Sagas of Icelanders [The Icelandic Family Sagas]

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Diana Whaley (University of Newcastle upon Tyne)

Ed. by Hugh Magennis, Queen's University Belfast
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.3.4: Icelandic Writing and Culture.
Vol. editors: Ármann Jakobsson (University of Iceland), Sven Hakon Rossel (Universitat Wien), Herbert Rowland (Purdue University), Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (University College London)

Dates

Date of occurrence 1100-1400

Places

Iceland (Location)

Genres and Modes

Prose Fiction Narrative

Resources

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Introduction

The Sagas of Icelanders have also been known, rather imprecisely, as Icelandic Family Sagas. They constitute the best-known grouping within the richly diverse range of Icelandic Sagas (see the separate essay Icelandic Sagas in The Literary Encyclopedia). There are some forty in total (this being, for instance, the number translated in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 1997). Collectively, they cover events running from the mid ninth century to the mid eleventh and located in all inhabited parts of Iceland (and some uninhabited), though saga-writing flourished above all in the West and North. Individual sagas vary in length from the compact Saga of Thorstein the White / Þorsteins saga hvíta and The Saga of the Greenlanders / Grænlendinga saga which occupy 8 and 13 pages

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3315 words

Citation: Whaley, Diana. "Sagas of Icelanders [The Icelandic Family Sagas]". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 April 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1275, accessed 22 November 2024.]

Sagas of Icelanders [The Icelandic Family Sagas]

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