Read The Sagas of the Icelanders Online
Authors: Jane Smilely
The Sagas of the Icelanders
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
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.
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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.
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ISBN: 978-0-14-193326-9
The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue (
trans
.
KATRINA C. ATTWOOD
)
The Tale of Audun from the West Fjords (
trans
.
ANTHONY MAXWELL
)
The Tale of the Story-wise Icelander (
trans
.
ANTHONY MAXWELL
)
Illustrations and Tables
MAPS
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.