Troll-Descended Bruisers: ‘Njal’s Saga’
Tom Shippey, 2 July 2015
Icelandic sagas are a strange anomaly in the literature of medieval Europe. There are ‘legendary sagas’ such as The Saga of the Volsungs; biographies of the Norwegian kings, brought into one sweeping cycle in Snorri Sturluson’s mammoth Heimskringla (The Circle of the World); and a gloomy compilation called The Saga of the Sturlungs, which recounts the violent break-up of...