The Vinland Sagas (Penguin Classics)

A great story about how the Vikings discovered America 500 years before Columbus did! It’s an amazing saga. I love reading the old sagas.Thank you

This book actually consists of two Icelandic sagas, "The Saga of the Greenlanders" and "The Saga of Erik the Red," which offer tantalizing and all too brief accounts of one of the most intriguing events in history--the exploration and attempted colonization of North America (in this case basically the Canadian Maritime Provinces) by Norsemen (Vikings) half a millennium before Columbus. The Vikings today are best known as looters and marauders, but they were also intrepid explorers, enterprising merchants, and hardworking farmers who succeeded in carving out long-term colonies in Greenland (which lasted until the sixteenth century) and Iceland (which still exists). They did not succeed in Vinland, largely because the hostile "Skraelings" (Native Americans) were too numerous and too powerful. Remember, folks, this was before the invention of gunpowder. They were also plagued by internal dissensions and the machinations of one truly evil woman, Leif Ericsson's half-sister Freydir Eriksdottir. The sagas were written down some three centuries after the events narrated therein, and must not be regarded as sober history, based as they are on oral traditions combining myth, legend, and solid fact. They have the directness of the Bible and the objectivity of Homer, and like the Bible and Homer much time is taken up by confusing genealogies and polysyllabic names that are hard to keep track of (a key to Icelandic pronunciation would have been nice). Though the tone is largely objective, there is a subtle evangelical spin to the narratives: the sympathetic characters are mostly Christians, while the unsympathetic characters are largely pagan. Also, one cannot help noticing that the pagan characters usually come to bad ends. This Penguin Classic version, translated by Keneva Kurz and edited with notes and introduction by Gisli Sigurdsson, contains maps, illustrations, and a glossary, and examination of Norse ships, farms, and legal structures. A very useful book for students of Norse culture and pre-Columbian America.

Four stars or not, it is hard for me to write excitedly about the Penguin Classics Edition of the Vineland Sagas. The very short book consist of some accessible and generally interesting introduction and very helpful maps and notes by Gisli Sigurdsson and the Sagas of The Greenlanders and Erik the Red both by Keneve Sigurdsson. Total page count is about 100.My notion of the importance of sagas is that they combine history, local legends and perhaps enough facts to transmit travel directions to the careful reader. That is sagas should be somewhat like a Bible, being the oral traditions, and history and generally the main way to carry vital information forward across generations. More than incidentally these particular sagas reflect the arrival of Christianity among the Vikings with some obvious changes in priorities and emphasis.Speaking only of this translation, for this is the only version I know; these sagas read like academic documents. They seem edited to be dry, documentary, summary and absent any of the kinds of drama and entertainment that would keep pagans, adult or children wide eyed at the communal fireside. Look elsewhere for the heroics of Beowulf. Check your insurance before you depend on these sagas as your sailing directions before exploring in an open boat with neither back up compass nor web based aps.The sagas do recite the same stories we heard in school about European discovery of Greenland, so named as a sales ploy to promote immigrations and do not expect to be thrilled by the early battles between the Viking settlers on what 500 years later they called Vineland and would come to be called America (more exactly the Canadian Maritime) and the ‘Skraelings’. This being the earlier Viking name for most likely Eskimos. Or perhaps what the Canadians now call the people of the First Nations. I rather wish we could have played cowboys and skræingjar (plural). However here the fights were not steel and gunpowder, versus bows and arrows, but rather iron verses large number of locals. Where Iron won, the sagas got to be written.My decision to read the Vineland Sagas was to learn about the tales of early travelers and non-Greco-Roman mythologies. This deck chair exploration is academically interesting, but too sanitized