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Oresai
11-27-2008, 04:42 AM
http://www.sagadb.org/


Welcome to the Icelandic Saga Database
saga n : a narrative telling the adventures of a hero or a family; originally, a story of the families that settled Iceland and their descendants.


The Icelandic Saga Database is an online resource dedicated to the Sagas of the Icelanders -- a large body of medieval literature which forms the foundation of the Icelandic literary tradition. The sagas are prose histories describing events that took place amongst the Norse and Celtic inhabitants of Iceland during the period of the Icelandic Commonwealth in the 10th and 11th centuries AD.



All sagas are now available in PDF format, with a table of contents. To access a saga in PDF format, press the left-most control button on the page for the saga. All the sagas can be downloaded in PDF format on the Downloads page.



The sagas are believed to have been written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries AD, perhaps originating in an oral tradition of storytelling. While their facticity and authorship is for the most part unknown, they are a widely recognized gem of world literature thanks to their sparse, succinct prose style and balanced storytelling. The sagas focus largely on history, especially genealogical and family history, and reflect the struggles and conflicts that arose amongst the second and third generations of Norse settlers in medieval Iceland, which was in this time a remote, decentralised society with a rich legal tradition but no organized executive power.

This website contains all the extant Icelandic family sagas. The sagas are made available in an easy, readable format using modernized Icelandic spelling, with the Old Norse versions and translations into English and other languages made available where these exist in the public domain.

Absinthe
12-01-2008, 10:25 AM
Fantastic. Thanks :) I was looking for a source like that, so that I can switch languages (and maybe learn something)! :)

Trivia: I met a man (smart-ass) in my sanskrit class, who insisted that the sagas are written in runic font.
We argued a bit about that, and then he told me he read somewhere that Icelanders are not Skandinavian :rolleyes:

The swedish teacher was passing by us at that moment so we asked her and she laughed out loud, told him yes, it's not part of the skandinavian geopolitical entity but the Icelanders have norse blood.
He kept insisting they don't!

Eva asked him 'why do they speak a norse language then?', and his response was... 'kanske de har fel'... :D :rolleyes:

Hrolf Kraki
02-24-2009, 04:47 AM
Another helpful link: http://www.northvegr.org/main.php

Sarmata
02-24-2009, 06:49 AM
Fantastic. Thanks :) I was looking for a source like that, so that I can switch languages (and maybe learn something)! :)

Trivia: I met a man (smart-ass) in my sanskrit class, who insisted that the sagas are written in runic font.
We argued a bit about that, and then he told me he read somewhere that Icelanders are not Skandinavian :rolleyes:

The swedish teacher was passing by us at that moment so we asked her and she laughed out loud, told him yes, it's not part of the skandinavian geopolitical entity but the Icelanders have norse blood.
He kept insisting they don't!

Eva asked him 'why do they speak a norse language then?', and his response was... 'kanske de har fel'... :D :rolleyes:


Polish professor of archeology-Przemysław Urbańczyk discovered some Slavic "huts" in Iceland :eek:

Urbańczyk conducted archeological research in northern Norway and the Lofoten for many years. Recently, he led an international archeological expedition in Iceland. (...)

"I found evidence that the Slavs inhabiting the areas around the Vistula river [Poland] accompanied the Vikings in their expeditions on the Atlantic one thousand years ago," Urbańczyk said. "They left evident traces in Norway and Iceland in the form of characteristic huts known from Poland."
(...)
"We discovered such a Slavic hut, a semi-dugout, alongside the Vikings' `long houses' during our most recent excavations in Iceland in July 2001. If they were together in Iceland, they could also have sailed together to Greenland and America," he concluded.

And I also found this: http://wolnapolska.boom.ru/index-Wyzdraw.html