They represent the diverse areas in which he has worked: Sagas of Icelanders to kings' sagas, eddic poetry to reception studies, and, in the longest single contribution to the volume, the 78-page 'The Riddles of the Rok Stone: A Structural Approach' (1977),
runology. The book is divided into five sections: 'Origins', 'Saga Rhetoric', 'Structure and Ideology', 'Edda and Saga as Oral Performance', and 'Reception and Adaptation', with articles organized thematically rather than chronologically.
The bibliography of his writings shows that his range is much wider than
runology, though that is itself a wide-ranging subject on which not many scholars have written with such good sense and care for establishable truth as he.