saga recap
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Fractured Fairy Tales: ‘The Sagas And Shit’ Rewrites History
Tackling the Icelandic Sagas can be a daunting task. Many of them are prefaced with complex descriptions of lineage and familial relations, and the writing can in many parts read dry and academic, even in modern translations. This can be discouraging for…
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Völuspá: The Prophecy of the Seeress
In this series, I illuminate the individual poems of the Edda–that most famous, epic masterpiece of Icelandic literary tradition–with humour, vulgarity and modern realness. Are you reading this and thinking, “What the fuck is the Edda?” If so, you should start by…
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Saga Recap: The Saga of Ketill Salmon
To celebrate the return of the world’s favorite fantasy-violence-porn series to its favorite fantasy-violence-porn TV station, I’ve decided to recap the closest thing that the Icelandic sagas have to a fantasy-violence-porn trilogy. It’s got it all: blood-splatter, steamy infidelity, fire-breathing dragons, and…
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Recap: The Tale of the Earl’s Poet Þorleifur
You know this is going to be a good story when the author begins by telling you that it ends with some rich dude who “drowns in a dark dungeon of wretched torments, in misery and subjection without end.” We’ve all been…
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Saga Recap: The Saga of Bosi And Herrauður
One thing you should know about the Icelandic sagas is that some of them are not only sexually charged, they’re utterly fucking pornographic. And equally pun-ographic. There’s no other way to prepare you for what you’re about to read, so let’s just…
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Saga Recap: The Saga Of Grettir The Strong
This is the saga of Grettir, the grandson of the “bravest and nimblest one-legged man to ever live in Iceland.” Don’t you wish your grandpa was that cool? Don’t be too jealous though because, honestly, things don’t really work out all that…
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Saga Recap: The Saga Of Crooked Refur
This saga starts with a lazy asshole named Refur, which is the Icelandic word for fox. So you probably already know where this is going. After his father dies, his shitty neighbor Þorbjörn starts letting his sheep graze all over Refur’s family…
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Saga Recap: The Tale of Þorsteinn Housebaby
This story starts with a dude called Þorsteinn Housebig. He is so huge that he can barely fit through any door in Norway. Doorway, shnorway—he just shoves himself through anyway. His adventure begins when he manages to fit himself through a particularly…
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RECAP: Saga Of Gísli Súrsson
There are more sex jokes in the sagas than you might guess, and neither jokes about butt-sex nor the literary masterpieces of the genre are exempt. The Saga of Gísli Súrsson begins with a good old-fashioned Norwegian family feud in which a…
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RECAP: The Tale of Shady Halli
This Old Icelandic story begins and ends with dick jokes, which is totally my type of story. It’s classified as a tale rather than a saga because it is pretty short, but goddamn if it doesn’t deliver. (And no, that is not…
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RECAP: Saga of Egill Skalla-Grímsson
This saga starts out with some big, hairy asshole named Kveld-Úlfur (“evening-wolf”), who may or may not be a werewolf. He is suspected of such based on his frequent bouts of rage in the evenings, but these could just as easily be…
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RECAP: The Dream of Star-Oddi
So some dude named Oddi, who is a good at astronomy but shitty at poetry, eats a bunch of psychedelic mushrooms and trips some craaazy shit. Technically, he is on a “fishing expedition” and “dreams” it but we’ve all told our parents…
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RECAP: The Saga of Sigurgarður the Valiant
It’s purely coincidence that “frækna,” the Icelandic word for “valiant,” looks a bit like the English word for “freak” because this saga is chock full of some freaky motherfuckers. Sigurgarður himself is normal bordering on boring but his BFF is a literal…
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RECAP: Saga of Ragnar Shaggy-Britches
Listen up because I am about to recap the Saga on which your favorite, wildly inaccurate History Channel drama series, ‘Vikings’, is based. And yes, it is literally called the Saga of Ragnar Shaggy-Britches. It is one of few Sagas that is…
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RECAP: The Tale of Dumbass-Hrói
Our summer Saga series has taken us to Norway and Sweden (and will again) but has largely skipped all things Danish. We wouldn’t want our former colonizers to feel left out (they were very involved for soooo long after all), so this…
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RECAP: Saga of the People of Kjalarnes
If you’ve ever stopped along Reykjavík’s waterfront to ogle the magnificent mountainess known as Esja, you’ve probably seen some little buildings scattered about her feet. That is Kjalarnes, the site of the only Saga to take place within sight of our modern…
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RECAP: Möttuls Saga, the Saga of the Mantle
If you remember the portrait of Arthurian nobility painted by Erex, this Saga is about to fuck your shit right up. It’s another translation of an Old French poem, technically into “Norwegian” but this was so long ago that Norwegian was just…
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RECAP: Saga of Eiríkur the Red
Let’s just get this out of the way upfront: forget what the history books told you because Columbus did not “discover” the Americas. Several hundred years before he set out across the Atlantic, the Norsemen sailed along the coasts of what is…
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RECAP: Saga Of Hrolf The Tramper
The Saga of this issue is Göngu-Hrolfs Saga, literally “Walking Hrolfur’s Saga” but typically translated as the Saga of Hrolfur the Tramper. Boring old people like to argue about whether it’s a “legendary saga” or a “romance saga,” but just like most…