Grettis saga

Grettis saga ( listen (help·info)) (also known as Grettla, Grettir's Saga or The Saga of Grettir the Strong) is one of the Icelanders' sagas. It details the life of (the possibly fictional) Grettir Ásmundarson, an Icelandic warrior who became an outlaw.

Grettir is ready to fight in this illustration from a 17th century Icelandic manuscript.

Overview

The saga is considered one of the Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendinga sögur) which were written in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and are fairly realistic accounts of events taking place between the ninth and the eleventh century in Iceland. The matter of such texts is usually conflicts for wealth, prestige, and power.

However, while Grettis saga is original in that although the main character is a historical figure and the story is told in a realistic manner, most of the hero's adventures involve supernatural elements. The author is unknown but it is believed he may have based his story on a previous account of Grettir's life written by Sturla Þórðarson.

Grettir is an odd hero, almost an anti-hero. His intentions are not necessarily bad, but he is bad-tempered and often does things that he later regrets: he is also very unlucky so that some of his actions have very bad consequences that he did not expect. Grettir spends most of his adult life in Iceland as an outlaw. He is not involved in the viking raids that many other saga-heroes take part in.

The tale has been translated into English several times, including a translation by William Morris. Also see Denton Fox and Hermann Pálsson trans., Grettir's Saga, (U of Toronto P, 1974).

Story

Grettir's life is told from beginning to end. As a child, he is rebellious and bad-tempered. He is also courageous; he takes on and defeats a draugr, a walking corpse that is the Norse equivalent of a zombie. But the draugr curses him, and this is seen by the author as the cause of his later misfortunes.

Grettir is sometimes able to be a proper hero, defeating various enemies. But he is blamed for setting fire to a hall, killing many men, and is condemned to outlawry. This means that anyone can kill him without legal penalty and that people are forbidden to help him in any way; many try to defeat him, but he is very hard to kill.

Grettir eventually becomes the longest-surviving outlaw in Icelandic history. When he has nearly completed 20 years as an outlaw, his friends and family ask for his outlawry to be lifted, arguing that a man may not spend more than 20 years as an outlaw according to the law (in actual history there was no such law in medieval Iceland). After a debate at the assembly, it is decided that the outlawry will be lifted when he has truly completed the 20 years but not before. His enemies make one last effort, using sorcery to cause him to wound himself and finally defeat him, atop cliff-sided, lonely, fortress-like Drangey off the northern tip of Iceland where he was staying with his brother Illugi, and his slave Glaumur.

His half brother, Thorsteinn of Dromund, later avenges him in a semi-comic scene in Byzantium, where the Norse served as Varangians.^[1]

References

External links

• Free downloads at [1], [2] and [3]
• Full text and translations at the Icelandic Saga Database