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Concept
Saga
Summary
Sagas are prose stories and histories, composed in Iceland and to a lesser extent elsewhere in Scandinavia.
The most famous saga-genre is the Íslendingasögur (sagas concerning Icelanders), which feature Viking voyages, migration to Iceland, and feuds between Icelandic families. However, sagas' subject matter is diverse, including pre-Christian Scandinavian legends; saints and bishops both from Scandinavia and elsewhere; Scandinavian kings and contemporary Icelandic politics; and chivalric romances either translated from Continental European languages or composed locally.
Sagas originated in the Middle Ages, but continued to be composed in the ensuing centuries. Whereas the dominant language of history-writing in medieval Europe was Latin, sagas were composed in the vernacular: Old Norse and its later descendants, primarily Icelandic.
While sagas are written in prose, they share some similarities with epic poetry, and often include stanzas or whole poems in alliterative verse embedded in the text.
The main meanings of the Old Norse word saga (plural sǫgur) are 'what is said, utterance, oral account, notification' and the sense used in this article: '(structured) narrative, story (about somebody)'. It is cognate with the English words say and saw (in the sense 'a saying', as in old saw), and the German Sage; but the modern English term saga was borrowed directly into English from Old Norse by scholars in the eighteenth century to refer to Old Norse prose narratives.
The word continues to be used in this sense in the modern Scandinavian languages: Icelandic saga (plural sögur), Faroese søga (plural søgur), Norwegian soge (plural soger), Danish saga (plural sagaer), and Swedish saga (plural sagor). It usually also has wider meanings such as 'history', 'tale', and 'story'. It can also be used of a genre of novels telling stories spanning multiple generations, or to refer to saga-inspired fantasy fiction. Swedish folksaga means folk tale or fairy tale, while konstsaga is the Swedish term for a fairy tale by a known author, such as Hans Christian Andersen.
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