Dating The Sagas

The Family Sagas, also known as the Sagas of Icelanders, are anonymous Icelandic tales that are notoriously difficult to date due to their oral and scribal transmission. This book tackles the challenges of pinpointing the origins of these sagas and the genre itself.

Exploring the dating of Iceland's early saga literature and its significance in literary history.

The Icelandic Family Sagas, or Sagas about early Icelanders, represent a unique genre composed of anonymous works. Dating these sagas is complicated because they were shaped through both oral storytelling and later manuscript copying. The contributors to this volume engage with these methodological challenges, offering insights into the dating of individual sagas as well as the entire genre.

The focus is on a pivotal era in Icelandic literary history, particularly the emergence of several new written genres during the thirteenth century. Among these, the Sagas about early Icelanders stand out as the most significant. The essays collected here demonstrate that understanding when this genre and its individual sagas began is key to grasping the development of Icelandic literary history in the thirteenth century.