Sagas of the Icelanders: A Book of Essays

If there is a single conviction that unifies the essays in this collection, it is that the Sagas of Icelanders are an extraordinary cultural achievement — extraordinary not only in the relative sense of being unlike any other literature that has survived to us from the middle ages, but absolutely. For a variety of reasons, not all of them understood, the art of story-telling flowered in Iceland at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Like the other explosions of creativity that punctuate the course of literary history, this one was short-lived, lasting scarcely a hundred years. But it was enough time to see the composition of a group of sagas so effectively told that, when they became known to people of other lands six centuries later, they gained an enthusiastic readership on the basis simply of their own compelling merits. This readership has continued to grow, especially in recent years, thanks to a number of good, inexpensive translations, and with it has grown scholarly interest — as the number of articles written about these sagas in the last couple of decades attests. The essays selected for presentation here are written to many ends. They are gathered together to provide the nonspecialist reader with a sample of the recent attempts that have beén made to define the nature of this creative achievement and, if only by implication, to account for its origins. Necessarily such a collection rather enacts than surveys the debate that has swirled about these questions. But excellent surveys already exist, together with larger analytic studies arguing one or another position. It is my hope that the benefits of anthologized variety and open-endedness will speak for themselves.