ABSTRACT
The sagas of Icelanders were long interpreted primarily as tales of heroes. Prior to the rise of bookprose theory in the early and mid-twentieth century, freeprose theorists found little urge to explore the moral or ethical qualities of saga heroism. There is a third tradition of significant importance for the modern scholarly reception of saga heroism, that of eddic poetry and the role it was assigned by Enlightenment intellectuals and their nineteenth-century heirs. A ‘mixed’ hero defends a sympathetic yet questionable cause—sympathetic to the saga audience if not always to other saga characters—and in so doing exposes personal shortcomings that undermine the righteousness of that cause and prevent reconciliation. Numerous other factors come into play when interpreting saga heroism within its literary context. Risking oversimplification, it may be said that since the 1980s and 1990s, the cultural and ideological framework of previous debates on ethics and action in the sagas has been replaced by a sociohistorical one.
