Feud in the Icelandic Saga [Paperback]

Feud stands at the core of the Old Icelandic sagas. Jesse Byock shows how the dominant concern of medieval Icelandic societythe channeling of violence into accepted patterns of feud and the regulation of conflictis reflected in the narrative of the family sagas and theSturlunga sagacompilation. This comprehensive study of narrative structure demonstrates that the sagas are complex expressions of medieval social thought.

Jesse Byockis Professor of Old Norse and Scandinavian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and author ofMedieval Iceland(California, 1988) and translator ofThe Saga of the Volsungs(California, 1990).