Introduction

The Sagas of Icelanders have also been known, rather imprecisely, as Icelandic Family Sagas. They constitute the best-known grouping within the richly diverse range of Icelandic Sagas (see the separate essay Icelandic Sagas in The Literary Encyclopedia). There are some forty in total (this being, for instance, the number translated in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 1997). Collectively, they cover events running from the mid ninth century to the mid eleventh and located in all inhabited parts of Iceland (and some uninhabited), though saga-writing flourished above all in the West and North. Individual sagas vary in length from the compact Saga of Thorstein the White / Þorsteins saga hvíta and The Saga of the Greenlanders / Grænlendinga saga which occupy 8 and 13 pages

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Citation: Whaley, Diana. "Sagas of Icelanders [The Icelandic Family Sagas]". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 April 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1275, accessed 21 November 2024.]