The Sagas of the Icelanders
Smiley, Jane
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In Iceland, the age of the Vikings is also called the Saga Age. A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world's great literary treasures. Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured farther west - to Greenland and, ultimately, the coast of North America. The sagas are not typical heroic literature, but rather tales of flesh-and-blood people. They explore perennial human problems: love and hate, fate and freedom, crime and punishment, travel and exile with great psychological intensity and depth of character. The eleven Sagas and six shorter tales in this Penguin edition commemorate the thousandth anniversary of Leif Eiriksson's historic voyage and is drawn from the first English translation of the entire corpus of the Sagas as published by the Leifur Eiriksson Publishing Foundation. Thirty translators were selected for this monumental project, Pulitzer prize-winning author Jane Smiley provides the preface and Robert Kellogg an introduction which provides a historical context.
Main title:
Author:
Imprint:
London : Penguin, 2000
Collation:
782p ; 212 cm
Dewey class:
839.63008
Language:
English
BRN:
1923472