(22)Demon, killer and drunkard, poet, lawyer and farmer: Egil is on eof the most individual and paradoxical characters to emerge from the Icelandic sagas.
(56)Commemorating the 1000th anniversary of Leif Eriksson's pioneering voyage to the New World, Viking will proudly publish a major new translation of the very greatest of the Icelanders' Sagas. A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world's greatest literary treasures--as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare. Set during the Viking Age, these epic stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norsemen and Norsewomen who first settled Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured farther west--to Greenland and, ultimately, the coast of North America.
The Sagas of Icelanders collects a dozen of the most outstanding Sagas, including the celebrated "Vinland Sagas," which contain the oldest descriptions of the North American continent. Much more than rousing adventure narratives, though, the Sagas introduce modern readers to a now-vanished world separated from ours by a thousand years--a richly imagined and psychologically complex world, comparable in realistic effect with the novelistic genius of Austen or Dickens.
The publication of these volumes is a reminder that the Icelandic Sagas can hold their own with the literature of the Mediterranean." ---Seamus Heaney, Nobel Laureate, 1995
The Icelandic Sagas remain one of the great marvels of world literature, a great human achievement."--Ted Hughes
(16)Written in the thirteenth century, Njal's Saga is a story that explores perennial human problems-from failed marriages to divided loyalties, from the law's inability to curb human passions to the terrible consequences when decent men and women are swept up in a tide of violence beyond their control. It is populated by memorable and complex characters like Gunnar of Hlidarendi, a powerful warrior with an aversion to killing, and the not-so-villainous Mord Valgardsson. Full of dreams, strange prophecies, violent power struggles, and fragile peace agreements, Njal's Saga tells the compelling story of a fifty-year blood feud that, despite its distance from us in time and place, is driven by passions familiar to us all. This Penguin Classics edition includes an introduction, chronology, index of characters, plot summary, explanatory notes, maps, and suggestions for further reading.
