The Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur), often called the family sagas, are around forty anonymous prose narratives written down in the 13th and 14th centuries about families who lived in Iceland between roughly 870 and 1030. A farmer kills a neighbour because the neighbour's farmhand rode his horse; thirty pages later four families are at war and two men are outlaws. Nobody comments, nobody tells you whom to admire. Below you will find the major sagas with their plots, the debate over their origins, their value as history, and advice on where to begin.
The word saga comes from the Old Norse verb segja, "to say", and simply means "something said", a story. In medieval Iceland it was a broad label: a saga could be the history of a king, the life of a saint or a translated French romance. The Sagas of Icelanders form a distinct group within that mass of writing. They are set in Iceland (with excursions to Norway, the British Isles, Greenland and beyond), their heroes are Icelandic farmers, chieftains and seafarers, and their action takes place in what scholars call the Saga Age.
That Saga Age runs from the settlement of Iceland, which began around 870, to a generation or so after the conversion to Christianity around the year 1000 – roughly to 1030. The settlement itself is well dated: beneath the oldest traces of human activity lies a layer of volcanic ash that geologists call the "Settlement Layer" and date to about 871, give or take two years. According to the Icelandic tradition, the Althing, the national assembly at Þingvellir, first met around 930. We have described how this society of chieftains, assemblies and quarters worked in our articles on the Icelanders and on Viking law and the Thing.
How many sagas of Icelanders are there? That depends on how strictly you count. The usual figure is "about forty"; broader counts that include late and fairy-tale-like texts come close to fifty. On top of that come the þættir (singular þáttr, literally "strand" or "thread"): short tales of a few pages, often about an Icelander at the court of a Norwegian king, usually preserved as insertions in the kings' sagas. Some of them are among the finest things the genre produced.
One fact surprises almost every new reader: not a single author of an Icelandic family saga is known by name. There are guesses, some of them well argued, but no signature.
You can recognise a family saga within a few paragraphs. It narrates from the outside. You almost never learn directly what a character thinks or feels; you learn what he does, what he says and how he looks while saying it. Silence often speaks louder than any speech.
The sagas are laconic to the point of rudeness. Understatement – litotes, if you like the technical term – is their favourite device. In Grettis saga, Grettir's brother Atli is run through by a spear at his own front door; his last words amount to: "Broad spears are in fashion these days" (our own rendering). Fear, grief and love are pushed into verse or left out altogether. That does not make the texts cold. Their force comes precisely from what remains unsaid.
They almost always start with ancestry. Who was the father, who the grandfather, where did the family come from, whom did they marry. This is where many modern readers give up. For a medieval audience it was the key to everything: kinship decided who was entitled, and obliged, to take revenge, who paid compensation and who stood by whom in court.
And they are built like lawsuits. The pattern repeats in endless variations: an insult or a quarrel over grazing, inheritance or marriage; a killing; an attempt at settlement through compensation; a case at the assembly; a broken settlement; revenge; a new settlement. The central values are honour, law (lǫg) and balance. Whoever swallowed an insult lost standing; whoever took revenge too harshly lost support. The historian Jesse Byock reads the sagas as portraits of a feud system that regulated violence rather than unleashing it. For the courts and procedures behind all this, see our article on the Thing.
Woven into the prose are stanzas in skaldic metre, put into the mouths of the characters: occasional verses (lausavísur), laments, insults. Some of these verses are probably much older than the prose around them, others were clearly composed by the saga writer. Telling them apart is one of the hardest problems in the field. For the poetic tradition these verses belong to, see our article on the Edda.
To place the family sagas on the shelf: kings' sagas such as Heimskringla, usually attributed to Snorri Sturluson, tell of Norwegian and Danish rulers. Legendary sagas such as Völsunga saga are set before the settlement of Iceland, in a world of heroes and monsters. Contemporary sagas such as the Sturlunga saga compilation describe the 12th and 13th centuries – exactly the civil war between the great families during which the family sagas were written, and which ended in 1262–1264 with Iceland's submission to the Norwegian crown. Add to these the bishops' sagas and the chivalric sagas modelled on French and English romance.
This is where everything turns. The events in the sagas end around 1030. The texts themselves were written mostly between about 1200 and 1350, the majority in the 13th century, a few even later. Six to ten generations lie in between.
