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Of the seven Icelandic short stories which appear here, the firstwas probably written early in the thirteenth century, while the restall date from the early twentieth century. It might therefore besupposed that the earliest of these stories was written in alanguage more or less unintelligible to modern Icelanders, and thatthere was a gap of many centuries in the literary production of thenation. This, however, is not the case.
The Norsemen who colonized Iceland in the last quarter of the ninthcentury brought with than the language then spoken throughout thewhole of Scandinavia. This ancestor of the modern Scandinaviantongues has been preserved in Iceland so little changed that everyIcelander still understands, without the aid of explanatorycommentaries, the oldest preserved prose written in their country850 years ago. The principal reasons for this were probably limitedcommunications between Iceland and other countries, frequentmigrations inside the island, and, not least important, a long anduninterrupted literary tradition. As a consequence, Icelandic hasnot developed any dialects in the ordinary sense.
It is to their language and literature, as well as to the islandseparateness of their country, that the 175 thousand inhabitants ofthis North-Atlantic state of a little more than a hundred thousandsquare kilometres owe their existence as an independent and separatenation.
The Icelanders established a democratic legislative assembly, theAlthingi (Alþingi) in 930 A.D., and in the year 1000 embracedChristianity. Hence there soon arose the necessity of writing downthe law and translations of sacred works. Such matter, along withhistorical knowledge, may well have constituted the earliestwritings in Icelandic, probably dating as far back as the eleventhcentury, while the oldest preserved texts were composed early in thetwelfth century. This was the beginning of the so-called saga-writing. The important thing was that most of what was written downwas in the vernacular, Latin being used but sparingly. Thus aliterary style was evolved which soon reached a high standard. Thisstyle, so forceful in its perspicuity, was effectively simple, yetrich in the variety of its classical structure.
There were different categories of sagas. Among the most importantwere the sagas of the Norwegian kings and the family sagas. Thelatter tell us about the first generations of native Icelanders.They are all anonymous and the majority of them were written in thethirteenth century. Most of them contain a more