Click "free sample" to read the whole book no need to purchase. Marjorie Burns The Story of Grettir the Strong was not the first saga translated by William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon, nor the first they published together. Their translation “The Saga of Gunnlaug the Worm-tongue and Rafn the Skald” had already appeared earlier the same year—in the January 1869 issue of The Fortnightly Review. But “Gunnlaug the Worm-tongue” makes a better showing in the 1875 revision Morris and Magnússon published in Three Northern Love Stories; and Grettir the Strong—with its cycles of revenge, heroic action, and supernatural encounters—is the saga that established the Morris and Magnússon team. Grettir (in Morris’s words) “yields only to the story of Njal” among all the known sagas. But Morris was nonetheless aware that readers new to sagas would find it baffling in places and sometimes troubling. To ease the way, he and Magnússon not only included an outline, a chronology, notes, indexes, and lists of periphrastic expressions and proverbial sayings, but they also prepared their audience for structural oddities: the long opening section on Grettir’s great grandfather, Onund Treefoot, for example, and the sudden shift to medieval romance that comes at the saga’s end—a shift that the translators call “something of a blot”