Raven's Top Five Must-Read Icelandic Sagas

[Raven]

The Top 5 Must-Read Icelandic Sagas

Ah, the Icelandic Sagas, treasures of medieval literature. While mainland Europe was preoccupied with rhyme and verse, The Icelanders preserved gritty, semi-historical, semi-fantastical mini-novels. They are our best glimpse into the lives of the vikings and the explorations of Vinland (the New World). They're also just plain fun. There is quite a canon of sagas to choose from, but here are the top 5 must read Icelandic Sagas.

1. Grettir's Saga.
This is an outlaw's tale. Grettir is essentially the robin-hood of Iceland in some ways, with perhaps more outright violence, trolls, and less of that Robin Hood flare for being such an upstanding-citizen-outlaw. Grettir, one of the most powerful warriors, almost manages to become a legitimate resident of Iceland again, all while overpowering and escaping all who tried to hunt him down and beating the more supernatural aspects of the Saga landscape — trolls. This is one of the more fantastical of the sagas, and just a plain good bit of storytelling.

2. Egil's Saga.
Egil's Saga is of interest both as a well-told tale, an interesting character study of a rough and tumble murderous viking poet, and full of historical information (one battle wherein Egil fights can be cross-checked to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, for example). Egil is one of the early settlers of Iceland, and the Saga begins with his family history in Norway, his flight to Iceland, and all his rampages in the region of the North Sea. A practically unstoppable fighter and generally belligerent man willing to go head-to-head against the will of kings, Egil's adventures are in some ways the standard of the Icelandic viking ethos of independence, ruggedness, and bloody-mindedness.

3. The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal.
This family saga is perhaps most notable because of its remarkably interesting accounts of the coming of Christianity to Iceland, foretold in the story by one of its most sympathetic main characters (this is not to say it is not full of adventure). This is a story of an Iceland meeting a new day and doing it with all the rough edges of the vikings. One more interesting scene depicts a Christian winning souls by overcoming evil berserkers.

4. Njall's Saga.
Spoiler Alert: people get burned. Njall's Saga is considered a classic, mostly because of its dealing with the laws and social norms of medieval Iceland. The Icelanders were a people, oddly enough, highly interested in laws and they had a whole system that circled around the Althing, the main law-meeting of the people of Iceland. In this saga, some brutal stuff goes down, and the ramifications must be worked out in the Icelandic ways . . .

5. Eirik the Red's Saga.
It is fairly widely known today that the Norse people arrived in North America long before Columbus. This saga recounts the activities of Nordic explorers in North America. This saga displays well the confusion of two unfamiliar cultures encountering each other for the first time. At first, encounters were peaceful, but finally, fighting broke out, replete with some unusual behavior (at one point, a pregnant woman scares away tribal warriors with quite a display of intimidation). This is the shortest saga on the list, but it is dense with interest.