saga
saga,an Old Norse word meaning ‘story’, applied to narrative compositions from Iceland and Norway in the Middle Ages. There are three main types of saga: family sagas, dealing with the first settlers of Iceland and their descendants; kings’ sagas, historical works about the kings of Norway; and legendary or heroic sagas, fantastic adventure stories about legendary heroes. The family sagas and the kings’ sagas share an elegant, laconic style, notable for its air of detached objectivity. This led early scholars to suppose that the family sagas were reliably historical, being based almost wholly on oral traditions from an earlier period; but modern critics see these works as literary fictions with some historical basis. The most celebrated of the family sagas is Njáls saga, a long but tightly structured narrative about Gunnarr, a brave and worthy man who marries the beautiful but morally flawed Hallgerr; she sets in motion a series of feuds...
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