Saga, << SAH guh, >> is the name given to a large body of literature written in Iceland between the 1100’s and the 1300’s. The word saga is related to the Icelandic verb meaning “to say” or “to tell.”
There are many kinds of sagas. The earliest sagas were biographies of Icelandic bishops and Norwegian kings. The greatest achievement in this early historical writing was a complete history of the Norwegian kings composed by Snorri Sturluson in the 1200’s.
The classic sagas were composed in the 1200’s. These sagas are usually known in English as Icelandic Family Sagas and in Icelandic as Sagas of Icelanders. They are anonymous and vary in length from brief stories to the equivalent of full-length novels. Scholars once believed these sagas were transmitted orally from generation to generation until scribes wrote them down in the 1200’s. But most scholars now believe the sagas were conscious artistic creations, based on oral and written tradition.
The sagas were composed during a period of civil war and social decline. They glorified the moral and social codes of a “golden age” that occurred between 850 and 1050 during the early settlement of Iceland. They are tales of legal disputes and blood vengeance, and provide a picture of social and cultural conditions at that time. The longest and finest of the classic sagas is Njal’s Saga, a tale of honor, death, and vengeance.
During the 1200’s, the European literature of chivalry began to influence Icelandic writers. Sagas became more romantic and fantastic. By the early 1300’s, the nature of sagas had completely changed. These later sagas described the adventures of many traditional Germanic heroes such as Sigurd the Dragon Slayer and Rollo. Generally, critics consider these sagas inferior to the earlier ones.
