ABSTRACT
Viking raids and battles loom large in the sagas. Many of the original settlers have Viking pasts and many young Icelanders, who travel abroad as a part of their coming of age, become involved in Viking expeditions of one kind or another. The chapters on the Icelanders conversion to Christianity are from another saga; as, it seems, are the chapters at the end about the Battle of Clontarf. Over 5000 skaldic poems survive, most of them in the drttkvtt, or court stanza form. End rhyme is seldom a feature of these verses, which are controlled by and heavy with alliteration and internal full and half rhymes. Although much of the saga literature is realistic, workaday and domestic, there is no shortage of the supernatural, eerie and thrilling. There are many today, however, who see Egils saga as the work of Snorri Sturluson one of the most prolific and remarkable historians, critics and poets in thirteenth-century Europe.
