Icelandic literary culture was one of the richest and most important in the medieval world. This title brings together the finest comic stories from medieval Iceland. It examines how the stories satirised old-style sagas while exploiting their classic themes of quests and revenge.
Set around the time of Iceland's conversion to Christianity, this saga follows a 50 year blood-feud. The narrative focuses on Njal Thorgeirsson who, along with his family, is burnt alive in his home. The saga exposes the cathatic power of vengance and inadequacy of the law. schovat popis
Composed at the end of the fourteenth century by an unknown author, The Saga of Grettir the Strong is one of the last great Icelandic sagas. It relates the tale of Grettir, an eleventh-century warrior struggling to hold on to the values of a heroic age becoming eclipsed by Christianity and a more pastoral lifestyle.
Set at the end of the tenth century, this title is about the time Scandinavia was converting from worship of Norse gods to Christianity. It focuses on two families that of Hoskuld, a prominent farmer with several sons, and that of Gudrun, the most beautiful woman ever born in Iceland.
One of the most arresting stories in the history of exploration, these two Icelandic sagas tell of the discovery of America by Norsemen five centuries before Christopher Columbus. Together, the direct, forceful twelfth-century Graenlendinga Saga and the more polished and scholarly Eirik's Saga, written some hundred years later, recount how Eirik the Red founded an Icelandic colony in Greenland and how his son, Leif the Lucky, later sailed south to explore - and if possible exploit - the chance discovery by Bjarni Herjolfsson of an unknown land. In spare and vigorous prose they record Europe's first surprise glimpse of the eastern shores of the North American continent and the natives who inhabited them.