The Genesis of a Saga Narrative

The origins of many of the Icelandic sagas have long been the subject of critical speculation and controversy. This book demonstrates that an investigation of the relationship between verse and prose in saga narrative can be used to reconstruct how the sagas were composed. O''Donoghue provides a detailed analysis of Kormaks saga revealing that far from being a seamless narrative of either pre-Christian oral tradition or later medieval fiction the work is in fact a patchwork of different kinds of literary materials.