Of course, forms of cultural production that combine the real and the fictional are hardly anything new (an observation that does not render the concept of the postmodern silly, as some pomophobes would have it).

The old man recounted the tale of how he caught the big fish.

Standard Python strings are really bytestrings, and a Python character, being such a string of length 1, is really a byte.

Put into English, the Saga seems too Norse; and there is often a hitchiness in the verse that suggests translation with overmuch heed for literal closeness.