Icelandic sagas

The Icelandic sagas are medieval prose works relating stories, mostly concerning Iceland or the deeds of Icelanders, and mostly in the period 930-1030 CE. They were composed in Icelandic during the 13th and 14th centuries. The authors are mostly unknown, but some have been conjectured.

Types of saga

Some of the works which have been labelled as sagas are in fact chronicles of rulers and their deeds, though written down after the events (e g Orkneyinga Saga). These are generally accepted as historical within the limitations of such documents. The majority, however, deal with the interactions and feuds of powerful men and women and families. Presenting themselves as histories, they are really crafted tales, usually based on historical events, but adapting them to the purposes of the writers - in modern terms, historical novels.

Saga characteristics

The sagas relate public acts. In a society of large households, most acts were in effect performed in public. When someone went off and did something secret, or killed the witnesses (e g Egil's Saga), the deeds are not related but only conjectured. As for the inner feelings of the actors, they are never described, but may often be deduced from the actions or from some formula, such as "it was said that so-and-so looked in such-and-such a way".

The ability of certain persons to work magic, usually evil, is taken for granted, as is the continued presence of the dead in their burial howes. If a prediction is made, however uncertainly, it will almost certainly be fulfilled.

Major characters are usually introduced with extended genealogies, which help to place the person for the original readership, and also set out part of the web of relationships so necessary to the plot. For the same reasons, a saga will often start several generations before what a modern reader would consider the main events.