Iceland in the saga age: Eric Brighteyes, the strongest man in the south, loves Gudruda the Fair, whose father will not have him; Swanhild, her half-sister and a witch, will have him or no one. Haggard wrote this in 1891 after reading the Icelandic sagas in translation and tried to write as they do — flat, fated, unamazed. It is the least Victorian book he produced and the one Icelanders themselves respected. Nineteen plates by Dahl, Gude, and the Norwegian landscape painters of 1832 to 1916 carry the saga's own country of waterfalls, mountain farms, and ships at sunset.
