Icelandic literature

Sagas are prose stories and histories, composed in Iceland and to a lesser extent elsewhere in Scandinavia.

collection of Old Norse poems

13th-century Norse work of literature written in Iceland

right|thumb|upright=1.3|Bersi Skáldtorfuson, in chains, composing poetry after he was captured by King Óláfr Haraldsson (illustration by [[Christian Krohg for an 1899 edition of Heimskringla)]]

group of narratives

thumb|Detail of the Old English manuscript of the poem [[Beowulf, showing the words (), meaning .]]

literature written in Iceland or by Icelandic people

nordic legendary saga

Old Norse chivalric saga

literary work

literary work

In Icelandic literature, a ríma (, literally "a rhyme", pl. rímur, ) is an epic poem written in any of the so-called rímnahættir (, "rímur meters"). They are rhymed, they alliterate and consist of two to four lines per stanza. The plural, rímur, is either used as an ordinary plural, denoting any two or more rímur, but is also used for more expansive works, containing more than one ríma as a whole. Thus Ólafs ríma Haraldssonar denotes an epic about Ólafr Haraldsson in one ríma, while Sigurður Breiðfjörð's '''' are a multi-part epic on Numa Pompilius.

form of verse that uses alliteration as the principal structuring device

thumb|upright|Page from the about the Ægishjálmur (occult symbol)|Ægishjálmur occult symbol.

manuscript collection

thumb|Ättestupa in Västergötland as depicted by [[Willem Swidde in Erik Dahlbergh, Suecia antiqua et hodierna (1705)]]

tale from Icelandic Sagas

saga

range of verse forms written in Old Norse

Hungrvaka ("Hunger-waker") is an Old Norse history of the first five bishops of Skálholt. The text covers the period from the formation of the Icelandic church to 1178. As the text refers to Saint Thorlak (acknowledged 1198), Jón Ögmundsson (acknowledged as a local Icelandic saint in 1200), and Gizzur Hallsson (died 1206), it was probably written in the first half of the thirteenth century. However, the manuscripts witnesses of the saga are all post-medieval, the earliest dating from 1601. Because of similarities in style it is assumed that the author of Hungrvaka wrote Páls saga biskups and m

thumb|An illuminated page from a AM 227 fol.|14th century Icelandic copy of Stjórn I. The capital letter marks the beginning of Genesis 25:20. Stjórn () is the name given to a collection of Old Norse translations of Old Testament historical material dating from the 14th century, which together cover Jewish history from Genesis through to II Kings. Despite the collective title, Stjórn is not a homogeneous work. Rather, it consists of three separate works which vary in date and context, labelled Stjórn I, II and III by scholar I.J. Kirby.

song

poetric texts written by Hallgrímur Pétursson

Ferskeytt (literally 'four-cornered') is an Icelandic stanzaic poetic form. It is a kind of quatrain, and probably first attested in fourteenth-century rímur such as Ólafs ríma Haraldssonar. It remains one of the dominant metrical forms in Icelandic versifying to this day.

genre of saga