Saga

Icelandic sagas are based on oral traditions and much research has focused on what is real and what is fiction within each tale. The accuracy of the sagas is often hotly disputed. Most of the medieval manuscripts which are the earliest surviving witnesses to the sagas were taken to Denmark and Sweden in the seventeenth century, but later returned to Iceland. Classical sagas were composed in the thirteenth century. Scholars once believed that these sagas were transmitted orally from generation to generation until scribes wrote them down in the thirteenth century. However, most scholars now believe the sagas were conscious artistic creations, based on both oral and written tradition. …

Many modern artists working in different creative fields have drawn inspiration from the sagas. Among some well-known writers, for example, who adapted saga narratives in their works are Poul Anderson, Laurent Binet, Margaret Elphinstone, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Gunnar Gunnarsson, Henrik Ibsen, Halldór Laxness, Ottilie Liljencrantz, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, George Mackay Brown, William Morris, Adam Oehlenschläger, Robert Louis Stevenson, August Strindberg, Rosemary Sutcliff, Esaias Tegnér, J.R.R. Tolkien, and William T. Vollmann.