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pictures:
Guðrún Ósvífursdóttir
films:
Útlaginn (1981) also known as: "Outlaw: The Saga of Gisli" (1981),
Gísla saga Súrssonar
These supposed Norse sagas were, written by Icelanders, in Iceland, in Icelandic (Icelanders can pick up the original texts and read them). The sagas are Icelandic and even though they are sometimes referred to as Norse it is erroneous to do so.
78.151.173.120 (
talk) 14:18, 29 March 2008 (UTC)In Lithuanian language Saga is Saka/sakme/sakai/sakmes from the word 'sekt' which means to tell stories...and Vikings or Variags (in russian) in Lithuanian language comes from the word 'vaikytis/varyt/vytis' and that means to drive/pursue/hunt/chase/be after...Pagan in Lithuanian language 'Pa-ganyti/pa-ginti' means to herd/depasture/drive...from the same word english have the word to hunt and one Empire was bearing the same name Huns meaning 'Ganiai/ganytojai'...moreover even the word to defent in Lithuanian language is the same 'ginti'
78.151.173.120 (
talk) 14:18, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
Talking about that the sagas were written by Icelanders, in Iceland, in Icelandic is anachronistic. No concept of nation states existed at the time and I think you are letting your nationalistic feelings carry you away. The correct adjective is without doubt Norse. I find it funny that you even claim the word "saga" as being from Icelandic. Do you really believe English imported any words from Icelandic? They imported most of them from Norse due to the Viking settlements in England, just look up the origins of the word "saga" in the Oxford dictionary. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 158.37.148.43 ( talk) 01:15, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
Implying here of course that Norse refers to the "Scandinavians" in (early) medieval times, not the Norwegians. Perhaps that is the source of the misunderstanding? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.166.255.158 ( talk) 21:02, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
In the Sagas they clearly differenced between the nations although not always by modern terminology but saying that the concept of a nation did not exist at the time is hilarious, the concept of the artificial nation is modern (the USA being the first, probably) and the concept of nationalism for an artificial nation is newish but the concepts of a nation and nationalism are old (þjóð, dansk, deutch etc), since we are on the subject of the sagas there are nationalistic concepts to be found in them and other much older literature.
Anyhow all the sagas are written in Iceland and they clearly refer to Icelanders as Icelanders at the time despite the ramblings of 158.37.148.43, why are they not referred to as such on Wikipedia ? Is the Norwegian tourist board still actively trying to maintain that Norway, despite being closer to Italy than Iceland was the same cultural zone as Iceland in the 12th century despite the 2 languages being different and a completely different set of runes for instance being used by the 2 at the time? It should be pointed out that the oldest habitation by "the Norse" found in Iceland date from around 500 and the sagas were written 6 to 700 years later. The first English speaking settlers came to the Americas in 1620, will we be referring to the inhabitants of the modern USA or Canada as the "Brits" in 2312 ? Given that the language is largely the same that would make some sense, which is actually more than can be said about the languages of Scandinavia and Iceland at the time. The distance from the UK to America is similar to the distance from Norway to Iceland BTW.
Here in the UK at the least I find it really odd to see references to Norse or "Norwegian Sagas" that were actually written in a different part of the world, in a different; if related language, by people that had no concept of "the Norse" (in addition nothing much of note was written in Norwegian until the 1980's, Ibsen et al. wrote in Danish, a language that is still used in Norway as a writing language or "Bokmal"), the "Arabic literature of Iran" (Not Arabs) and fantasy fiction classified as "science" fiction (surely opposite terms?), but your mileage may vary ......
Norse BTW is not a nordic term, there was a tendency to use dansk for the nordic language group as a whole and for runic writing but not for the "Scandinavians" as a whole, they actually do not appear to have had a concept of the Norse nations as a whole. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.145.236.116 ( talk) 01:05, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
I'd suggest, though, that some thought be given to merging Sagas with this one. Sagas in the plural is a nonstandard title in any case. Saga, apparently, may require a disambiguation page. -- IHCOYC 14:08, 20 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Quite nice work on this page, but I think the article exaggerates the importance of the word 'fate' in the sagas. The line 'noone questions fate' bothers me, since this is not always true in Old Nordic litterature. I can not give concrete examples, since I do not know how to translate the titles of certain texts properly. My point is, the Vikings were not as fatalistic as the article may suggest; they were intelligent, free individuals too and were not ruled by some unquestionable fate, like the article seemingly states.
