Of the seven Icelandic short stories which appear here, the first was probably written early in the thirteenth century, while the rest all date from the early twentieth century. The Norsemen who colonized Iceland in the last quarter of the ninth century brought with them the language then spoken throughout all of Scandinavia. This ancestor of the modern Scandinavian tongues has been preserved in Iceland with the oldest preserved Icelandic prose written almost 1000 years ago. Limited communications between Iceland and other countries, frequent migrations inside the island, and, not least important, a long and uninterrupted literary tradition has meant the Icelandic language has not developed any dialects in the ordinary sense. Since the 12th C. the Icelandic people have continued to tell stories and to compose poems with the greyness of commonplace existence made more bearable when listening to tales of the heroic deeds and sagas of the past. In the evening, the living-room...