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
Icelandic is a North Germanic language from the Indo-European language family spoken by about 314,000 people, the vast majority of whom live in Iceland, where it is the national language. Since it is a West Scandinavian language, it is most closely related to Faroese, western Norwegian dialects, and the extinct language Norn. It is not mutually intelligible with the continental Scandinavian languages and is more distinct from the most widely spoken Germanic languages, English and German. The written forms of Icelandic and Faroese are very similar, but their spoken forms are not mutually intelligible.
A page from the Landnámabók, an early Icelandic manuscript
Photograph taken from page 176 of Colloquial Icelandic
Eyjafjallajökull, one of the smaller ice caps of Iceland, situated to the north of Skógar and to the west of Mýrdalsjökull, is Icelandic for "glacier of Eyjafjöll", in turn "glacier of island mountains".
