Saga
The Old Norse word saga means 'story', 'tale' or 'history' and normally refers specifically to the epic prose narratives written mainly in Iceland between the 12th- and 15th centuries CE, covering the country's history as well as Scandinavia's legendary past. A few sagas were also written in Norway but in either country their usually anonymous writers shaped their stories in high-quality, nuanced prose, leading the saga to now be considered one of the prime vernacular literary genres of Medieval Europe. Poetry is generally included, too, which helps point out the influence older, oral traditions of storytelling are thought to have had on the saga's development.
Although the heyday of Old Norse saga composition lay in the 13th century CE, the tales often dive back through the ages into the times of ancestors, heroes and legendary kings, spanning from prehistory through the Viking Age (c. 790-1100 CE) – including the settlement of Iceland – to the writers' own times. History and fiction are often mixed in a sort of Gordian knot that is hard to disentangle, and the stories have as their playground not just Iceland but also Scandinavia, the British Isles, the North Atlantic (including Greenland and North America), the Mediterranean, Russia and the Middle East.
In our present day sagas are not only perfectly readable and enjoyable but also still feel relatable, probably due to the fact that they focus on the everyday life of everyday people. Wealthy farmers, for instance, get tangled up in such things as feuds, go on exciting and often character-shaping journeys, or experience a variety of down-to-earth problems from within the predominantly agricultural society they are a part of.
The Old Norse sagas can be arranged into the following main subgenres, each with their own favourite topics and features, which are frequently referred to by their Old Norse name by scholars:
Fornaldarsögur – 'Legendary sagas', 'Sagas of ancient time' or 'Mythical-heroic sagas'
Riddarasögur – 'Sagas of knights'
Konungasögur – 'Kings' sagas'
Íslendingasögur – 'Sagas of Icelanders' or 'Family sagas'
Samtíðarsögur – 'Contemporary sagas'
Origins of the saga
The quest for the origins of the Old Norse saga takes us beyond the realm of the tangible collections of parchment that prevail from the 13th century CE onward and into a murkier, harder-to-trace past. Before 1250 CE, only a few sagas can be proved to have existed in writing – Egils Saga, telling of the life of the Viking Age poet Egill Skallagrímsson, is one of them – and these fragments allow us to pin down the (late?) 12th century CE as the likely beginning of the textualisation process. From this time onwards, saga composition probably became an exclusively Icelandic phenomenon, and it is from 1350 CE and beyond that the majority of our extant manuscripts originate.
As for what exactly prompted the process or where the stories first came from, we can only hazard educated guesses. In the early 20th century CE, Swiss scholar Andreas Heusler came up with two alternatives that long divided the academic community: on the one hand, the 'freeprose theory' suggested the sagas were essentially oral texts handed down through generations before being recorded in writing in the Middle Ages, while on the other hand, the 'bookprose theory' held that the sagas were created in the Middle Ages, although partially based on oral sources. Today, neither is deemed sufficiently accurate, but the valid takeaway is their shared emphasis on the existence of an oral tradition that fed into the later, written one – something present-day scholars actually agree on.
This oral tradition hails back at least to the Viking Age, when poetry was often performed for the elite. As a lot of the sagas take place on a Viking Age stage, too, it is not hard to envisage some Viking Age stories surviving orally until medieval authors picked up on them and shaped them into their own written versions. The Icelandic scholar Gísli Sigurðsson even explains that 'oral traditions continued to feed into written ones throughout the period of Icelandic saga composition.' (Clunies Ross, 47-48). Although Iceland was already Christian by this time, Icelandic (Old Norse) was the favoured written language and this also goes for the sagas. This love for the vernacular ties in with a broader Western European context, too: from the 12th-14th centuries CE, a vigorous textual, vernacular culture flourished there, and its courtly romances and other works may well have reached Scandinavia, perhaps soliciting a response or impacting saga composition.
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