Northwoods Philological Press

Veraldar saga, the saga of the world, tells the whole history of the world as twelfth-century Iceland received it: the six days of Creation, the Flood and the tower of Babel, Alexander, Caesar, the Incarnation, and the long procession of emperors down to the writer’s own day, where the narrative halts in the present tense: “and now Frederick is [emperor].” Written while Frederick Barbarossa reigned, it stands among the earliest vernacular prose histories of the world in medieval Europe, and it is a rare witness to what an educated medieval Icelander perceived the history of the world to be.

This volume offers the first complete translation of the saga into any language, made from Jakob Benediktsson’s edition of its principal manuscript, AM 625 4to. The translation holds close to the Old Norse, preserving the saga’s plain, swift narrative voice; an introduction treats the work’s origins, manuscripts, and sources, and the text is accompanied by explanatory notes, marginal references to the source edition, and a full index.