Iceland had changed in that time. Christianity had been adopted at the Althing around 1000; there were two bishoprics, monasteries and schools. People wrote on parchment – first laws and saints' lives, then history. Between about 1122 and 1133 the priest Ari Þorgilsson wrote the Íslendingabók, the oldest surviving history of Iceland. The Landnámabók, the "Book of Settlements" with some 400 settlers and their farms, survives in versions from the 13th and 14th centuries. Both are as old as or older than the earliest sagas and share many names and pedigrees with them.
No saga states when it was written. Scholars infer dates from language, allusions to contemporary events, dependence on other texts and the age of the manuscripts. The dates in the table below are therefore estimates, and for several sagas the experts disagree by half a century.
Are the sagas oral tradition written down, or are they literature? Scholars argued about this for a century.
The free-prose theory held that the sagas had been told orally for generations, in a form already very close to the later text, and that the 13th-century scribe essentially recorded what he heard. Its best-known champions were the Swiss philologist Andreas Heusler and, in Norway, the folklorist Knut Liestøl.
The book-prose theory held that the sagas are the works of individual authors, who built a work of art – with structure, motifs and purpose – out of oral stories, genealogies, legal knowledge, local lore and older books. This view was developed above all in Iceland, by Björn M. Ólsen, Sigurður Nordal and Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, which is why it is often called the "Icelandic school".
The most famous blow was struck by Sigurður Nordal in 1940 with a slim study called Hrafnkatla, on Hrafnkels saga. He showed that the saga contradicts the Landnámabók on persons and family ties and that its geography does not fit the real landscape of eastern Iceland. His conclusion: at its core, this saga is a 13th-century invention, not the memory of real events. For decades afterwards, pure free-prose theory was considered dead.
Since the 1980s the picture has shifted again. Carol Clover coined the term "immanent saga", and Gísli Sigurðsson has shown that saga writers assumed their audience already had a broad oral knowledge of people, places and families, which the texts merely touch on – hence the many cross-references between sagas that do not visibly copy from each other. Today research sits in the middle: oral storytelling supplied the material, and the surviving sagas are deliberately crafted literature. What remains open is how much historical substance could survive ten generations of telling – and that cannot be measured, because nobody has the oral version.
Here are the sagas worth knowing, roughly in order of fame.
Njáls saga is the longest and most celebrated of them all, and it survives in more manuscripts than any other family saga. It tells of the friendship between the wise lawyer Njáll and the hero Gunnarr of Hlíðarendi, which survives a murderous feud between their wives, of Gunnarr's last stand, and of the burning of Njáll's farm Bergþórshvoll with Njáll and his family inside. Large parts of it are a handbook of legal procedure – more in our article on Njáls saga.
Egils saga follows the warrior-poet Egill Skallagrímsson, whose family falls out with the Norwegian royal house. Its most famous scene is set in York, where Egill stands before his mortal enemy Eric Bloodaxe and saves his neck with the praise poem Höfuðlausn, "Head-Ransom". Snorri Sturluson has long been suspected as the author, but it cannot be proven.
Laxdæla saga has the strongest women in the genre. It opens with Auðr the Deep-Minded, who came to Iceland as a widow on her own ship, and centres on Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir, her four marriages and the triangle with the foster-brothers Kjartan and Bolli that ends with Kjartan's death. Guðrún's line in old age is famous; in our own rendering: "I was worst to the one I loved most."
Grettis saga is the story of strong, unlucky Grettir Ásmundarson, who wrestles the revenant Glámr, is cursed by him, and survives almost two decades as an outlaw – longer than anyone else, as the saga stresses. He dies on the rock island of Drangey in Skagafjörður. It is considered one of the youngest of the great sagas and blends realism with ghost story and adventure.
Gísla saga Súrssonar is its dark twin. A blood-brotherhood ritual fails, Gísli secretly kills his brother-in-law to avenge his friend Vésteinn, and then lives thirteen years as an outlaw in the Westfjords, haunted by dreams of two dream-women. His wife Auðr stands by him to the end, and when a man tries to buy her betrayal with silver, she hits him in the face with the purse.
Eyrbyggja saga, the saga of the people of Eyrr on the Snæfellsnes peninsula, is the richest source among the sagas for cult, law and daily life. It tells of Þórólfr Mostrarskegg, who follows his high-seat pillars carved with an image of Thor to his new home, of Snorri goði, the slyest politician in the saga world, and of the hauntings at the farm of Fróðá. Its description of a pagan temple, however, is two centuries younger than the time it depicts.
Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða is short, sharp and a classic of scholarship. Hrafnkell has sworn to kill anyone who rides his stallion Freyfaxi, dedicated to the god Freyr. His shepherd does it, Hrafnkell keeps his oath – and loses everything in the lawsuit that follows. What happens next is told without a word of judgement, and readers still argue about it.
The two Vinland sagas, Grænlendinga saga (the Saga of the Greenlanders) and Eiríks saga rauða (Eirik the Red's Saga), tell of the settlement of Greenland by Erik the Red and of the voyages further west. They tell the same story differently: in the Greenlanders' saga Bjarni Herjólfsson sights the land and Leif Eriksson explores it; in Eirik's saga Leif is an accidental discoverer and Þorfinnr Karlsefni and his wife Guðríðr take centre stage. Strictly speaking both are sagas of Icelanders, even though much of the action happens in Greenland and Vinland.
Vatnsdæla saga follows several generations of one family in Vatnsdalur in northern Iceland, starting with the Norwegian Ingimundr the Old, to whom a seeress foretells that he will settle in a land he does not yet know. The saga stresses the moderation and nobility of its heroes, ends with the conversion, and is generally seen as a fairly late, consciously idealising family history.
Kormáks saga is one of the "skald sagas", the sagas about poets. It tells of Kormákr Ögmundarson and his unfulfilled love for Steingerðr. A curse prevents the wedding; she marries other men, he keeps composing. The many stanzas carry the plot. Many scholars consider it one of the oldest family sagas; its complete text has come down to us through Möðruvallabók.
For quick orientation: region means the main setting in Iceland; the date of composition is the usual scholarly estimate and disputed for almost every saga.
| Saga | Plot in brief | Region | Written (est.) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Njáls saga | Njáll and Gunnarr, feud, the burning of Bergþórshvoll | South Iceland (Rangárþing) | c. 1270–1290 |
| Egils saga | Life of the skald Egill, conflict with Norway's kings | West Iceland (Borgarfjörður) | c. 1220–1240 |
| Laxdæla saga | Guðrún, Kjartan and Bolli, love and revenge | West Iceland (Breiðafjörður, Dalir) | c. 1230–1260 |
| Grettis saga | The outlaw Grettir, Glámr, death on Drangey | North Iceland (Miðfjörður, Skagafjörður) | c. 1300–1350 |
| Gísla saga | Blood-brotherhood, secret revenge, thirteen years an outlaw | Westfjords | 13th c., usually mid-century |
| Eyrbyggja saga | Snorri goði, cult, hauntings at Fróðá | Snæfellsnes | c. 1250 |
| Hrafnkels saga | Freyfaxi, lawsuit, fall and return | East Iceland | late 13th c. |
| Grænlendinga saga | Bjarni, Leif, voyages to Vinland | Greenland, Vinland | c. 1200–1230 (disputed) |
| Eiríks saga rauða | Erik the Red, Guðríðr, Karlsefni in Vinland | West Iceland, Greenland, Vinland | mid-13th c. |
| Vatnsdæla saga | Ingimundr the Old and his descendants | North Iceland (Vatnsdalur) | c. 1270–1280 |
| Kormáks saga | The skald Kormákr and Steingerðr | Northwest Iceland (Miðfjörður) | early 13th c. |
Not one original survives. What we read are copies of copies: the oldest vellum fragments from the 13th century, most complete texts from the 14th and 15th, plus a great many paper copies from the early modern period. Icelanders went on copying their sagas, and reading them aloud on winter evenings, well into the 19th century.
The most important compilation is Möðruvallabók (shelfmark AM 132 fol.), written around 1330–1370 and named after the farm Möðruvellir in Eyjafjörður, where it was kept in the 17th century. It contains eleven texts: Njáls saga, Egils saga, Finnboga saga, Bandamanna saga, Kormáks saga, Víga-Glúms saga, Droplaugarsona saga, Ölkofra þáttr, Hallfreðar saga, Laxdæla saga and Fóstbræðra saga. For most of them it is the key witness; the Greenlanders' saga, by contrast, survives in Flateyjarbók and Eirik's saga in Hauksbók. After Egils saga, Möðruvallabók preserves the poem Arinbjarnarkviða, found nowhere else – sadly, much of it is now barely legible because of water damage.
