Laxdæla saga
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Laxdæla saga, also Laxdœla saga or The Saga of the People of Laxárdalur, is one of the sagas of Icelanders. Written in the 13th century, it tells of people in the Breiðafjörður area in western Iceland from the late 9th century to the early 11th century. The saga particularly focuses on a love triangle between Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir, Kjartan Ólafsson and Bolli Þorleiksson. Kjartan and Bolli grow up together as close friends but the love they both have for Guðrún causes enmity between them.
Kjartan Ólafsson is slain by his foster brother Bolli Þorleiksson. Bolli, filled with regret, holds the dying Kjartan in his arms.
Kjartan sees Hrefna with the headdress and decides he might as well own "both together, the bonnet and the bonnie lass".
Guðrún smiles at Helgi Harðbeinsson, right after he killed her third husband Bolli.
Guðrún encounters a ghost after her fourth and last husband Þorkell Eyjólfsson drowned at sea.
Sagas of Icelanders
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The sagas of Icelanders, also known as family sagas are a subgenre, or text groups of Icelandic sagas. They are prose narratives mostly based on historical events that mostly took place in Iceland in the ninth, tenth, and early eleventh centuries, during the so-called Saga Age. They were written in Old Icelandic, a western dialect of Old Norse. They are the best-known specimens of Icelandic literature.
Egill Skallagrímsson in a seventeenth-century manuscript of Egil's Saga
Grettir is ready to fight in this illustration from a seventeenth-century Icelandic manuscript.
Detail of a miniature from a thirteenth-century Icelandic manuscript