noun
definition
An Old Norse (Icelandic) prose narrative, especially one dealing with family or social histories and legends.
definition
Something with the qualities of such a saga; an epic, a long story.
Examples of sagas in a Sentence
It was Ablabius, apparently, who had first used the Gothic sagas (prisca carmina); it was he who had constructed the stem of the Amals.
The accounts of naval battles in the sagas show us, too, that this was the case.
Icelandic literature consists mainly of the so-called "sagas," or prose narratives, and is rich in historical lore.
Sagas exist showing all these phases, some primitive and rough, some refined and beautified, some diluted and weakened, according as their copyists have been faithful, artistic or foolish; for the first generation of MSS.
The author was an unnamed Austrian poet, but the story itself belongs to the cycle of sagas, which originated on the shores of the North Sea.
A list of its birds, with some notes, bibliographical and biological, has been given as an Appendix to Baring-Gould's Iceland, its Scenes and Sagas (8vo, 1862); and Shepherd's North-west Peninsula of Iceland (8vo, 1867) recounts a somewhat profitless expedition made thither expressly for ornithological objects.
Besides complete sagas there are embedded in the Heimskringla numerous small pcettir or episodes, small tales of Icelanders' adventures, often relating to poets and their lives at the kings' courts; one or two of these seem to be fragments of sagas now lost.
The forged Icelandic sagas appear as early as the 13th century.
The best text of Ari's KonungabOk (Ynglinga, and the sagas down to but not including Olaf Tryggvason's) is that of FrisbOk.
Ari also wrote a Book of Icelanders (IslendingabOk, c. 1127), which has perished as a whole, but fragments of it are embedded in many sagas and Kings' Lives; it seems to have been a complete epitome of his earlier works, together with an account of the constitutional history, ecclesiastical and civil, of Iceland.
These works were indebted for their facts to Ari's labours, and to sagas written since Ari's death; but the style and treatment of them are Snorri's own.
The earlier part of it has perished save a fragment Sogu-brot, and citations and paraphrases in Saxo, and the mythical Ragnar Lodbrok's and Gongu-Hrolf's Sagas; the latter part, Lives of Harold Bluetooth and the Kings down to Sveyn II., is still in existence and known as Skioldunga.
When the Norsemen came to Greenland they found various remains indicating, as the old sagas say, that there had been people of a similar kind as those they met with in Vinland, in America, whom they called Skraeling (the meaning of the word is uncertain, it means possibly weak people); but the sagas do not report that they actually met the natives then.
He attended lectures on grammar, and his favourite work was St Augustine's De civitate Dei, He caused Frankish sagas to be collected, began a grammar of his native tongue, and spent some of his last hours in correcting a text of the Vulgate.
Of these we may mention LOgsogumannatal og LOgmanna a Islandi (" Speakers of the Law and Law-men in Iceland"); his edition of Landneima and other sagas in Islendinga SOgur, i.
But the Greenland colony was obscure, the country was believed to form part of Europe, and the records of the farther explorations were contained in sagas which were only rediscovered by modern scholarship. Throughout the middle ages, legendary tales of mythical lands lying in the western ocean - the Isle of St Brandan, of Brazil and Antilia - had been handed down.
He is frequently introduced in legendary sagas, generally in disguise, imparting secret instructions to his favourites or presenting them with weapons by which victory is assured.
Such in particular were the Greek Isles of the Blest, or Fortunate Islands, the Welsh Avalon, the Portuguese Antilia or Isle of Seven Cities, and St Brendan's island, the subject of many sagas in many languages.
After the 6th century cremation seems not to have been common, if we may trust the sagas, but isolated instances occur as late as the 10th century.
A special form of funeral rite peculiar to the North was that of cremation on a ship. Generally the ship was drawn up on land; but occasionally we hear, in legendary sagas, of the burning ship being sent out to sea.
To these must be added a large number of Old Norse writings including the older Edda and the prose Edda (the chief authorities for Northern mythology), Islands Landnamabok and many sagas dealing with the history of families in Iceland (such as Eyrbyggia Saga) or with the lives of Norwegian and other kings, both historical and legendary (in Heimskringla, Fornmanna Sogur and Rafn's Fornaldar Sogur Norr landa).
The poets, and the poetically minded authors of the sagas, who are the only authorities, have told the story with many circumstances of romance.
To the student of the Norse sources, Adam's reference is not so important, as the internal evidence of the sagas is such as to give easy credence to them as records of exploration in regions previously unknown to civilization.
In the case of the Vinland sagas, however, there are two independent narratives of the same events, which clash in the record of details.
This collection of sagas, completed in about 1380, is "the most extensive and most perfect of Icelandic manuscripts," and was sent to Denmark in 1662 as a gift to the king.
The Vinland story was doubtless a cherished family possession, and was put into writing, when writing sagas, instead of telling them, came into fashion.
The "self-sown wheat" of the sagas he identifies as strand wheat, instead of Indian corn, or wild rice, and the mdsur trees as the canoe birch.
At any rate, the incontrovertible facts of the Vinland voyages are that Leif and Thorfinn were historical characters, that they visited, in the early part of the 11th century, some part of the American continent south-west of Greenland, that they found natives whose hostility prevented the founding of a permanent settlement, and that the sagas telling of these things are, on the whole, trustworthy descriptions of actual experience.
In Scandinavia a custom, alluded to in the sagas, of burying the viking in his ship, drawn up on land, and raising a barrow over it, is exemplified by the ship-burials discovered in Norway.
