The Sagas of the Icelanders

BOOK: The Sagas of the Icelanders
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Praise for
The Sagas of Icelanders

“What better way to begin a new century than with a generous collection—the first such in English—of some of the greatest stories ever told… Irresistible tales that are, as surely as the masterpieces of Homer and Cervantes, the forerunners of the modern European novel.”


Kirkus
Reviews

 

“The Sagas are the literature not only of the island where they were written, but of the whole Western world of their day—undoubtedly one of the greatest contributions made by Nordic culture to world literature. Even today, they provide the modern reader with fascinating insights; they are stories which reveal an immense variety of human conduct and condition.”

—Jostein Gaarder

 

“Wonderful… this splendid edition will inaugurate the discovery of these great works by adventuresome readers of English for years to come.”


The San Diego Tribune

 

“Excellent… It would be hard to imagine a finer introduction to this extraordinary body of work… the best thing is the selection itself, which reflects the great variety of saga narrative, from complex family chronicles to brief, witty tales. We are taken from the male-dominated world of feuding and killing to the remarkable depiction of powerful, clever women in
The Saga of the People of Laxardal;
from the farmsteads in Iceland to the North America of the Vinland sagas… full of vivid and haunting scenes.”


The Sunday Daily Telegraph
(London)

 

“The English is wonderfully accessible to this modern reader. Only now can I fully appreciate my own deep debt as a storyteller to Icelandic writers of long ago.”

—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

 

WORLD OF THE SAGAS

 

Editor: Örnólfur Thorsson

Assistant Editor: Bernard Scudder

Advisory Editorial Board:

Theodore M. Andersson (Stanford University), Robert Cook (University of Iceland), Terry Gunnell (University of Iceland), Frederik J. Heinemann (University of Essen), Vidar Hreinsson (Reykjavik Academy), Robert Kellogg (University of Virginia), Jónas Kristjánsson (University of Iceland), Keneva Kunz (Nordregio, Stockholm), Vésteinn Ólason (University of Iceland), Gisli Sigurdsson (University of Iceland), Andrew Wawn (University of Leeds), Diana Whaley (University of Newcastle)

Translators

Katrina C. Attwood

George Clark

Ruth C. Ellison

Terry Gunnell

Keneva Kunz

Anthony Maxwell

Martin S. Regal

Bernard Scudder

Andrew Wawn

THE SAGAS OF ICELANDERS

A Selection

 

Preface by
JANE SMILEY

Introduction by
ROBERT KELLOGG

 

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinron Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First: published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2000

Published in Penguin Books 2001

Copyright © Leifur Eiriksson Publishing Ltd, 1997

Preface copyright ©Jane Smiley, 2000

All rights reserved

Translations first published in
The Complete Sagas of Icelanders
Volume I–V (forty-nine tales), Leifur Eiriksson Publishing Ltd, Iceland 1997

Leifur Eiriksson Publishing Ltd gratefully acknowledges the support of the Nordic Cultural Fund, Ariane Programme of the European Union, UNESCO, and others.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

ISBN: 978-0-14-193326-9

Table of Contents
 

List of Illustrations and Tables

Preface by
JANE SMILEY

Introduction by
ROBERT KELLOGG

Further Reading

A Note on the Texts

SAGAS

 

Egil’s Saga (
trans
.
BERNARD SCUDDER
)

The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal (
trans
.
ANDREW WAWN
)

The Saga of the People of Laxardal (
trans
.
KENEVA KUNZ
)

Bolli Bollason’s Tale (
trans
.
KENEVA KUNZ
)

The Saga of Hrafnkel Frey’s Godi (
trans
.
TERRY GUNNELL
)

The Saga of the Confederates (
trans
.
RUTH C. ELLISON
)

Gisli Sursson’s Saga (
trans
.
MARTIN S. REGAL
)

The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue (
trans
.
KATRINA C. ATTWOOD
)

The Saga of Ref the Sly (
trans
.
GEORGE CLARK
)

The Vinland Sagas

The Saga of the Greenlanders (
trans
.
KENEVA KUNZ
)

Eirik the Red’s Saga (
trans
.
KENEVA KUNZ
)

TALES

 

The Tale of Thorstein Staff-struck (
trans
.
ANTHONY MAXWELL
)

The Tale of Halldor Snorrason II (
trans
.
TERRY GUNNELL
)

The Tale of Sarcastic Halli (
trans
.
GEORGE CLARK
)

The Tale of Thorstein Shiver (
trans
.
ANTHONY MAXWELL
)

The Tale of Audun from the West Fjords (
trans
.
ANTHONY MAXWELL
)

The Tale of the Story-wise Icelander (
trans
.
ANTHONY MAXWELL
)

REFERENCE SECTION

 

Illustrations and Diagrams

Ships

The Farm

Social and Political Structure

Glossary

Index of Characters

Illustrations and Tables
 

Ages of Icelandic History

The Duty of Revenge and the Right to Inheritance

Types of Saga

Family Ties between Six Sagas

Ingimund’s Ancestors and Family in Vatnsdal

Family Ties in Laxardal

Gudrun’s Family and Husbands

Main Characters in
Gisli Sursson’s Saga

Historical Tables

Knorr

Warship

Icelandic Farm

The Farmhouse at Stong

Social and Political Structure

Old Icelandic Year and Day

MAPS

 

The World of the Sagas

Norway

Borgarfjord

Vatnsdal

Laxardal

Travels of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue

Travels of Leif Eiriksson

Travels of Thorvald Eiriksson

Travels of Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir and Thorfinn Karlsefni

Saga Sites in Iceland

Assembly Sites

Preface

JANE SMILEY

 

The prose literature of medieval Iceland is a great world treasure – elaborate, various, strange, profound, and as eternally current as any of the other great literary treasures – the Homeric epics, Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, the works of William Shakespeare or of any modern writer you could name. Mysteries surround these stories – how were they composed and by whom? what were the motives of the authors? why were they written in prose when the currency of medieval literature was poetry? how did their contemporaries understand them – did they even read them, or did they hear them read aloud? But the questions fall away as we read the sagas and tales themselves. They are written with such immediacy and forthrightness and they concern such basic human dilemmas that for the most part they are readily accessible and seductive. Reading one creates the appetite for another and another. In the present volume, Penguin has drawn upon the newly translated and edited
Complete Sagas of Icelanders
to offer the English-speaking reader a rich selection of Icelandic prose. Long and short, complex and simple, fantastic and realistic – there is a taste of everything here, an abundant introduction to a world a thousand years separated from ours, both intensely familiar and intensely strange.

BOOK: The Sagas of the Icelanders
13.27Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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