The Sagas of Icelanders [B2118]

2001 HCDJ Viking Penguin new translation edition, in nice clean condition. In Iceland, the age of the Vikings is also known as the Saga Age. A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world's great literary treasures - as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare. Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled in Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured farther west to Greenland and, ultimately, North America. Sailing as far from the archetypal heroic adventure as the long ships did from home, the Sagas are written with psychological intensity, peopled by characters with depth, and explore perennial human issues like love, hate, fate and freedom. In this volume, Penguin has drawn upon the newly translated and edited 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.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "It was so bittersweet to close this book up after falling in love with the brutal but beautiful medieval-Scandinavian culture."; "Timeless and magnificent, a collection of some of the earliest prose literature tales to come out of northwestern Europe. They brilliantly transport back to that time and let you live and breathe as a people from 1000 years ago."; "This 700+ page book is an undertaking but definitely worth reading! Extremely interesting sagas (tales) from the Viking era in and around Iceland. It is fascinating to read about their arrival in Greenland and then North-America, 500 years before Columbus, apparently the oldest and first account of encounters between Europeans and Native Americans. The stories and characters have great depth and it is a pity that these sagas are not as well known as other European medieval literature."; "This was the book that really got me interested in Norse sagas. I liked it so much I decided to read every other Icelandic saga that I could get my hands on."