Sagas of Warrior-Poets

Book Description
Lovers, poets, and dragon-slaying heroes populate the gripping Icelandic sagas included in this collection. Part of Penguin Classics' new eight-volume Icelandic Saga collection, this volume includes stories that were composed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and are set more than two hundred years earlier-a time when the old Viking ethos of honor and heroic adventure merged with new ideas of romantic infatuation. Set in the farmsteads of Viking-age Iceland, each of these sagas features poet heroes, complex love triangles, and travels to foreign lands. In her informative introduction, Diana Whaley highlights these important themes and reveals how the authors used these tales to entertain, to preserve and shape traditions about the past, and to explore vital social issues.

About the Author
Diana Whaley is a reader in medieval studies at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne.


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"All the Icelandic sagas portray a world well aware of the power of words: to praise, to blame, to curse and to taunt. Yet these five stories are unusual in putting a skald, or poet, centre stage and building the plot around his travels to seek fame, his doomed love for a married woman and his hostilities against her menfolk." Although the mainly thirteenth-century authors drew on semi-historical traditions about people and events from over two centuries before, they portrayed vivid and enduring scenes of everyday life in the farmsteads of windswept Iceland - making hay, hunting seals, rounding up sheep and struggling through blizzards. Most of the poet-heroes are notably difficult characters, whose restless energy threatens the peace of their communities, and whose own faults, as much as fate, bar them from happiness. Full of fights, invective and voyaging, these sagas also deploy their terse prose and intricate verse to explore human motive and behaviour in non-aristocratic society, and as such they are almost unique in the medieval literature of Europe.


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