SOURCE: Veblen, Thorstein. Introduction to The Laxdaela Saga, translated by Thorstein Veblen, pp. v-xv. New York: B. W. Huebsch, Inc., 1925.

In the following introduction to his English translation of the Laxdaela Saga, Veblen enumerates the underlying characteristics of the work, including its depiction of a blood feud, its rendering of a society situated between paganism and Christianity, and its idiomatic status as the product of thirteenth-century Iceland.

It has been something of a convention among those who interest themselves in Icelandic literature to speak well of the Laxdæla Saga as a thing of poetic beauty and of high literary merit. So, characteristically and with the weight of authority, Gudbrand Vigfusson has this to say of the Laxdæla, in the Prolegomena to his edition of the Sturlunga Saga: “This, the second only in size of the Icelandic Sagas, is perhaps also the second in beauty. It is...