SOURCE: “Reading for Character in Grettis Saga,” in Sagas of the Icelanders: A Book of Essays, edited by John Tucker, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989, pp. 226-40.

In the following essay, Cook demonstrates some ways of discerning and evaluating character in the Grettis Saga.

The modern reader, brought up on novels and unused to the Sagas of Icelanders, will at first have a hard time. The sagas present a bewildering array of persons and events, names and details, often without highlighting what is important or pointing to connections or giving the reader any apparent basis for comprehension. The novice deserves some help, and in this essay I will offer some elementary guidelines, with examples from Grettis saga.

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My starting point will be to contrast the sagas with the Old English poem Beowulf, which many who come to the sagas will have read, at least in translation. Beowulf, too, is...