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Saga

In the myth-legend, or saga, the deeds transcend the ordinarily credible and the heroes are often directed by superhuman agencies. Perhaps the oldest examples of this kind are those recorded in the Sanscrit "Mahabharata" and "Ramayana", and the Persian "Shah Nameh." In the last occurs the beautiful story of Sohrab and Rustam, who lived six hundred years before Christ. Firdousi, writing as late as the first decade of the eleventh century, was therefore working over very ancient material. Such combinations likewise of older tradition and later writing are the Anglo-Saxon "Beowulf", the French "Chanson de Roland", the Spanish "Cid", the Italian "Orlando Furioso" (which is the French story adapted), the German "Hildebrand", "Waltharilied", and "Nibelungen Nôt", and the Icelandic "Grettir the Strong" and "Volsunga Saga". The "Volsunga Saga" as we have it today is prose with some songs from the "Elder Edda". Legend in its written form as a composition type we think of as prose, though it may be verse, or prose and verse combined.