96 Books Like Sagas of Warrior-poets

Want to know where Marvel comics got many of its ideas? Then, read this book.

Snorri Sturluson is an Icelandic national hero. Historian, poet, and politician, he was a chieftain during a civil war in Iceland facing encroaching Norwegian expansion. In the middle of all of this, it is argued that he wrote The Prose Edda.

In this book you will learn about the original myths and legends of medieval Iceland written in an accessible and engaging manner. 

Where did J.R.R. Tolkien get his ideas? This book will provide some insight.

I fell in love with the Lord of the Rings when I was 12 when the first Peter Jackson film came out in 2001. It put me on the path to learning more about his works and his inspiration. Elves, dragons, and magical rings? Tolkien got much of it from Old Norse literature, and the Saga of the Volsungs has it all. Based on Viking Age poems, it is filled with myth, legend, and human drama and follows the story of Sigurd, the dragon slayer who is fundamentally changed after a meeting with one of Odin’s Valkyries.

For all of its myth-making, I love this book because of its very human elements: princely jealousy, unrequited love, and how greed corrupts. 

Romantic in style, taste, and theme, this is a saga that culminates in that most human of narratives: the love triangle. Heavily inspired by the European romance genre, this saga has key themes of chivalry, history, and poetry. With its unusual focus on women and their desires, it has been suggested that this saga might even have been written by a woman, and for this reason alone, it is worth a read.

I believe there is no greater character in Icelandic literature than the tragic Guðrún. For those who wish to learn more about women in medieval Iceland beyond stereotypical accounts of shield maidens and queens, this is the book for you. 

It was in reading this book that my love affair with Icelandic literature began.

The saga of “burnt Njal” is, in my opinion, the most technically accomplished and thrilling Icelandic sagas in existence. Written in the late 13th century it offers unparalleled insight into the everyday lives and the social structures of medieval Iceland.

The text is one of the most accessible to a modern audience–helped by the excellent English translation by Lee M. Hollander–and has many tropes and themes a modern reader will recognize: touching friendship, fatal enmity, and great adventure. 

This book, from a fin de siècle Scotsman, is a classic of literature in its own right. It contains a perfectly brilliant reading of the sagas as well as other works of medieval literature. It has never been surpassed and is perhaps unsurpassable. Every sentence is an elegant gem, with one nonobvious insight after another. He just nails it. Ker reminds you that literary criticism need not be pretentious and badly written as it so often is. Treat yourself. 

This is from the master of saga studies of the past half-century. His knowledge of Old Norse literature is unsurpassed. He takes you through how the miracle of the sagas came about. Moreover, he writes well. His prose is clear and elegant. I also wish to steer readers to a perfect gem of an article Andersson wrote that actually manages to say something quite new about the more than a century-old fight in saga studies as to whether the sagas owe their excellence to an oral culture or to a written one: “Sea Traffic in the Sagas: Quantitative Reflections” in The Creation of Medieval Northern Europe: Essays in Honor of Sverre Bagge, edited by Leidulf Melve and Sigbjørn Sønnesyn (Oslo: Dreyer, 2012), 156–75.

The University of Michigan professor-emeritus William Ian Miller is, of course, essential reading on violence and revenge, particularly his Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga, Iceland.

But Miller has been so deservedly lauded elsewhere – and his books so widely recommended – that I'm using this space to suggest that readers also open his sources. Among the sagas, Njal's Saga is much more complex than this one, and probably more revealing of the Saga tradition. But I'm a fan of the shorter, more readable Hrafnkel's, not least because I have a weakness for spooky horses.

Hrafnkel is a bully who would not pay compensation, and the arc of his distinctly pre-modern biography is not what you might expect. In fact, it will make you realize exactly how much what we call "modern" is really a product of legal development, including our ideas about satisfying narratives.

Also, dark… show more.

An excellent account of this supremely intelligent Machiavellian rogue and wit of a Norwegian king by the eminent Norwegian historian and namesake Sverre Bagge. King Sverrir’s saga was written by an Icelander with the king looking over his shoulder and apparently dictating portions of it. Nothing quite captures a medieval insurgency any better than this saga when read through the lens of Bagge’s astute commentary. 

This is by all estimation the greatest of the sagas. I would even claim that its excellence allows it to be fairly mentioned in the same breath as the Iliad, Don Quixote, and the tragedies of Shakespeare. It is quite complex and I would suggest, if I am allowed to, my Why is Your Axe Bloody? (2014) as a guide. But the present Penguin translation is a travesty and should be avoided. The best English translation available is the older Penguin translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson (1961) and still available from various used booksellers online. Their translation is as good as a translation can get. Hrafnkels saga is a perfect entry to the sagas because it is short and compact and prepares one for the complexity of Njáls saga. 

Even though this is a massive tome with almost 800 pages, the book is the perfect introduction to the rich medieval literature of the sagas that form the foundation of Icelandic literature today. It contains many of the main sagas including the Egil's Saga, the Laxdæla Saga, and the Vinland Sagas as well as background information on saga history, medieval Iceland, and the Icelandic language. A collection full of the battles, witchcraft, poetry, monsters, and heroic journeys that influenced generations of writers from Jules Verne and J.R.R. Tolkien over to A.S. Byatt.