The Sagas of the Icelanders
The Sagas of the Icelanders

Author: Jane Smilely

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2005-02-24

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 0141933267

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In Iceland, the age of the Vikings is also known as the Saga Age. A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world’s great literary treasures – as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare. Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled in Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured farther west to Greenland and, ultimately, North America. Sailing as far from the archetypal heroic adventure as the long ships did from home, the Sagas are written with psychological intensity, peopled by characters with depth, and explore perennial human issues like love, hate, fate and freedom.

An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders
An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders

Author: Carl Phelpstead

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780813058719

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Combining an accessible approach with innovative scholarship, this book provides up-to-date perspectives on a unique medieval literary genre. Carl Phelpstead draws on historical context, contemporary theory, and close reading to deepen our understanding of Icelandic saga narratives about the island's early history.

Icelanders in the Viking Age
Icelanders in the Viking Age

Author: William R. Short

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2010-03-15

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0786447273

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The Sagas of Icelanders are enduring stories from Viking-age Iceland filled with love and romance, battles and feuds, tragedy and comedy. Yet these tales are little read today, even by lovers of literature. The culture and history of the people depicted in the Sagas are often unfamiliar to the modern reader, though the audience for whom the tales were intended would have had an intimate understanding of the material. This text introduces the modern reader to the daily lives and material culture of the Vikings. Topics covered include religion, housing, social customs, the settlement of disputes, and the early history of Iceland. Issues of dispute among scholars, such as the nature of settlement and the division of land, are addressed in the text.

Comic Sagas and Tales from Iceland
Comic Sagas and Tales from Iceland

Author:

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2013-03-07

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 0141975520

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Comic Sagas and Tales brings together the very finest Icelandic stories from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, a time of civil unrest and social upheaval. With feuding families and moments of grotesque violence, the sagas see such classic mythological figures as murdered fathers, disguised beggars, corrupt chieftains and avenging sons do battle with axes, words and cunning. The tales, meanwhile, follow heroes and comical fools through dreams, voyages and religious conversions in medieval Iceland and beyond. Shaped by Iceland's oral culture and their conversion to Christianity, these stories are works of ironic humour and stylistic innovation.

Sagas of the Icelanders
Sagas of the Icelanders

Author: John Tucker

Publisher: Scholarly Title

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13:

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A collection of essays on Icelandic sagas from the middle ages, which concern the earliest period of Icelandic history. Includes references.

The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga
The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga

Author: Margaret Clunies Ross

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-10-28

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1139492640

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The medieval Norse-Icelandic saga is one of the most important European vernacular literary genres of the Middle Ages. This Introduction to the saga genre outlines its origins and development, its literary character, its material existence in manuscripts and printed editions, and its changing reception from the Middle Ages to the present time. Its multiple sub-genres - including family sagas, mythical-heroic sagas and sagas of knights - are described and discussed in detail, and the world of medieval Icelanders is powerfully evoked. The first general study of the Old Norse-Icelandic saga to be written in English for some decades, the Introduction is based on up-to-date scholarship and engages with current debates in the field. With suggestions for further reading, detailed information about the Icelandic literary canon, and a map of medieval Iceland, this book is aimed at students of medieval literature and assumes no prior knowledge of Scandinavian languages.

Bloodtaking and Peacemaking
Bloodtaking and Peacemaking

Author: William Ian Miller

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-05-15

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 0226526828

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Dubbed by the New York Times as "one of the most sought-after legal academics in the county," William Ian Miller presents the arcane worlds of the Old Norse studies in a way sure to attract the interest of a wide range of readers. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking delves beneath the chaos and brutality of the Norse world to discover a complex interplay of ordering and disordering impulses. Miller's unique and engaging readings of ancient Iceland's sagas and extensive legal code reconstruct and illuminate the society that produced them. People in the saga world negotiated a maze of violent possibility, with strategies that frequently put life and limb in the balance. But there was a paradox in striking the balance—one could not get even without going one better. Miller shows how blood vengeance, law, and peacemaking were inextricably bound together in the feuding process. This book offers fascinating insights into the politics of a stateless society, its methods of social control, and the role that a uniquely sophisticated and self-conscious law played in the construction of Icelandic society. "Illuminating."—Rory McTurk, Times Literary Supplement "An impressive achievement in ethnohistory; it is an amalgam of historical research with legal and anthropological interpretation. What is more, and rarer, is that it is a pleasure to read due to the inclusion of narrative case material from the sagas themselves."—Dan Bauer, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Iceland
Iceland

Author: Sabine Baring-Gould

Publisher: Signal Books

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 9781902669892

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So begins Sabine Baring-Gould's account of his journey on horseback around Iceland in 1862. Aged twenty-eight, the young writer and teacher was fascinated by the tradition of the Icelandic sagas, and this was the catalyst for his adventure and the book that emerged from it. His voyage took him from the then tiny settlement of Reykjavik through remote and hostile terrain, passing through the empty expanse of Iceland's countryside. He observed mountains and glaciers, volcanoes and geysers, wondering at the wild beauty of the landscape. He also recorded the rich flora and fauna that he saw-and, to his chagrin, that his companions shot.