Can saga really mean an epic poem? For instance, can Beowulf be called a saga? It is out of the question in, say, Icelandic or Danish, but English is not my first language, so I'd be curious to know. Io 15:41, 27 May 2004 (UTC)
Also, could you call Snorra-Edda a saga? It's a poetic manual, not a coherent tale, and its parts consist of, in essence, a mythological overview, a dictionary and a list of meters. Io 16:33, 27 May 2004 (UTC)
"Saga" means "saying". It's the same word, only with a hard, rather than soft guttural. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.106.203.96 ( talk) 06:37, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
for two reasons: It is not Norse and it is not a saga. I also have problems with the following:
What does this actually mean? Especially, what does questionaried mean?
Cheers Io 23:53, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
-- Yst 01:50, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Beowulf should appear under Norse mythology, but not under Norse saga (which is a much more well-defined corpus). But we can link it at as a 'see also', of course.
dab
(ᛏ) 08:11, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)
One should always read before one edits. Beowulf plays a larger role in the article than I thought. I'll remove him altogether at a later date, if nobody objects. Io 00:14, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I'm glad to make your acquaintance (that goes for Dsmdgold as well, of course :-). There's nothing wrong with Beowulf. It is a fine poem. It's just that it is neither Norse nor a saga and this article is entitled Norse saga. Could you tell me, why Beowulf should be here?
To Dsmdgold: I will, provided that I don't get involved in any kind of war. There are a lot of things to be remedied in the article (and part of the paragraph I asked about is mine, so I plead guilty on some charges :-).
Cheers Io 01:23, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)
More to follow. Listing the entire canon may seem excessive, but this should be the place to do it, if at all. Io 17:55, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)
It sounds more programmatic than encyclopedic.
Also, should the section
The saga as a literary technique
be kept as it is? As it stands, it is a list of a variety of genres with little in common, except that stories are told in all. It seems way too inclusive. Io 22:13, 22 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Dear friends, in bugzilla:660 I have explained some problems related to Norse saga. Would be happy to be in contanct with you. Regards Gangleri 20:48, 2004 Oct 7 (UTC)
See also: Wikipedia:Invalid article names Regards [[User:Gangleri| Gangleri | T | Th]] 20:23, 2004 Nov 11 (UTC)
moved here from
User talk:Gangleri#On Norse Saga Thanks Jallan!
An attempt to arrive at a consensus on spelling of Old Norse names appears at
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Old Norse/Old Icelandic/Old English). However only three people turned up who were intrested in discussing the matter, and though we mostly agreed, that is not enough to enforce a Wikipedia rule. But I have been mostly following those rules in edits since September 1, and no-one has yet complained. But I have not tried to enforce them on all articles. Mostly I have followed the conventions in new articles I have writen and have erratically made some changes in accordance with the consenus in articles where I have cause to make some other change.
Since this is the English Wikipedia, we are supplosed to follow common English practice in rendering foreign names. But there really isn't one for Old Norse names. In some texts, for example in Rudolf Simek's Dictionary of Northern Mythology, trans. by Angela Hall, full Norse spellings are retained throughout. But other works, such as Kevin Crossley-Holland's The Norse Myths (also available as The Penguin Book of Norse Myths: Gods of the Vikings), use ultra-anglicized forms with case endings removed, with þ replaced by th, ð replaced by d, æ and œ both replaced by ae, and all diacritics dropped.
The convention tentatively decided on was an intermediate convention, used in John Lindow's Norse Mythology and Andy Orchard's Cassell's Dictionary of Norse Myth & Legend. See again the discussion at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Old Norse/Old Icelandic/Old English). This really applies to mythology only. Icelandic saga translations in English generally omit all diacritics. And Wikipedia's rule is to follow English conventions. Inconsistantly however, diacritics and ð are often retained on modern Icelandic names. It is hideous mess.
The hooked o ( ǫ ) is almost always rendered as ö or simply o in English texts except when the genuine Old Norse forms with case endings are being presented, which excuses us from having to worry overmuch about it. It is also rendered as ö in all genuine Old Norse texts that I have found on the web, not distinguished from the rarer, genuine Old Norse ö. So Wikipedia articles should mostly do the same. The hooked o and œ are the only characters which cannot be included in article titles (until eventually the English Wikipedia moves to Unicode). But even after a move to Unicode, the hooked o should probably only appear as the title of an alternate redirect to an article with title containg ö or o instead. The letters Œ and œ can be used now on Windows machines in article titles by entering the Windows 1252 characters directly into the Wikipedia editor (at least on some systems). However, the character values are not legal values for printable characters in the Latin-1 character set currently used by Wikipedia and are likely to cause problems on non-Windows systems. Therefore Œ and œ should never be used in titles and always rendered by HTML entities in text rather than typing them in directly. Whoever has placed the new special characters line at the bottom of the edit window seems not to know this.
