The Sagas of the Icelanders
Viking, $40
ISBN 0670889903

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Jane Smiley has also contributed a preface to The Sagas of Icelanders, a new collection released this month in a special American edition. This volume of ten Icelandic sagas and seven tales was drawn from the first complete edition of the sagas in English, translated by an international team of experts and published in Iceland in 1997. Old Norse literature is one of Smiley's many areas of interest; she studied in Iceland on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1977 and wrote her doctoral dissertation on the subject. When she first read the sagas, Smiley writes in her preface, she found "plenty for an aspiring novelist to learn." Through their use of scene, character, and plot, the Icelandic saga writers told stories as "eternally current" as the works of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. This readable new translation includes the two "Vinland Sagas," which recount the Viking settlement of Greenland and Leif Ericksson's voyage to North America. Publication of The Sagas of Icelanders coincides with the 1,000 anniversary of Ericksson's voyage.