Overview
About Icelandic Sagas
Literature about an earlier society
The family sagas were principally written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries but describe events set mainly in the tenth and eleventh. Genealogy, disputes, marriage and obligations between households shape their plots. Their authors are generally unknown, and their relationship to earlier oral storytelling is an area of scholarly interpretation. They should therefore be read as crafted medieval narratives rather than straightforward contemporary records of the people they portray. Njáls saga, Egils saga and Laxdæla saga belong to this family-saga tradition.
Stories in a named landscape
Farms, valleys, routes and assembly places give saga narratives a detailed geographical setting. The University of Iceland's Icelandic Saga Map connects passages to places, showing how the geographical worlds of different stories overlap. This approach allows readers to study landscape as part of literary transmission and memory. Other medieval narrative groupings, including bishops' sagas and the Sturlunga compilation, broaden Iceland's saga literature beyond the familiar stories of the early settlers' descendants.
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