See also: Saga (homonymy)

A saga (word Icelandic, plural sögur ) is a literary Genre developed in the medieval Iceland, with.

General information

Régis Boyer ( medieval Iceland , p. 189) gave the following definition of the saga: “One calls saga an account in prose, always in prose, this point is capital, bringing back the life and the actions of a character, worthy of memory for various reasons, since his birth until his death, by not omitting neither his ancestors nor his descendants if they have some importance”. Still let us note that a saga is only extremely seldom a legend or a tale.

The word comes from the verb segja , “to tell”, “to tell” (to compare with the German sagen or the English to say ). The author of saga, often anonymity, is a sagnamenn .

Categories

It was thought a long time that the various categories of sagas had followed one another. It seems from now on established that one cannot make chronology of these various chronologies, but which they emerged in a concomitant way.

; Royal sagas In fact the sagas treat Danish kings, Norwegian and Swedish. The most known example is the Heimskringla, of Snorri Sturluson, which gathers in fact sixteen sagas devoted to all the kings of Norway until the end of the twelfth century.

Apart from Heimskringla, one can also quote the Fagrskinna, the Morkinskinna or the Saga of the king Sverrir. The history of the island of Gotland is treated in Saga of Gotlandais, which is only the saga written apart from Iceland and of Norway.

; Sagas of the Icelanders, also known as sagas of family They refer to the important facts of an ancestor having lived with. Their authors are not known. The heroes of these sagas are generally famous because of forwardings Viking S which they carried out or their personal qualities (direction of the friendship, poetic talent, chivalrous manners, etc).

Régis Boyer gives of them six like particularly exemplary: the Saga de Hrafnkell, the Saga d' Egill, wire of Grímr the Bald person, the Saga de Snorri the godi, the Saga of people of the Valley-with-Salmon, the Saga de Grettir the Fort and the Saga de Njáll the Flaring.

; Sagas of the contemporaries These sagas makes, as their name indicates it, the narration of contemporary events to the life of the author. It is in particular of the sagas bishops, but also about the Saga of the descendants of Sturla.

; Sagas of the knights It is about adaptation of or French novel chansons de geste of the Roundtable. One can thus quote a Saga de Charlemagne. The principal interest of some of these texts comes owing to the fact that they were written starting from texts now disappeared.

See too

• Saga d' Erik the Red
• Saga of the Greenlanders

External bonds

• the saga of Njal on the site of the Project Gutenberg

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