SOURCE: “Grettis Saga and European Literature in the Late Middle Ages,” in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1970, pp. 49-61.

In the following essay, Glendinning examines elements of the novella genre present in the Grettis Saga as well as motifs and devices it shares with the literature of continental Europe.

During the second half of the 13th century, when the literature of continental Europe was beginning to move into the new intellectual constellation that was to become the Renaissance, the people of Iceland were still living in that brilliant period which saw the culmination of their mediaeval culture in the classical Icelandic sagas, the so-called Family Sagas. According to the traditional view, the classical Icelandic saga owes little of real substance to the mainstream of continental European literature. It owes nothing to the courtly vogue which at the end of the 13th century...