Poetry in Sagas of Icelanders

First full analysis of the skaldic verse appearing in the family sagas of Icelanders, considering why and how it is deployed. Sagas of Icelanders, also called family sagas, are the best known of the many literary genres that flourished in medieval Iceland, most of them achieving written form during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Modern readers and critics often praise their apparently realistic descriptions of the lives, loves and feuds of settler families of the first century an