This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

Instigated by a spiteful and selfish wife, a grim blood feud between the families of two well-to-do Icelandic landowners spirals out of control, claiming lives and property. Widely regarded as the capstone of Icelandic literary achievement, this gripping thirteenth-century saga not only recounts long and costly battles but documents Viking civic and legal institutions as well. It also presents a cogent exposition of Icelandic religious practices amid stirring tales of war and conquest. The finest English-language version available, this volume includes an informative introduction, editor's notes, and a complete chronology of events.

Proclaimed as one of the finest Icelandic sagas, this text was written in about 1280 and refers to events a couple of centuries earlier. It is full of the details of everyday life, as well as the social structures of the society in which they take place.

The Rewriting of Njáls saga concerns itself with the process which enables literary texts to cross cultures and endure history. Through six interrelated case studies, Jón Karl Helgason focuses on the reception of Njáls saga, the most distinguished of the Icelandic sagas, in Britain, the United States, Denmark, Norway and Iceland, between 1861 and 1945. The editions and translations in question claim to represent a medieval narrative to their audience, but Helgason emphasises how these texts simultaneously reflect the rewriters' contemporary ideas about race, culture, politics and poetics. Introducing the principles of comparative Translation Studies to the field of Medieval Literature, Helgason's book identifies the dialogue between literary (re)production and society.

Considered to be one of the finest of the Icelandic sagas, "Njal's Saga" (or "The Story of Burnt Njal") was written sometime in the thirteenth century by an unknown author and is the longest and most developed of the sagas. The source material for the saga was historical but probably drawn largely from oral tradition. The story relates events that took place between 960 and 1020, involving blood feuds in the Icelandic Commonwealth. It features memorable characters like the noble warrior Gunnar of Hlidarendi, the lawyer Njáll Þorgeirsson, and the mildly villainous Mord Valgardsson, whose motivations and passions are familiar to people of every age and locale. The saga is divided into three parts, which describe the friendship between Gunnar and Njal, the tragic consequences of revenge, and finally the retribution of Flosi and Kari. Themes of loyalty, marriage, family honor and vengeance permeate this beautifully written and timeless epic.

The story of Burnt Njal, the great Icelandic tribune, jurist, and consellor.

Njals saga, the greatest of the sagas of the Icelanders, was written around 1280. It tells the story of a complex feud that starts innocently enough--in a tiff over seating arrangement at a local feast--and expands over the course of 20 years to engulf half the country, in which both sides are effectively exterminated, Njal and his family burned to death in their farmhouse, the other faction picked off over the entire course of the feud. Law and feud feature centrally in the saga, Njal, its hero, being the greatest lawyer of his generation. No reading of the saga can do it justice unless it takes its law, its feuding strategies, as well as the author's stunning manipulation and saga conventions. In 'Why is Your Axe Bloody?' W.I. Miller offers a lively, entertaining, and completely orignal personal reading of this lengthy saga.

Njáls saga is the best known and most highly regarded of all medieval Icelandic sagas and it occupies a special place in Icelandic cultural history. The manuscript tradition is exceptionally rich and extensive. The oldest extant manuscripts date to only a couple of decades after the saga’s composition in the late 13th century and the saga was subsequently copied by hand continuously up until the 20th century, even alongside the circulation of printed text editions in latter centuries. The manuscript corpus as a whole has great socio-historical value, showcasing the myriad ways in which generations of Icelanders interpreted the saga and took an active part in its transmission; the manuscripts are also valuable sources for evidence of linguistic change and other phenomena. The essays in this volume present new research and a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on the Njáls saga manuscripts. Many of the authors took part in the international research project "The Variance of Njáls saga" which was funded by the Icelandic Research Council from 2011-2013.