Jane Smiley - The Sagas of Icelanders: A Selection

Praise for The Sagas of Icelanders

What better way to begin a new century than with a generous collectionthe first such in Englishof some of the greatest stories ever told Irresistible tales that are, as surely as the masterpieces of Homer and Cervantes, the forerunners of the modern European novel.

KirkusReviews

The Sagas are the literature not only of the island where they were written, but of the whole Western world of their dayundoubtedly one of the greatest contributions made by Nordic culture to world literature. Even today, they provide the modern reader with fascinating insights; they are stories which reveal an immense variety of human conduct and condition.

Jostein Gaarder

Wonderful this splendid edition will inaugurate the discovery of these great works by adventuresome readers of English for years to come.

The San Diego Tribune

Excellent It would be hard to imagine a finer introduction to this extraordinary body of work the best thing is the selection itself, which reflects the great variety of saga narrative, from complex family chronicles to brief, witty tales. We are taken from the male-dominated world of feuding and killing to the remarkable depiction of powerful, clever women in The Saga of the People of Laxardal; from the farmsteads in Iceland to the North America of the Vinland sagas full of vivid and haunting scenes.

The Sunday Daily Telegraph (London)

The English is wonderfully accessible to this modern reader. Only now can I fully appreciate my own deep debt as a storyteller to Icelandic writers of long ago.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

WORLD OF THE SAGAS

Editor: rnlfur Thorsson

Assistant Editor: Bernard Scudder

Advisory Editorial Board:

Theodore M. Andersson (Stanford University), Robert Cook (University of Iceland), Terry Gunnell (University of Iceland), Frederik J. Heinemann (University of Essen), Vidar Hreinsson (Reykjavik Academy), Robert Kellogg (University of Virginia), Jnas Kristjnsson (University of Iceland), Keneva Kunz (Nordregio, Stockholm), Vsteinn lason (University of Iceland), Gisli Sigurdsson (University of Iceland), Andrew Wawn (University of Leeds), Diana Whaley (University of Newcastle)

Translators

Katrina C. Attwood

George Clark

Ruth C. Ellison

Terry Gunnell

Keneva Kunz

Anthony Maxwell

Martin S. Regal

Bernard Scudder

Andrew Wawn

A Selection

Preface by JANE SMILEY

Introduction by ROBERT KELLOGG

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First: published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2000

Published in Penguin Books 2001

Copyright Leifur Eiriksson Publishing Ltd, 1997

Preface copyright Jane Smiley, 2000

All rights reserved

Translations first published in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders Volume IV (forty-nine tales), Leifur Eiriksson Publishing Ltd, Iceland 1997

Leifur Eiriksson Publishing Ltd gratefully acknowledges the support of the Nordic Cultural Fund, Ariane Programme of the European Union, UNESCO, and others.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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ISBN: 978-0-14-193326-9

MAPS

JANE SMILEY

The prose literature of medieval Iceland is a great world treasure elaborate, various, strange, profound, and as eternally current as any of the other great literary treasures the Homeric epics, Dantes Divine Comedy , the works of William Shakespeare or of any modern writer you could name. Mysteries surround these stories how were they composed and by whom? what were the motives of the authors? why were they written in prose when the currency of medieval literature was poetry? how did their contemporaries understand them did they even read them, or did they hear them read aloud? But the questions fall away as we read the sagas and tales themselves. They are written with such immediacy and forthrightness and they concern such basic human dilemmas that for the most part they are readily accessible and seductive. Reading one creates the appetite for another and another. In the present volume, Penguin has drawn upon the newly translated and edited Complete Sagas of Icelanders to offer the English-speaking reader a rich selection of Icelandic prose. Long and short, complex and simple, fantastic and realistic there is a taste of everything here, an abundant introduction to a world a thousand years separated from ours, both intensely familiar and intensely strange.

The Icelandic sagas, in form and apparent purpose, were anomalous for their time, the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that is, the time of Chaucer, the Romance of the Rose and Dante. If English, French and Italian readers had had access to them in their own day, they might have found them stranger than we do. We have been trained by the form of the novel, which arose in England in the eighteenth century, to accept the significance of a prose narrative that concerns itself with the doings and opinions and fates of what we would call ordinary citizens, that is, men and women who live in communities of people who are more or less their equals, whose personal qualities determine the outcome of their intentions and whose stories constitute models of social and psychological behaviour. Much of the medieval literature we know of had an aristocratic, leisured audience. Icelanders wrote for each other, that is, a relatively small population of related and isolated (in the world-geographical sense) families who were all aware of who their ancestors were and how their ancestors had settled and developed the world that saga writers and readers lived in. Medieval Iceland shared with the modern world a considerable degree of social mobility and a considerable ambiguousness about how men (and women) of exceptional qualities (strength, talent, beauty, passion) could be fitted into the fabric of society. Such concerns arose in mainland Europe in times of social and economic disruption, for example during the Black Death, but less so than they did at times of social and economic stability; they were at the very heart of how Icelandic society created itself and sustained itself. Just as the settlement of Iceland in the ninth century prefigured the westward expansion of Europe into America five and six centuries later, the literature of Iceland written in the high Middle Ages prefigured the literature of the modern world.