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They are prose narratives primarily based on historical events that mostly took place in Iceland in the ninth, tenth, and early eleventh centuries, during the so-called Saga Age. They were written in Old Icelandic, a western dialect of Old Norse. They are the best-known specimens of Icelandic literature.
Icelanders’ sagas, the class of heroic prose narratives written during 1200–20 about the great families who lived in Iceland from 930 to 1030. Among the most important such works are the Njáls saga and the Gísla saga. The family sagas are a unique contribution to Western literature and a central.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Overview
- The heroic sagas
- Translations from Latin
- Romances
- Prose
- Poetry
- The Reformation in Iceland
The Icelanders’ sagas (also called family sagas) are about heroes who supposedly lived in the 10th and 11th centuries. Their origins are unclear, and it is debatable whether they are faithful records of history. One theory has suggested that they were composed in the 11th century and transmitted orally until written down in the 13th century; though researchers now reject this view, it is true that the sagas owed much to oral tales and the tradition of oral verse. Their historicity is difficult to verify, since their content and form were shaped both by the sources used and by the author’s intentions.
It is also difficult to determine the date of many of the sagas. The obviously early works are somewhat crudely structured and express Norse ideals of loyalty and heroism. The Gísla saga, written before the middle of the 13th century, shows the development of artistic skill and contains rich descriptions of nature and verses of considerable beauty and tragic feeling; it tells of the poet Gísli Súrsson (died c. 980). The Laxdæla saga (“Saga of the Men of Laxárdal”), written a few years later, is a delicately worked tragedy in which the author shows an unusual appreciation of visual beauty. One work that is clearly its author’s creation was the Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða (“Saga of Hrafnkell, Freyr’s Priest”): despite realistic detail, the saga contains little historical fact. As the 13th century progressed, a taste for fantastic and romantic elements grew. The Grettis saga (“Saga of Grettir the Strong”) includes several motifs from folklore and portrays a hero fighting against trolls and ghosts.
The fantastic element was further developed in the fornaldarsǫgur, literally “sagas of antiquity,” whose heroes were supposed to have lived in Scandinavia and Germany before Iceland was settled. The best known, the Vǫlsunga saga (c. 1270), uses prose stories adapted from heroic lays to describe Sigurd (Siegfried), the Burgundians, and the Ostrogoth king Jǫrmunrekr (Ermanaric). The Hrólfs saga kraka (c. 1280–1350) incorporated ancient traditions about Danish and Swedish heroes who also appeared in the Old English poems “Widsith” and Beowulf.
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Poetry: First Lines
Many of the works on contemporary history were combined about 1300 in the Sturlunga saga, including the Íslendinga saga by Sturla Þórðarson.
A quantity of secular literature was translated from Latin between the 12th and the 14th century. The “Prophecies of Merlin,” already translated in verse by a Þingeyrar monk, were combined with a complete translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of Britain) and titled Breta sǫgur (“Stories of th...
Romances were also translated or adapted from Continental romances. Interest in the romance genre began in Norway and soon took root in Iceland. The earliest romance was probably the Tristrams saga (1226), derived from a late 12th-century adaptation of the Tristan and Isolde legend by the Anglo-Norman poet Thomas. This was followed by the Karlamagn...
Prose literature of the 14th century includes several sagas. Among them are the Finnboga saga ramma (“Saga of Finnbogi the Strong”), about a 10th-century hero, and a saga that tells the love story of its hero Víglundr. Sagas about bishops, already a theme in the 13th century, became more numerous, as did lives of foreign saints. A large collection ...
Much poetry was written up to the time of the Reformation, in the 16th century, and many new forms were devised. The best poems were religious pieces, in honour of the Virgin Mary, the Apostles, or other saints. The well-known Lilja (c. 1350; “The Lily”; Eng. trans. Lilja) by Eysteinn Ásgrímsson, a monk from Þykkvabær, gives an account of the fall ...
In Iceland the chief political figure and poet of the Reformation was Jón Arason, the last Roman Catholic bishop of Hólar, beheaded in 1550. By his life he showed that he was a Viking as well as a martyr, although most of his surviving poetry is religious.
As a result of the Reformation and its effects on Icelandic learning and literature, Catholic poetry was discarded, and the first Lutheran bishops attempted to replace it with hymns poorly translated from Danish and German. Lutheran teachers instructed the people in Protestant dogma, and several translations of sermons and books of instruction by German Lutherans were printed in Icelandic from as early as 1540. Guðbrandur Þorláksson was the most energetic of the Lutheran teachers. In translating the Bible into Icelandic, he used earlier Icelandic versions of some books of the Old Testament and Oddur Gottskálksson’s Icelandic translation of the New Testament. In his psalmbook Þorláksson showed appreciation of Icelandic poetic tradition and adhered to Icelandic alliteration and form.
Apr 25, 2022 · The sagas of Icelanders deal with the life of wealthy farmers in Iceland in the period from 930 to 1030 CE, in the so-called Saga Age. They were recorded over a long period of time in the Middle Ages.
Jul 12, 2022 · The Sagas of the Icelanders, written in the 12th and 13th centuries and telling the stories of the early settlers of Iceland from the 10th century, are an amazing treasure trove of historical knowledge about the early years of settlement in Iceland.
The Icelandic sagas (also known as family sagas) are a category of sagas written in medieval Iceland, mostly in the 13th and 14th centuries. The stories, written in the Icelandic language, take place in the period from the settlement of Iceland around 900 AD until the 11th century; most of the writers remain unknown.
The Sagas of Icelanders are forty narratives of adventure and conflict, set in the Viking Age but written down in the vernacular by anonymous authors in Iceland several hundred years later, during the 13th and 14th centuries.
