Færeyinga Saga
Introduction
These idioms and saws, and such laconisms as have been marked above (pp. viii., ix., x., xi.), are the very life-blood of a true Saga; where they abound, they are the infallible tests of good tradition ripened on the lips of good narrators; where they are absent, the story is the work of the scribe writing from his head without the genuine impulses of the story-teller before his audience. In listening to an Icelandic Saga in the original, the difference in style between the "good" and "bad" parts is very clear, but, of course, it must be less apparent in a translation.
The present translation was made as far back as 1868, and first revised (for the help of my kind and regretted friend F. S. Pulling, when he began to read Icelandic with me) in 1874. It has, of course, been again revised, indeed almost wholly rewritten, for the present edition. Some of the names have been put into forms nearer our own; for it is hoped that others beside the scholar (who will be put to no difficulty by such changes, and for whom I have striven to provide some matter in the Introduction), may read the story for its own sake. It is one that has always given me especial pleasure to read and to remember, and accordingly I have been bold enough to dedicate my version of it to two of my teachers for whom I have a profound regard, as a token of a grateful desire to do them honour. And I am glad to have their names printed at the head of the little book that, however unworthily, does, at least, first set forth in English the life and death of certain memorable inhabitants of the far-off lonely little Atlantic archipelago that the Icelandic-bound voyager sometimes beholds as "a wonderful vision in changing mist --- a sudden revelation of shiny sea" with the dark castles of islands "standing up out of it, and large streamers blowing away from their tops like flags." It is true that the men and women, of whom this story tells, lived and died long ago, but surely they were of those whom the pious poet would not have us willingly forget ---
kum Aida, pese d adokhton en
kai dokeonta tima de ginetai,
wn qeoj abron auxei logon teqnakotwn.
F. Y. P.
Oxford, 1896.
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