The Eddas, Sagas and Tales of Iceland (42 books)

* The Eddas, Sagas and Tales of Iceland (42 books)

The medieval literature of Iceland occupies a remarkable place in European literary history. Produced in a society on the far northwestern edge of Europe, much of it was written down in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, yet it preserves traditions that reach considerably further back, into the Viking Age and the centuries of settlement that followed. Its surviving literature encompasses poetry, mythology, heroic legend, historical narrative, family history, biography, law, and religious writing. Among these works, the Eddas and the Icelandic sagas are the most famous and, for modern readers, perhaps the most immediately compelling. They are very different kinds of literature, however. The two Eddas are principally concerned with myth, poetry, and the legendary past of the Scandinavian world; the Sagas turn their attention to human beings, families, feuds, journeys, marriages, friendships, and struggles for power in the world of medieval Iceland. Taken together, they provide an unusually broad view of the imaginative and historical consciousness of medieval Iceland.

The PROSE EDDA , traditionally attributed to the Icelandic poet and statesman SNORRI STURLUSON (c. 1179–1241), is the more systematic of the two Eddas. Its first major section, Gylfaginning, recounts a succession of stories concerning the gods and the creation, ordering, and eventual destruction of the world; Skáldskaparmál explains the elaborate metaphors and mythological allusions used by poets; and Háttatal provides an extended demonstration of Old Norse poetic meters. The work is therefore at once a handbook of poetics, a treasury of mythology, and a prose retelling of some of the stories that lie behind the older poetic tradition. Its importance is difficult to overstate: without Snorri's work, our knowledge of Norse mythology would be considerably poorer, and many mythological references found in the older poetry would be much more difficult to understand.

Rather than being a single work by a known author, the POETIC EDDA is a collection of anonymous Old Norse poems, principally mythological and heroic, preserved in manuscripts of the medieval period, most famously the Codex Regius. The poems include Völuspá, the great prophetic vision of the world's creation and destruction; Hávamál, a collection of wisdom poetry associated with Óðinn; poems recounting encounters among the gods; and a sequence of heroic poems dealing with figures such as Sigurðr, Brynhildr, Guðrún, and the tragic Völsung tradition. The collection offers not a single coherent mythology or narrative but a constellation of poems, voices, and traditions.

Unlike the Eddic poems and Snorri's mythological prose, the SAGAS OF ICELANDERS (Íslendingasögur) are predominantly prose narratives centered on Icelanders and their descendants, particularly during the period of settlement and Commonwealth (c. 870–1262). Their subjects are strikingly varied but often intensely human: family loyalties and rivalries, marriage and inheritance, friendship and betrayal, violence and revenge, law and arbitration, exile and return, ambition and honor. The sagas are generally anonymous, and although they recount events set centuries before the manuscripts in which they survive were written, they combine inherited tradition with sophisticated literary construction.

The anchor of this collection—Viðar Hreinsson's landmark five-volume COMPLETE SAGAS OF ICELANDERS, INCLUDING 49 TALES (1997)—is the first complete, coordinated English translation of this entire corpus. The Penguin Classics single-volume edition (2005), draws upon the same acclaimed translations from the Hreinsson volumes but curates only the 17 most famous sagas and selection of tales rather than providing the entire library. In addition, individual translations of particular sagas allow the reader to encounter the same extraordinary body of literature through different translators and at different moments in the history of English-language saga translation. Read together, the Eddas and Sagas offer an unusually rich introduction to the literature of medieval Iceland—and to a literary imagination capable of moving effortlessly between cosmic catastrophe and the smallest details of human conduct.


The following books are in ePUB and/or PDF format as indicated:

== SAGAS & TALES ==

* Complete Sagas of Icelanders, including 49 Tales, 5 volumes [ed. Hreinsson] (Leifur Eiríksson, 1997) – PDF

* Comic Sagas and Tales from Iceland [ed. Hreinsson] (Penguin, 2013) – ePUB
* Egil's Saga [tr. Eddison] (HarperCollins, 2015) – ePUB
* Egil's Saga [tr. Scudder] (Penguin, 2004) – ePUB
* Eirik the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas [tr. Jones] (Oxford, 1961) – PDF^
* Gisli Sursson's Saga and The Saga of the People of Eyri [tr. Regal & Quinn] (Penguin, 2004) – ePUB
* Hrafnkel's Saga and Other Icelandic Stories [tr. Pálsson] (Penguin, 2005) – ePUB
* Njal's Saga [tr. Cook] (Penguin, 2002) – ePUB
* Penguin Book of Norse Myths [retold by Kevin Crossley-Holland] (Penguin, 1993) – ePUB
* Saga of Grettir the Strong [tr. Scudder] (Penguin, 2005) – ePUB
* Saga of King Hrolf Kraki [tr. Byock] (Penguin, 1999) – ePUB
* Saga of the Jomsvikings [tr. Hollander] (Texas, 2011) – ePUB
* Saga of the Jómsvikings: A Translation for Students [tr. Finlay] (De Gruyter, 2019) – ePUB / PDF
* Saga of the Jómsvikings: A Translation with Full Introduction [tr. Finlay] (Medieval Institute, 2018) – ePUB / PDF
* Saga of the People of Laxardal and Bolli Bollason's Tale [tr. Kunz] (Penguin, 2008) – ePUB
* Saga of the Volsungs [tr. Byock] (California, 1990) – ePUB
* Saga of the Volsungs [tr. Byock] (Penguin, 2000) – ePUB
* Saga of the Volsungs [tr. Crawford] (Hackett, 2017) – ePUB
* Sagas of Icelanders: A Selection [Preface by Jane Smiley] (Penguin, 2005) – ePUB
* Vinland Sagas [tr. Kunz] (Penguin, 2008) – ePUB
* Vinland Sagas [tr. Magnusson & Pálsson] (Penguin, 1973) – ePUB
* Wanderer's Havamal [tr. Crawford] (Hackett, 2019) – ePUB

== THE POETIC EDDA ==

* Elder Edda [tr. Orchard] (Penguin, 2011) – ePUB
* Poems of the Elder Edda [tr. Terry, revised] (Pennsylvania, 1990) – ePUB / PDF
* Poetic Edda [tr. Bellows] (American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1923) – PDF^
* Poetic Edda [tr. Crawford, 2e] (Hackett, 2025) – ePUB / PDF
* Poetic Edda [tr. Dodds] (Coach House, 2014) – ePUB
* Poetic Edda [tr. Hollander, 2e] (Texas, 2012) – ePUB
* Poetic Edda [tr. Larrington, revised] (Oxford, 2014) – ePUB / PDF
* Poetic Edda: A Dual-Language Edition [tr. Pettit] (Open Book 2023) – PDF
* Poetic Edda: The Heroic Poems [tr. Bellows] (Dover, 2007) – ePUB
* Poetic Edda: The Mythological Poems [tr. Bellows] (Dover, 2004) – ePUB
* Poetic Edda: Volume II, Mythological Poems [ed. Dronke] (Oxford, 1997) – PDF

== THE PROSE EDDA ==

* Edda [tr. Faulkes] (Everyman, 1995) – PDF
* Prose Edda [tr. Brodeur] (Dover, 2006) – ePUB
* Prose Edda [tr. Byock] (Penguin, 2006) – ePUB
* Uppsala Edda: DG 11 4to [tr. Faulkes] (Viking Society, 2012) – PDF
* Uppsala Edda: DG 11 4to [tr. Hopkins] (Uppsala Universitet, 2022) – PDF

PDF^ courtesy of @Mohamed5438


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