European Sources of Icelandic Saga-Writing: An Essay Based on Previous Studies

This essay contains a summary of results previously published in four separate articles. The common theme of these is that Old Icelandic saga-writing should be treated as a branch of European literature and not as a product of an isolated Germanic culture. I am certainly not the first to urge such an argument, but foreign influence on saga-writing is still a very neglected field of study. And of course I have not been able to exhaust the subject any more than my predecessors have done. So far, we are familiar only with certain aspects of the relationship between the foreign influence and the native tradition in the sagas.