On the grounds that the Fornaldarsögur belong to legend, I have used the conventions suggested for mythology in articles discussing those sagas and characters that appear in them. However in sagas dealing with the historical period, particularly with Icelandic sagas, current English practice (and most older English practice that I know about) is almost overwhelmingly against using diacritics. See the index to the recently released The Sagas of the Icelanders at [9]. The forms that appear in that book are mostly identical to those found in other commonly available medieval Icelandic sagas, except that a minority of translators insist on rendering ð by th instead of by d. Another difference is that many render æ and even œ directly rather than as ae as this book does. I prefer keeping the ligature letters. When two forms of a foreign name are found in common use, it makes sense to use the more pedantically accurate of the two as the norm in a reference work (though acknowledging the more simplified forms).
I have begun the practice of including the genuine Old Norse form in parentheses and in italics on the first appearance of a name in an article. I also include other variant forms at the bottom of an article to enable search engines to find references to articles mentioning the names in variant spellings and variant translations of surnames. I also always create ASCII redirects without diacritics to article names containing diacritics. See Halfdan the Old for how I currently manage things. I used the spelling Halfdan rather than Hálfdan because the name is rendered without the acute accent by both Andy Orchard and John Lindow. They drop diacritics from names that are very familiar in English without them, which is a common practice: use the most familiar form for commonly known names. Most English writers use the spellings Odin and Thor, rather than Ódin and Thór, for the same reason. I realize now that I should also have rendered the Old Norse name Óláfr as Olaf rather than Óláf and will make that change at some time.
Jallan 04:08, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Since the English Wikipedia doesn't currently support Unicode in article names, and since there's a request pending on WP:RfD to delete one of these "non-legible" redirects (see above), I would really appreciate it you all could come to a definite decision on whether you want to keep or delete them. Noel (talk) 13:37, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I am thinking of writing an article on the Gutasaga. It is a Norse saga, but it is not Icelandic. Any opinions about its possible mention in this article?-- Wiglaf 18:54, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
According to the 1989 Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Volume 4 (of 12), page 289, article by author Peter A. Jorgensen (University of Georgia):
He goes on to give further bibliographical references in German academic journals should you desire those. My question is, since the Icelandic version is the only one known to exist, if this does not go under Iceland, where would it go? Given that there does not seem to be a consensus on its origins, I see no reason it should not be listed here. -- Stbalbach 01:38, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Although hooked-o-acute = o-ogonek-acute does not exist precomposed in Unicode, the Unicode standard does provide for combinations of characters and accents. This particular combination would be Vǫ́lsung (Vǫ́lsung). This renders correctly (though not beautifully) on Firefox, but to force correct rendering across all browsers including Internet Explorer, you should use the IPA template: Vǫ́lsung ({{IPA|Vǫ́olsung}}). (This is just technical information—I have no opinion on orthographic conventions for Old Norse.) -- Macrakis 17:01, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC), corrected 19:23
....and what about the Biskupasögur? This is a bit of a glaring omission.
I did a somewhat bold re-write, splitting off long lists of sagas into smaller articles. They were getting tedious.
dino 20:03, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
Is there any sort of chronological order in which to read the sagas? Just read and enjoyed the Penguin edition of the Vinland Sagas and wondering where I should go next. Thanks! Cardinal Wurzel 10:39, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
Was that a stupid question or does nobody know the answer? Cardinal Wurzel 21:50, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
Norse saga seems a bit redundant to me. Wouldn't it be better to call the article saga? It would be more logical and consistent with most of the other wikis. Sigo 16:17, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
All right, the deed is done. Note that the good thing about having the 'Norse' prefix in the title was that it discouraged people from adding discussion of all sorts of non-Norse literature. Now we'll have to be more vigilant in keeping the article on topic; i.e. the academic sense of 'saga'. Haukur 17:18, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Several important points have been raised on this page, but I'll post my comments here at the bottom for convenience:
-- dllu 13:14, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
There was a section in this article summarizing the meanings of the word 'saga' in the various modern Scandinavian languages. I removed it because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a dictionary. (see
WP:NOT) An encyclopedia treats concepts, not words. When we say 'saga' in English, we're referring specifically to the Old Norse epics. What the word 'saga' means in the modern Scandinavian languages (or even in Old Norse) is irrelevant (except to clarify the etymology). Along the same lines, the article
ulna talks specifically about that particular bone, not about the
elbow in general, though "ulna" in Latin means "elbow"; the article
chef talks about professional cooks, though the French word means any "head" i.e. boss. --
Macrakis (
talk) 16:28, 1 September 2008 (UTC)
Maybe there should be a Disambiguation link or something, for the more general usage (meaning "epic tale"). [It's tempting to put "This page is for actual sagas; for other uses, just go away."] ~Eric F 184.76.225.106 ( talk) 14:55, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
twilight is the meaning of many things but the most used meaning is:Example The period after sunset and before sunrise ; any faint light; a period of waning glory, decline in achievements, etc —Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.59.3.87 ( talk) 18:43, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
Most people believe saga means the stuff in ARTICLE.
