Excerpt from The Saga Library, Vol. 1: The Story of Howard the Halt, the Story of the Banded Men, the Story of Hen Thorir, Done Into English Out of the Lcelandic
As the series of tales and histories to be published under the title of the Saga Library is addressed to the whole reading public, and not only to students of Scandinavian history, folk-lore, and language, the translators think it well to say a few words about Icelandic literature in general before dealing with the three stories contained in this volume.
Although Iceland is a barren northern island, of savagely wild, though to the eye that sees, beautiful scenery, the inhabitants of it neither are nor were savages cut off from the spirit and energy of the great progressive races. They are, rather, a specially intellectual family of one of the most active of those races, to whom fate, which has deprived them of so much, has allotted the honourable task of preserving the record of the thoughts, the aspirations, and the imaginations of their earliest ancestors: their language, which they have kept scarcely altered since the thirteenth century, is akin to our own.
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