For almost a thousand years, the story of the Norse discovery of America has been told and retold — yet the sagas themselves have rarely reached modern readers in their full power. This edition renders both surviving accounts, The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red's Saga, in clear, present-day English that keeps the spare beauty and unflinching honesty of the original. Here is Eirik the Red, banished for manslaughter, who gives Greenland its hopeful name; his son Leif, who steers further west than any Norseman before him; Gudrid, the widowed voyager whose visions and pilgrimages bind two worlds; and Freydis, whose ambition turns a colony into a tragedy. Rooted in the oral memories of Viking-age Iceland and set down in the thirteenth century, these tales move between pagan prophecy and Christian faith, between festival fire and frozen sea. Faithful to the meaning and spirit of the old texts, this is the Vinland saga as it was meant to be heard: timeless, strange, and deeply human. Part of The World Scriptures Library.
