What the Sagas Are
The sagas are prose narratives, mostly written in Iceland in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, though some belong to earlier or later periods. The word saga comes from an Old Norse term related to “saying” or “telling”. Most are anonymous. They are among the major achievements of medieval literature in Europe, written in the Icelandic vernacular rather than in Latin, which was unusual at the time.
Historians divide them into several groups, and the group matters a great deal when judging reliability.
- Sagas of Icelanders (family sagas) follow families and feuds in Iceland, mostly in the period from the settlement in the late ninth century to the early eleventh. Examples include the stories of Egil and of Njal.
- Kings’ sagas tell of the rulers of Norway, Denmark and the Orkney earldom. The best known is Heimskringla, traditionally attributed to the Icelandic chieftain and writer Snorri Sturluson.
- Contemporary sagas, such as the collection called Sturlunga saga, describe events of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, often written not long after.
- Legendary and romance sagas deal with heroes, monsters and foreign adventures, and are mostly entertainment.
The Problem of Time
The central difficulty is the gap between events and their writing. A family saga set around the year 1000 was typically written down some two or three centuries later. Between those two points, stories were retold, probably reshaped, and perhaps invented. Historians continue to debate how much the sagas rest on a solid oral tradition and how much on the imagination of the authors. Some earlier scholars treated the sagas as nearly accurate records. Others went to the opposite extreme and treated them as pure fiction. Most now take a middle view: the sagas contain real memory, but it is mixed with literary craft, and it is hard to separate the two without outside evidence.
The authors also had their own purposes. They wrote for audiences who valued honor, family reputation and good storytelling. Dialogue was invented, speeches were polished, and events were arranged to fit a satisfying plot. Authors in the thirteenth century also viewed the past through the lens of their own time, so details about law, religion or custom may reflect the author’s world rather than the Viking Age. A saga’s account of pagan religion, for instance, was written by Christians and shaped by what they thought or imagined, which complicates its use as evidence for Norse mythology.
What the Sagas Can Tell Us
Even if the specific events are doubtful, the sagas are valuable for other kinds of information.
Social values. They reveal how medieval Icelanders thought about honor, insult, loyalty, revenge and reconciliation. A feud story shows what the audience considered a reasonable cause for conflict or a fair settlement.
Legal practice. Many sagas include detailed court scenes. They reflect real legal procedures from Iceland’s assembly system, though they dramatize them.
Material life. Farm layouts, travel, seasonal work, ships, weapons and clothing appear in passing and often fit the archaeology. Such incidental details are generally more trustworthy than the plot.
The medieval mind. The sagas also show how thirteenth-century Icelanders imagined their ancestors, which is itself historical evidence about the society that wrote them.
What They Cannot Tell Us
They cannot, on their own, confirm the exact dates, motives or conversations in events of the settlement era. A saga may say that a certain man killed another on a certain day, but without independent evidence there is no way to check. They also reflect the interests of Iceland’s elite families, and the viewpoint of enslaved people, poor farmers and women outside leading households is mostly missing or filtered.
Kings’ sagas raise another concern. Snorri and other authors drew on earlier poems and written works, but also had political aims, and their descriptions of Norwegian kings were often shaped by Icelandic attitudes toward royal power. The Battle of Stamford Bridge, for example, features in the kings’ sagas because of King Harald Hardrada of Norway, and these accounts need to be compared with English sources.
Checking Sagas Against Other Evidence
Historians use several methods to test sagas.
- Archaeology. The Vinland sagas describe Norse voyages to North America. For many years, their reliability was doubted, until the discovery of a Norse site at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland in the twentieth century showed that Norse people did reach North America. The sagas’ exact geography remains unclear and their two accounts differ in many details.
- Earlier texts. Ari the Learned’s Íslendingabók and the Landnámabók, both earlier, provide a framework to compare against. Foreign chronicles and annals, such as those from England and Ireland, can confirm some raids or rulers.
- Skaldic poetry. Verses composed by court poets were fixed by meter and rhyme, which makes them harder to alter than prose. Historians often treat them as closer to the events, though they were also composed to praise their patrons.
- Internal comparison. Comparing different versions of the same story shows where a tale changed over time.
Reading Sagas Sensibly
A good way to approach the sagas is as medieval literature rooted in a real society. They are less reliable for “what happened” in the tenth century and more reliable for “what people in the thirteenth century believed and valued.” They also preserve an unusual amount of vernacular storytelling, which makes them an important window into how medieval sagas and oral storytelling worked. For anyone interested in the Viking Age, the best approach is to use them together with runic inscriptions, archaeology and foreign records, and to keep in mind that none of these sources alone tells the full story.