That so much survives is largely thanks to one man. The Icelandic scholar Árni Magnússon (1663–1730), a professor in Copenhagen, spent decades collecting every Icelandic manuscript he could lay hands on, down to scraps recycled in bookbindings. In the great Copenhagen fire of 1728 part of his collection burned, including the saga manuscript Vatnshyrna. Leaves of Heiðarvíga saga were lost together with the only copy; his assistant Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík wrote down the contents from memory, and that retelling still stands in modern editions.
After long negotiations Denmark began returning most of the Icelandic manuscripts in 1971. The first two, the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda and Flateyjarbók, arrived in Reykjavík by ship in April 1971; the last shipments followed in 1997. Today the Árni Magnússon Institute in Reykjavík and the Arnamagnæan Institute in Copenhagen share the collection, which was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2009. You can browse many of the manuscripts page by page on handrit.is.
For hard facts about the Viking Age, the family sagas are awkward witnesses. They put speeches into the mouths of people whose words nobody recorded. They arrange events to suit the drama, double motifs and let dreams and omens steer the plot. And they look at the past from a Christian Iceland torn by 13th-century civil war.
In the 19th century many scholars read the sagas as essentially reliable chronicles; after Nordal the pendulum swung the other way. Today the view is more nuanced. The sagas are valued as sources for mentalities, legal thinking, ideas of honour, social structures and everyday life – at least as 13th-century Icelanders imagined their past. That in itself is a historical fact of great value.
Much can be cross-checked. Pedigrees often appear in Landnámabók and Íslendingabók as well. Archaeology confirms farm sites, building styles, trade goods and burial customs; we have collected the evidence for women's lives in our article on women in the Viking Age. Where saga, older histories and the ground agree, a statement gains weight. Where a saga stands alone, it remains a story.
The standard scholarly edition of the original texts is the series Íslenzk fornrit, published in Reykjavík since 1933, with normalised Old Icelandic text, maps, family trees and long introductions. If you do not read Old Icelandic, you need a translation – and there are plenty.
Many 19th-century English translations are in the public domain and free to read online: George Webbe Dasent's The Story of Burnt Njal (1861) and The Story of Gisli the Outlaw (1866), William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon's Grettis saga (1869), W. C. Green's Egils saga (1893) and Muriel Press's Laxdæla saga (1899). Their English is very much of its time, but they work as a free first taste.
The modern English standard is The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, five volumes edited by Viðar Hreinsson (Reykjavík 1997), from which many of the Penguin paperbacks are drawn. German readers had the Thule series, edited by Felix Niedner in 24 volumes between 1911 and 1930, and since 2011 have a complete new translation: Isländersagas, edited by Klaus Böldl, Andreas Vollmer and Julia Zernack, published by S. Fischer in Frankfurt in four volumes plus a companion volume, timed for Iceland's appearance as guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2011.
A piece of advice from experience: do not start with Njáls saga. It is magnificent, but it has hundreds of characters, and the names will flatten you before the story gets going. Try this order instead:
Practical tips: read the introduction of your edition, keep the family tree at hand, and feel free to skim the genealogies at the start on a first reading – the characters who matter will come back. If the myths of the gods appeal to you more than farmers' feuds, the Edda is the better way in.
What we love about these texts is that they never explain their characters. You see what someone does, and you have to decide for yourself what you make of it. That is exactly why people are still reading them eight hundred years later.
How many Icelandic sagas are there? Depending on how you count, about 40 to nearly 50 sagas of Icelanders, plus many short tales called þættir. The Complete Sagas of Icelanders (1997) gathers around fifty sagas and a similar number of tales.
When were the Icelandic sagas written? Mostly in the 13th and early 14th centuries, some 200 to 300 years after the events they describe, which fall between about 870 and 1030. The authors are unknown.
What is the most famous Icelandic saga? Njáls saga, followed by Egils saga and Laxdæla saga. Thanks to Leif Eriksson, the Vinland sagas are also widely known.
Are the Icelandic sagas true? They are neither pure fiction nor reliable history. People, places and the general setting can often be confirmed, while dialogue, detail and many plot lines are literary creations.
What is the best English translation of the sagas? The Complete Sagas of Icelanders (1997) and the Penguin paperbacks drawn from it are the modern standard; the Victorian translations by Dasent, Morris and others are free online but old-fashioned.
For courage. For remembrance. For legends that live on.
Njáls saga · Egill Skallagrímsson · Snorri Sturluson · The Icelanders · Aud the Deep-Minded · Erik the Red.
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