For those who may not be familiar with the medieval Icelandic sagas, below are some very brief general comments about this extraordinary literary genre, plus some links to further information about the sagas available on the internet, and some suggestions for reading in traditional book format, should you be more that way inclined... It's a hard thing to convey a sense of these remarkable narratives in only a few sentences but I hope it gives those who haven't come across the sagas before a rough idea about them.
As I mention in my project outline (archived at http://sagasteads.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html), the medieval Icelandic family sagas or Íslendingasögur (literally, "Sagas of Icelanders") were written down for the most part in the 13th century in Iceland, and describe the lives of the first few generations of settlers in Iceland in the late 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries. None of the sagas' "authors" are known and their anonymity is central to understanding the circumstances that surrounded their composition, as well as the relative freedom with which subsequent scribes hand-copied and transmitted the texts, from the medieval period right up until the early 20th century.
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| Egill Skalla-Grímsson (from a 17th-century manuscript) |
The sagas present a great number of highly individual and memorable characters. Some sagas are biographical and sketch out the lives of famous Icelandic figures such as the difficult and provocative Egill Skalla-Grímsson (Egils saga Skallagrímssonar), or the outlaw-poets Grettir Ásmundarson (Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar) and Gísli Súrsson (Gísla saga Súrssonar). Others, such as Eyrbyggja saga, Laxdæla saga, and Njáls saga, have a wider focus and follow the development of bloody feuds that unfold in different districts.
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Much of the narrative material about specific characters and events that was worked into these written, literary compositions must have been passed down orally prior to the writing of the sagas, from one generation to the next. Stylistically, the sagas are striking for the way that their narrative perspective gives the impression of being very objective: events are reported soberly and tersely without overt authorial comment, characters do not reveal their inner thoughts or emotions, and dialogue is reported without narratorial comment or analysis. These stylistic features have led some modern commentators to refer to the sagas as the forerunners of the prose novel, many centuries before the 18th-century rise of this genre of literature...but herein lies a vexed question as to whether the sagas are history, or literature, or something in between -- not a question I will take up further here, for the moment anyway!
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Sources for further information:
Iceland will be the Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2011; much of interest about Icelandic literature, art, and culture (both medieval and modern) can be found on the official website:
http://www.sagenhaftes-island.is/en
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A new and comprehensive introduction to the medieval Icelandic sagas by Margaret Clunies Ross (Professor of English Language and Early English Literature at the University of Sydney, Australia) has just been published by Cambridge University Press. My photo on the front cover!:
Much of the narrative material about specific characters and events that was worked into these written, literary compositions must have been passed down orally prior to the writing of the sagas, from one generation to the next. Stylistically, the sagas are striking for the way that their narrative perspective gives the impression of being very objective: events are reported soberly and tersely without overt authorial comment, characters do not reveal their inner thoughts or emotions, and dialogue is reported without narratorial comment or analysis. These stylistic features have led some modern commentators to refer to the sagas as the forerunners of the prose novel, many centuries before the 18th-century rise of this genre of literature...but herein lies a vexed question as to whether the sagas are history, or literature, or something in between -- not a question I will take up further here, for the moment anyway!
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Sources for further information:
Iceland will be the Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2011; much of interest about Icelandic literature, art, and culture (both medieval and modern) can be found on the official website:
http://www.sagenhaftes-island.is/en
***
A new and comprehensive introduction to the medieval Icelandic sagas by Margaret Clunies Ross (Professor of English Language and Early English Literature at the University of Sydney, Australia) has just been published by Cambridge University Press. My photo on the front cover!:
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Online translations (and texts in Old Norse-Icelandic) of some of the more popular of the Íslendingasögur can be found here:
***Online translations (and texts in Old Norse-Icelandic) of some of the more popular of the Íslendingasögur can be found here:
English translations of a number of sagas, and some shorter stories (þættir) are printed in this compendium, edited by Robert Kellogg, and with a Preface by Jane Smiley, published by Penguin:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sagas-Icelanders-World/dp/0141000031/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1288821642&sr=1-1