But saga means vampire things like a 4-part saga between vampires and werewolves or vampires and wizards —Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.59.3.87 ( talk) 13:36, 18 July 2009 (UTC)
Ugh, if you are referring to this atrocity of a book named Twilight - It's not a saga.
Ribbedebie (
talk) 16:03, 25 October 2009 (UTC)
"The texts are epic tales in prose, ...often with stanzas or whole poems" - sorry I'm ignorant on these matters, but isn't this sentence contradictory? It's either prose, or it's poetry - or am I wrong? Plus this doesn't carry a reference and what's with the '...'? — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
178.78.86.107 (
talk) 18:14, 19 October 2011 (UTC)
There are many places where citations are needed, but I for one would like to see one for this (in Background section): However, most scholars now believe the sagas were conscious artistic creations, based on both oral and written tradition. -- In fact, this article relies heavily on anonymous "scholars". This is not a moot point; I'm trying to evaluate reliability for information in Icelandic saga. ~Eric F 184.76.225.106 ( talk) 14:12, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
At the moment there's one line, which almost looks like vandalism: "A modern example of a saga is George Lucas's classic film trilogy, The Star Wars Saga. The Lord of the Rings novels by J.R.R. Tolkien are also a saga."
I agree with both of those as examples but it would be nice to have a definition too. My understanding is that the modern English useage, when refering to modern literature, is a story that covers a long period of time (several years at least, more often several human generations) and is mainly about events on a very large, epic scale (usually along the lines of a fight between good and evil that threatens the entire world, universe, realm or whatever). But that's just my understanding, I have no idea if it's accurate. Ideally someone somewhere will have given an 'official' authoritive definition we could include, but again I have no idea if that's the case. As you may have guessed by now I don't think I have remotely enough knowledge on the subject to make the edit myself, which is why I'm asking here instead. But I think it would be helpful to acknowledge and address the modern useage. (If only as a more encyclopedic alternative to a section entitled "Why Twilight is NOT a Saga, no matter what the advertising says".) Danikat ( talk) 22:17, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
I would have liked to see something in here about Saga as a literary genre to add to the current text about Saga as a historic artefact. Some of the points that an editor might like to consider discussing or including are as follows:
Were the sagas written in black bearberry ink as author Michael Ridpath writes in his novel Where the Shadows Lie? 79.79.248.208 ( talk) 07:51, 2 June 2013 (UTC)
This edit comment makes me suspicious about the change made, especially because the person made a more substantial edit to the Sagas of Icelanders page that was reverted. Can someone review?-- Duesouthfan ( talk) 19:33, 6 January 2017 (UTC)
Edda is poetry and saga is pretty much prose. There seems to be some overlap although I don’t know for sure. But this article must make reference to eddas and expain how they are related, mention authors who composed both, if any, etc. This is bad that it’s missing. Rich ( talk) 00:11, 23 April 2020 (UTC)
These sagas focus on the lives of Scandinavian kings and their reigns. A blend of history with legendary elements.
Family sagas are prose narratives that depict the lives, conflicts, and adventures of Icelandic families and individuals from the 10th and 11th centuries.
Legendary sagas blend Norse mythology, heroism, and history to tell the stories of legendary heroes and their adventures, often taking place before the settlement of Iceland.
These works focus on Norse mythology, beliefs, and religious practices.
Skaldic poetry is a highly stylized form of Old Norse poetry composed by skalds (court poets) in praise of kings, nobles, or in commemoration of significant events.
Rímur are narrative poems composed in Iceland from the 14th century onwards.
( talk) 19:03, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
"Sagas are prose stories and histories, composed in Iceland and to a lesser extent elsewhere in Scandinavia"
Most Sagas are poetic. And were written in Bavaria and Austria. Not Iceland Scandinavia! 79.106.203.96 ( talk) 06:34, 7 September 2023 (UTC)