money out of reading Sagas: they have nothing to say
about stocks and shares, nor about Prime Ministers and politics.
Nor will they amuse a man, if nothing amuses him but accounts of
races and murders, or gossip about Mrs. Nokes's new novel, Mrs.
Stokes's new dresses, or Lady Jones's diamonds. The Sagas only tell