In 1872 appeared Love is Enough, structurally the most elaborate of his poems for its combination of the epic and dramatic spirits; and in the autumn he began to translate the shorter Icelandic sagas, to which his enthusiasm had been directed by two inspiring journeys to Iceland..
The epic mood had possessed Morris very strongly, and, in addition to his work upon the sagas, he had actually finished and (in 1875) published a verse translation of the Aeneid, which is interesting rather for its individuality than for any fidelity to the spirit of the original.
There are similar alternative possibilities with regard to the explanation of the striking resemblances which certain incidents of the adventures with Grendel and the dragon bear to incidents in the narratives of Saxo and the Icelandic sagas.
But there also developed a rather extensive Pahlavi literature, not limited to religious subjects, but containing works in belles letires, modernizations of the old Iranian sagas and native traditions, e.g.
Nor can we deny to the Yashts, in their depiction of the Zoroastrian angels and their presentment of the old sagas, a certain poetic feeling, at times, and a pleasant diction.
Shortly afterwards she married Sweyn, and easily persuaded her warlike husband to unite with Olaf, king of Sweden, against Olaf Trygvessdn, who fell in the famous sea-fight off Svolde (1000) on the west coast of Riigen, after a heroic resistance immortalized by the sagas, whereupon the confederates divided his kingdom between them.
The political life and law of the old days is abundantly illustrated in the sagas (especially Eyrbyggia, Hensa-Thori, Reykdaela, Hrafnkell and Niala), the two collections of law-scrolls (Codex Regius, c. 1235, and Stadarhol's Book, c. 1271), the Libellus, the Liberfragments, and the Landnamabok of Ari, and the Diplomatarium.
The first generations of Icelandic poets resemble in many ways the later troubadours; the books of the kings and the sagas are full of their strange lives.
The Icelandic sagas also comprise much verse which is partly genuine, partly the work of the 12th and 13th century editors.
In Nial's, Gisli's and Droplaug's Sons' Sagas there is good verse of a later poet, and in many sagas worthless rubbish foisted in as ornamental.
Such are Konunga-tal, Hugsvinnsmal (a paraphrase of Cato's Distichs), Merlin's Prophecy (paraphrased from Geoffrey of Monmouth by Gunnlaug the monk), Jomsvikinga-drapa (by Bishop Ketil), and the Islendinga-drapa, which has preserved brief notices of several lost sagas concerning Icelandic worthies, with which Gudmundar-drapa, though of the 14th century, may be also placed.
It is to the west that the best sagas belong; it is to the west that nearly every classic writer whose name we know belongs; and it is precisely in the west that the admixture of Irish blood is greatest.
Taking first the sagas relating to Icelanders, of which some thirty-five or forty remain out of thrice that number, they were first written down between 1140 and 1220, in the generation which succeeded Ari and felt the g impulse his books had given to writing, on separate scrolls, no doubt mainly for the reciter's convenience; they then went through the different phases which such popular compositions have to pass in all lands - editing and compounding (1220-1260), padding and amplifying (1260-1300), and finally collection in large MSS.
We have also complex sagas put together in the 13th century out of the scrolls relating to a given locality, such a group as still exists untouched in Vapnfcrdinga being fused into such a saga as Niala or Laxdeela.
Of later subject are the sagas of Havard and his revenge for his son, murdered by a neighbouring chief (997-1002); of the He15arirgasaga (990-1014), a typical tale of a great blood feud, written in the most primitive prose; of Gunnlaug and Hrafn (Gunnlaugssaga Ormstungu, 980-1008), the rival poets and their ill-starred love.
To the west also belong the three great complex sagas Egla, Eyrbyggia and Laxdcela.
Of the north there are the sagas of Kormak (930-960), most primitive of all, a tale of a wild poet's love and feuds, containing many notices of the heathen times; of Vatzdeelasaga (890-980), relating to the settlement and the chief family in Waterdale; of Hallfred the poet (996-1014), narrating his fortune at King Olaf's court, his love affairs in Iceland, and finally his death and burial at Iona; of Reyk -deela (990), which preserves the lives of Askell and his son Viga-Skuti; of Svarf-deela (980-990), a cruel, coarse story of the old days, with some good scenes in it, unfortunately imperfect, chapters I-10 being forged; of VigaGlum (970-990), a fine story of a heathen hero, brave, crafty and cruel.
To the north also belong the sagas of Gretti the Strong (Ioio-1031), the life and death of the most famous of Icelandic outlaws, the real story of whose career is mixed up with the mythical adventures of Beowulf, here put down to Gretti, and with late romantic episodes and fabulous folk-tales (Dr Vigfusson would ascribe the best parts of this saga to Sturla; its last editor, whose additions would be better away, must have touched it up about 1300), and the stories of the Ljosvetningasaga (1009-1060).
The Banda-manna saga (1050-1060), the only comedy among the sagas, is also a northern tale; it relates the struggles of a plebeian who gets a chieftancy against the old families of the neighbourhood, whom he successfully outwits; Ol-kofra pattr is a later imitation of it in the same humorous strain.
The sagas of the north are rougher and coarser than those of the west, but have a good deal of individual character.
The sagas of the south are either lost or absorbed in that of Nial (970-1014), a long and complex story into which are woven the tales of Gunnar Nial, and parts of others, as Brian Boroimhe, Hall o' Side, &c. It is, whether we look at style, contents or legal and historical weight, the foremost of all sagas.