An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders (New Perspectives on Medieval Literature: Authors and Traditions)

An essential resource for exploring the early literary genre of Icelandic saga narratives

Combining an accessible approach with innovative scholarship, An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders provides up-to-date perspectives on a unique medieval literary genre that has fascinated the English-speaking world for more than two centuries. Carl Phelpstead draws on historical context, contemporary theory, and close reading to deepen our understanding of Icelandic saga narratives about the island’s early history.

Phelpstead explores the origins and cultural setting of the genre, demonstrating the rich variety of oral and written source traditions that writers drew on to produce the sagas. He provides fresh, theoretically informed discussions of major themes such as national identity, gender and sexuality, and nature and the supernatural, relating the Old Norse-Icelandic texts to questions addressed by postcolonial studies, feminist and queer theory, and ecocriticism. He then presents readings of select individual sagas, pointing out how the genre’s various source traditions and thematic concerns interact.

Including an overview of the history of English translations that shows how they have been stimulated and shaped by ideas about identity, and featuring a glossary of critical terms, this book is an essential resource for students of the literary form.

Carl Phelpstead, professor of English literature at Cardiff University in Wales, is the author of Holy Vikings: Saints’ Lives in the Old Icelandic Kings’ Sagas.