ABSTRACT
The medieval saga literature of Iceland has long been a source of inspiration for artists from different genres. Since the nineteenth century it has in various ways inspired works of literature, music, visual arts, and, increasingly, popular culture. The attention paid by artists to the Icelandic sagas is not an isolated phenomenon but rather part of the broad international interest in Old Norse literature and culture and in the Viking Age. Although saga reception is an international phenomenon, its historical development is dependent on national cultures and therefore differs from country to country. Studies of saga reception were only gradually able to free themselves from the straitjacket of prescriptivism when the rigid hierarchy of originals and adaptations began to dissolve under the influence of new research paradigms, in particular aesthetics of reception and intertextuality. The majority of these studies are indebted to the paradigms of national literatures.
