The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason

Oddr Snorrason, a Benedictine monk in northern Iceland in the late twelfth century, composed a landmark Latin biography of the legendary Norwegian king Olaf Tryggvason (died 1000 C.E.). This biography was soon translated into Icelandic, and the translation (though not the Latin original) is preserved in two somewhat differing versions and a small fragment of a third. The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason is the first English translation of this text, augmented by an introduction and notes to guide the reader.

There is a strong possibility that Oddr's biography was the first full-length saga of the Icelandic Middle Ages. It ushered in a century of saga writing that assured Iceland a unique place in medieval literature and in the history of prose writing. Aside from being a harbinger of the saga tradition, and indeed of the modern novel, The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason has its own literary merits, including an epic description of the great Battle of Svoldr, in which King Olaf succumbed. In significant ways the narrative of this battle anticipates the mature style of the classical sagas in the thirteenth century.

Theodore M. Andersson, one of the greatest authorities on Old Norse kings' sagas, has recently dedicated himself to making some of the most intriguing but sadly neglected sagas accessible to a larger audience.... Olafs saga is in fact an extremely complex and charming saga, which merits more scholarly attention, as well as a larger audience. We have every reason to hope that Andersson's careful and erudite translation is a first step toward a new understanding of this neglected saga.

Anderson's thorough introduction discusses the issues relating to the author and his sources; it also offers an interpretation of the text and surveys the manuscripts, editions, and translations of the saga.... Anderson's analysis of the sources of Olaf's saga is particularly valuable, demonstrating that the similarities between Theodoricus's history and Oddr's saga can be explained better by common sources than by direct borrowing.