ABSTRACT
The literary-historical question of whether Norse-Icelandic sagas are best seen as history or as fiction must not be confused with the historical question of how reliable the sagas are as historical sources. The modern separation between ‘history’ and ‘literature’ has been shown to make no sense at all when studying the Middle Ages, during which historiography was a major branch of literature. The sagas whose historical status is most secure are Old Norse adaptations of works of foreign historiography: Trojumanna saga, Alexanders saga, Gyoinga saga, Breta sogur, Romverja saga, and Veraldar saga. A number of scholars, however, use the word ‘fiction’ to refer to this species of imaginative history-writing. Once again, renewed interest in the constructed nature of history and cultural memory has helped scholars emerge from this impasse. Before the 1970s, questions about whether the sagas were history or fiction were mostly occupied with the Islendingasogur and overshadowed by the ongoing bookprose—freeprose debate.
