Medieval Icelandic Sagas: Discovering Hidden Stories from the Viking Age

Iceland boasts a long and rich literary tradition dating back to the Middle Ages. Remarkably, for a nation of only 380,000 people, it has produced a wealth of renowned writers; it’s even been said that half of all Icelanders write books.

“Previously, the theory was that Iceland was so dark and barren that the Icelanders had to fill their lives with storytelling and poetry to compensate for this. But Icelanders were certainly part of Europe and had a lot of contact with Britain, Germany, Denmark and Norway, among others,” said Tom Lorenz, a PhD research fellow at the Department of Language and Literature at NTNU. He is hunting down hidden and forgotten pieces of the island of the Sagas’ literary history.

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“The Icelanders were part of a common European culture, and Iceland has been a great knowledge society for a long time.”

Our relatively comprehensive understanding of Norway’s royal lineage, from the early Viking Age to the death of Magnus V Erlingsson in 1184, is largely thanks to the Icelanders. Norwegian kings employed skilled Icelandic skalds—poets who composed alliterative verse (distinct from Eddic poetry)—to chronicle and perpetuate their stories and achievements. During the Middle Ages, Icelanders documented these oral traditions in both Latin and Old Norse. Snorri Sturluson, the most significant of the saga writers, compiled these kings’ sagas in the 13th century, ensuring their preservation.

“In addition to sagas, eddaic poems, and skaldic verse, scientific literature and political treaties were also written in Iceland during the Middle Ages,” said Lorenz.

A common method for reusing old manuscript pages was to remove the original text by scraping and polishing so that the parchment could be used to create new books and manuscripts.

This is called a palimpsest.

“Palimpsests were common in the Middle Ages across Europe, and were particularly widespread in Iceland. Although literarily rich, Iceland was a poor country. The supply of expensive parchment was limited, while the demand was high because the Icelanders had much they wanted to communicate,” said Lorenz.

In Iceland, parchment was also reused for printing books after Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century.

“The fact that there are printed palimpsest books in Iceland and not just handwritten palimpsest parchments is unique in a European context, and this has not been studied before!” Lorenz emphasized.

“My goal is to create virtual reconstructions of some of the ancient fragments that have survived to shed new light on previous eras’ culture and society,” said Lorenz.

However, this involves finding the remnants of the palimpsests, and they are few and far between.

“Hardly any Latin books from medieval Iceland have survived. Due to their rarity, recycled parchment from disassembled Latin books is one of our most important sources in the history of medieval Icelandic books,” said Lorenz.