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Sagas are prose stories and histories, composed in Iceland and to a lesser extent elsewhere in Scandinavia.
The most famous saga-genre is the sagas of Icelanders, which feature Viking voyages, migration to Iceland, and between Icelandic families. However, sagas' subject matter is diverse, including legendary saga; saints and bishops both from Scandinavia and elsewhere; Scandinavian kings and contemporary Icelandic politics; and chivalric romances either translated from Continental European languages or composed locally.
Sagas originated in the Middle Ages, but continued to be composed in the ensuing centuries. Whereas the dominant language of history-writing in medieval Europe was Latin language, sagas were composed in the vernacular: Old Norse and its later descendants, primarily Icelandic.
While sagas are written in prose, they share some similarities with epic poetry, and often include stanzas or whole poems in alliterative verse embedded in the text.
The word continues to be used in this sense in the modern Scandinavian languages: Icelandic saga (plural sögur), Faroese (plural søgur), Norwegian (plural soger), Danish saga (plural sagaer), and Swedish saga (plural sagor). It usually also has wider meanings such as 'history', 'tale', and 'story'. It can also be used of a Family saga telling stories spanning multiple generations, or to refer to saga-inspired fantasy fiction.J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings series was translated into Swedish by Åke Ohlmarks with the title Sagan om ringen: "The Saga of the Ring". (The 2004 translation was titled Ringarnas herre, a literal translation from the original.) Icelandic journalist Þorsteinn Thorarensen (1926–2006) translated the work as Hringadróttins saga meaning "Saga of the Lord of the Rings". Swedish means Folklore or fairy tale, while konstsaga is the Swedish term for a fairy tale by a known author, such as Hans Christian Andersen. In Swedish historiography, the term sagokung, "saga king", is intended to be ambiguous, as it describes the semi-legendary kings of Sweden, who are known only from unreliable sources.
The material of the short tales of Icelanders ( þættir or Íslendingaþættir) is similar to Íslendinga sögur, in shorter form, often preserved as episodes about Icelanders in the kings' sagas.
Like kings' sagas, when sagas of Icelanders quote verse, as they often do, it is almost invariably skaldic verse.
According to historian Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, "Scholars generally agree that the contemporary sagas are rather reliable sources, based on the short time between the events and the recording of the sagas, normally twenty to seventy years... The main argument for this view on the reliability of these sources is that the audience would have noticed if the saga authors were slandering and not faithfully portraying the past."
Some legendary sagas overlap generically with the next category, chivalric sagas.Matthew, Driscoll, 'Late Prose Fiction ( Lygisögur)', in A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. by Rory McTurk (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 190–204.
While often translated from verse, sagas in this genre almost never quote verse, and when they do it is often unusual in form: for example, Jarlmanns saga ok Hermanns contains the first recorded quotation of a refrain from an Icelandic dance-song,Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, 'How Icelandic Legends Reflect the Prohibition on Dancing', ARV, 61 (2006), 25–52. and a metrically irregular riddle in Þjalar-Jóns saga.' Þjalar-Jóns saga', trans. by Philip Lavender, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 46 (2015), 73–113 (p. 88 n. 34).
Most of the medieval manuscripts which are the earliest surviving witnesses to the sagas were taken to Denmark and Sweden in the seventeenth century, but later returned to Iceland. Classical sagas were composed in the thirteenth century. Scholars once believed that these sagas were transmitted orally from generation to generation until scribes wrote them down in the thirteenth century. However, most scholars now believe the sagas were conscious artistic creations, based on both oral and written tradition. A study focusing on the description of the items of clothing mentioned in the sagas concludes that the authors attempted to create a historic "feel" to the story, by dressing the characters in what was at the time thought to be "old fashioned clothing". However, this clothing is not contemporary with the events of the saga as it is a closer match to the clothing worn in the 12th century. It was only recently (start of 20th century) that the tales of the voyages to North America (modern day Canada) were authenticated. Strange Footprints on the Land (Author: Irwin, Constance publisher: Harper & Row, 1980)
Most sagas of Icelanders take place in the period 930–1030, which is called söguöld (Age of the Sagas) in Icelandic history. The sagas of kings, bishops, contemporary sagas have their own time frame. Most were written down between 1190 and 1320, sometimes existing as oral traditions long before, others are pure fiction, and for some we do know the sources: the author of King Sverrir's saga had met the king and used him as a source.
While sagas are generally anonymous, a distinctive literary movement in the 14th century involves sagas, mostly on religious topics, with identifiable authors and a distinctive Latinate style. Associated with Iceland's northern diocese of Hólar, this movement is known as the North Icelandic Benedictine School ( Norðlenski Benediktskólinn).
The vast majority of texts referred to today as "sagas" were composed in Iceland. One exception is Þiðreks saga, translated/composed in Norway; another is Hjalmars och Hramers saga, a post-medieval forgery composed in Sweden. While the term saga is usually associated with medieval texts, sagas — particularly in the legendary and chivalric saga genres — continued to be composed in Iceland on the pattern of medieval texts into the nineteenth century.Matthew James Driscoll, The Unwashed Children of Eve: The Production, Dissemination and Reception of Popular Literature in Post-Reformation Iceland (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik Press, 1997).
Early, nationalist historians argued that the ethnic characteristics of the Icelanders were conducive to a literary culture, but these types of explanations have fallen out of favor with academics in modern times. It has also been proposed that the Icelandic settlers were so prolific at writing in order to capture their settler history. Historian Gunnar Karlsson does not find that explanation reasonable though, given that other settler communities have not been as prolific as the early Icelanders were.
Pragmatic explanations were once also favoured: it has been argued that a combination of readily available parchment (due to extensive cattle farming and the necessity of culling before winter) and long winters encouraged Icelanders to take up writing.
More recently, Icelandic saga-production has been seen as motivated more by social and political factors.
The unique nature of the political system of the Icelandic Commonwealth created incentives for aristocrats to produce literature, offering a way for chieftains to create and maintain social differentiation between them and the rest of the population. Gunnar Karlsson and Jesse Byock argued that the Icelanders wrote the Sagas as a way to establish commonly agreed norms and rules in the decentralized Icelandic Commonwealth by documenting past feuds, while Iceland's peripheral location put it out of reach of the continental kings of Europe and that those kings could therefore not ban subversive forms of literature. Because new principalities lacked internal cohesion, a leader typically produced Sagas "to create or enhance amongst his subjects or followers a feeling of solidarity and common identity by emphasizing their common history and legends". Leaders from old and established principalities did not produce any Sagas, as they were already cohesive political units.
Later (late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century) saga-writing was motivated by the desire of the Icelandic aristocracy to maintain or reconnect links with the Nordic countries by tracing the ancestry of Icelandic aristocrats to well-known kings and heroes to which the contemporary Nordic kings could also trace their origins.
A list, intended to be comprehensive, of translations of Icelandic sagas is provided by the National Library of Iceland's Bibliography of Saga Translations.
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