When discussing medieval literature

in terms of genre, we are

faced with several problems.
The most obvious one is the fact
that our terminology and overall understanding
of literary genres is a modern construct.
This certainly applies to the sagas.
Not all the terms we now use for the
various types of sagas are present in
the medieval manuscripts themselves.
By classifying a saga as a particular genre,
we are often employing criteria that
may have seemed foreign to the original audience.
The taxonomy of Icelandic prose literature
is mainly based on two parameters:
Subject matter and internal chronology.
In other words, when we classify a saga,
we normally look at what the saga is about,
and when the events it describes happen.
Throughout this course,
we will see a number of genres
from medieval Iceland. I want to explain
the most important ones now and illustrate
the main differences between them.
First of all, there are the Íslendingasögur,
the sagas of Icelanders. It’s this category
that is our main focus in the current course,
and the three sagas we use as our point
of reference are all Sagas of Icelanders.
By comparing the three, we come to
understand that despite an undeniable
unity of design, in terms of plot
and types of characters,
the Íslendingasögur as a genre
is surprisingly diverse.
Eyrbyggja saga is the regional history
of a certain district, and the place by
itself is what keeps the storyline together.
It has no real protagonist and the
structure is highly episodic.
Njáls saga is different;
it has a more explicit narrative thread
and centres around the same characters throughout.
Grettis saga has a single protagonist
and could even be called a biography.
But on the whole, Sagas of Icelanders
happen mostly in Iceland, with occasional trips abroad,
and the characters are mainly historical
individuals who lived in the country.
The events are set between the
settlement of Iceland, which began in the 870s,
and the country’s conversion to Christianity,
or a few decades after it.
The conversion happened around the year 1000 AD.
Our next category are saint’s lives,
stories of holy men and women,
both those translated from Latin and
other foreign languages and those
composed originally in Icelandic.
This is a fundamental genre in any European
literature during medieval times, and it is
presumably the first type of prose
literature introduced in Iceland.
The oldest saint’s lives in Icelandic
are composed in the early 12th century,
long before any of the Sagas of
Icelanders assumed a written form.
The third literary genre are the
legendary sagas, fornaldarsögur.
The Icelandic term literally
means ‘sagas from Antiquity’,
since they describe events that are
set in the northern world before
the settlement of Iceland.
Here we find stories of quasi-mythical heroes,
warriors who are endowed with superhuman qualities,
who spend their days fighting
monsters and giants and live for hundreds of years.
The legendary sagas are much more
stagey and fanciful than any other saga type.
Some of them have strong ties to the
Poetic Edda and cover the same ground to a degree.
To take one example, Völsunga saga,
one of the legendary sagas,
recounts events from the German Nibelungenlied,
material that is also reported in several Eddic poems.
The fourth saga type are the chivalric sagas,
riddarasögur. These sagas are both
indigenous and translated,
and they describe the adventures of
distinguished European knights and princesses,
kings and queens. King Arthur and his men
often take precedence in these sagas,
as do Tristan and Isolde,
Alexander the Great and Charlemagne.
The chivalric sagas were Iceland’s window
into the world of the European romances,
and they were highly celebrated
in the 14th and 15th centuries.
There are more types of sagas,
but for the context of this course
we will stick to these four.
Numerous theories have been attempted
with the intention of explaining the
causal and temporal relationship between
the various literary genres,
but the current scholarly consensus
is that they developed side by side.
One genre did not simply substitute another,
even if changes in the literary taste
make some types of sagas more prominent
than others at a given period of time.
It is a dynamic process where all the
constituents influence each other.
Even if each genre has its specific
set of narrative motifs and traditions,
influence easily travels between them.