An essential resource for exploring the early literary genre of Icelandic saga narratives
Combining an accessible approach with innovative scholarship, An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders
provides up-to-date perspectives on a unique medieval literary genre
that has fascinated the English-speaking world for more than two
centuries. Carl Phelpstead draws on historical context, contemporary
theory, and close reading to deepen our understanding of Icelandic saga
narratives about the island’s early history.
Phelpstead
explores the origins and cultural setting of the genre, demonstrating
the rich variety of oral and written source traditions that writers drew
on to produce the sagas. He provides fresh, theoretically informed
discussions of major themes such as national identity, gender and
sexuality, and nature and the supernatural, relating the Old
Norse-Icelandic texts to questions addressed by postcolonial studies,
feminist and queer theory, and ecocriticism. He then presents readings
of select individual sagas, pointing out how the genre’s various source
traditions and thematic concerns interact.
Including an
overview of the history of English translations that shows how they
have been stimulated and shaped by ideas about identity, and featuring a
glossary of critical terms, this book is an essential resource for
students of the literary form.
A
volume in the series New Perspectives on Medieval Literature: Authors
and Traditions, edited by R. Barton Palmer and Tison Pugh
