This book provides a comprehensive account of Old Icelandic literature within its social context. An international team of specialists examines the ways in which the unique medieval social experiment in Iceland, a kingless society without an established authority structure, inspired a wealth of innovative writing composed in the Icelandic vernacular. The book shows how Icelanders explored their uniqueness through poetry, mythologies, metrical treatises, religious writing, and through saga, a new genre that textualized their history and incorporated oral traditions in a written form.

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