A sweeping epic of the Viking Age, Grettir's Saga follows the life of the outlaw Grettir the Strong as he battles against sorcery, bad luck, and the vengefulness of his enemies. Among the most famous and widely read of Iceland's sagas, this new translation features extensive illustrative material to elucidate the story.

The Saga of Grettir the Strong: Grettir's Saga by Unknown has been regarded as significant work throughout human history, and in order to ensure that this work is never lost, we have taken steps to ensure its preservation by republishing this book in a contemporary format for both current and future generations. This entire book has been retyped, redesigned, and reformatted. Since these books are not made from scanned copies, the text is readable and clear.

Profound and intriguing, Grettir's Saga is the last of the great Icelandic sagas. It tells of the life and death of Grettir, a great rebel, individualist, and romantic hero viewed unromantically. Grettir spends his childhood violently defying authority: as a youth of sixteen he kills a man and is outlawed; all the rest of his life he devotes, with remarkable composure, to fighting more and more formidable enemies. He pits himself against bears, berserks, wraiths, trolls, and finally, it seems, the whole population of Iceland. Yet he is not a bloodthirsty killer, but only a man who is totally unwilling to compromise. As a result of his desire for freedom, he becomes increasingly isolated, although he wishes to live in society, and indeed can hardly bear solitude. Driven back and forth from Iceland to Norway, harried around Iceland, he continually flees subjection and confinement only to find a perilous freedom beset both by the external hazards of a new land and by the internal hazards of loneliness and pride. He escapes to freedom and finds destruction. He finally meets his death in his last refuge on the top of an unscalable island near the northern tip of Iceland. Grettir's Saga has several themes. One of them is the conflict between the Christian world and the survival of the pagan world, as sorcery or heroic pride; the other is the conflict between man's desire for individual freedom and the restrictive bond imposed by society. This translation is the first into English since 1914; it is based on a more accurate Icelandic text than the earlier translations, and, unlike them, is unexpurgated and in unarchaic English. The saga has an especial modern relevance - a recent translation into Czech reached the top of the best-seller list. The present volume includes genealogies, a study of the legal system, and a critical assessment of the work.

'The Saga of Grettir the Strong' is one of the Icelanders' sagas. It details the life of Grettir Ásmundarson, a bellicose Icelandic outlaw. The first part of the story primarily focuses on how Grettir's viking great-grandfather Onundur Tree-foot escaped Norway to settle in Iceland after fighting in the Battle of Hafrsfjord against the first king of Norway Harald Fairhair.

Composed at the end of the fourteenth century by an unknown author, The Saga of Grettir the Strong is one of the last great Icelandic sagas. It relates the tale of Grettir, an eleventh-century warrior struggling to hold on to the values of a heroic age becoming eclipsed by Christianity and a more pastoral lifestyle. Unable to settle into a community of farmers, Grettir becomes the aggressive scourge of both honest men and evil monsters - until, following a battle with the sinister ghost Glam, he is cursed to endure a life of tortured loneliness away from civilisation, fighting giants, trolls and berserks. A mesmerising combination of pagan ideals and Christian faith, this is a profoundly moving conclusion to the Golden Age of the saga writing.

Presents the full-text of "The Saga of Grettir the Strong (Grettir's Saga)," which was written in the early 14th century in Icelandic. Notes that the translation was by G.H. Hight and the text was published online as part of the Online Medieval and Classical Library (OMACL) Web site of Douglas B. Killings.