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The Sagas Of The Icelanders edited by Ornolfur Thorsson. New York. 2000. Viking Press. Preface by Jane Smiley. Introduction by Robert Kellogg. Translated from the Icelandic by Various Translators. keywords: Iceland Sagas Norse Scandinavia History Literature. 782 pages. Jacket design by Robin Rosenthal. Jacket art courtesy of The Granger Collection. 0670889903. April 2000.
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FROM THE PUBLISHER - 'The Icelandic sagas remain one of the great marvels of world literature, a great human achievement. We can see how much of our Western modern tradition of narrative realism begins with them. But we can also see that the subsequent seven centuries have produced no other work so timelessly up-to-date, nothing with such a supreme, undistorted sense of actuality, nothing so tempered and tested by such a formidable seriousness of life.' - TED HUGHES. In Iceland, the age of the Viking Presss is also known as the Saga Age. 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 around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured farther west - to Greenland and, ultimately, the coast of North America itself. The Sagas are not typical heroic literature, but rather tales of flesh-and-blood people burdened with a heroic legacy - the Viking Press traditions of honor and blood vengeance. Deeply rooted in the real world of their day, concise and straightforward in style, the Sagas explore perennial human problems: love and hate, fate and freedom, crime and punishment, travel and exile. For the modern reader, it is the psychological intensity and depth of the characters as much as the codes of honor and ethics that capture the imagination. Though strong men dominate the Saga stage, it is often clever and beautiful women who manipulate the course of events behind the scenes. Among the colorful cast of women found throughout the Sagas, perhaps none is more intriguing than Gudrid Thorbjardottir. Born in Iceland, married in Greenland, Gudrid sailed to Vinland, where she bore a son - the first person of European ancestry born in North America. A formidable, independent-minded spirit, Gudrid was the most widely traveled woman in the world in her day - and would remain so for another five hundred years. The eleven Sagas and six shorter tales in this volume recount the adventures of the settlers who first came from Norway to Iceland's shores and how they founded a unique commonwealth of chieftains with no king in this brave new world of towering mountains and lonely fjords. The celebrated 'Vinland Sagas' began a new chapter in world history, telling of Leif Eiriksson's pioneering voyage to the New World; these sagas contain the oldest descriptions of the North American continent and mark the first contact between Europeans and Native Americans. This new Viking Press edition of THE SAGAS OF ICELANDERS, commemorating the thousandth anniversary of Leif Eiriksson's historic voyage, is drawn from the first English translation of the entire corpus of the Sagas, together with the forty-nine connected tales - a five-volume set published by Leifur Eiriksson Publishing, Iceland. Thirty translators were selected for this monumental project, including leading international scholars from seven countries. JANE SMILEY, whose preface opens this new selection of the Sagas, is the author of many novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning A THOUSAND ACRES and THE GREENLANDERS.
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