The prose literature of medieval Iceland is a great world treasure –elaborate, various, strange, profound, and as eternally current as any of theother great literary treasures – the Homeric epics, Dante’s Divine Comedy,the works of William Shakespeare or of any modern writer you couldname. Mysteries surround these stories – how were they composed and bywhom? what were the motives of the authors? why were they written inprose when the currency of medieval literature was poetry? how did theircontemporaries understand them – did they even read them, or did theyhear them read aloud? But the questions fall away as we read the sagasand tales themselves. They are written with such immediacy andforthrightness and they concern such basic human dilemmas that for themost part they are readily accessible and seductive. Reading one createsthe appetite for another and another. In the present volume, Penguin hasdrawn upon the newly translated and edited Complete Sagas of Icelanders tooffer the English-speaking reader a rich selection of Icelandic prose. Longand short, complex and simple, fantastic and realistic – there is a taste ofeverything here, an abundant introduction to a world a thousand yearsseparated from ours, both intensely familiar and intensely strange