This book is not a search for the origins of the sub-genre of sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur in Modern Icelandic), because it seems to me that those origins are likely to be diverse, complex and ultimately not fully knowable. Rather, it is an attempt to document the various adaptations of existing literary resources and the development of new ones that led to the emergence of written sagas of Icelanders, probably from the early thirteenth century. While the main focus of the study is upon the majority of sagas that employ the mixed prose and verse medium often termed prosimetrum, a final chapter analyses the group of nine sagas that do not contain any poetry and investigates the various reasons why their authors may have eschewed a mixed prosaic and poetic discourse in favour of prose alone.

Throughout this study the focus is upon the empirical evidence provided by the saga texts themselves for the different kinds of developments that writers of sagas of Icelanders followed as well as the routes some took that seem to have become dead ends. The study also looks at how the saga form changed over the 200 years or so (c. 1200–c. 1400) in which it was in active written composition and how the ways in which saga writers used poetry were also modified in response to a range of presumed cultural changes.

The book’s concentration upon the poetry in these texts distinguishes it from most, if not all, existing literary studies on the general subject of the sagas of Icelanders. Most previous book-length studies effectively treat these sagas as prose works in which poetry sometimes appears and thus requires a brief discussion. Their authors usually devote a few pages to the poetry, but for the most part their emphasis is on literary aspects of the text as perceived through its prose, including its structure, plot, characterisation and style. There are some exceptions to this generalisation, especially involving studies of poets’ sagas, where it is difficult to ignore the role of poetry, but it would be fair to say that the literary role and character of poetry in sagas of Icelanders has had short shrift in most previous works on the subject, excellent as many of them are.