Grettir’s Sagais the last of the great Icelandic sagas: it was probably written about 1325, some thirty or forty years afterNjal’s Saga, and at the end of the hundred years during which most of the important sagas were written. Its author was evidently a man of great knowledge and sophistication; the saga shows that he had mastered both the matter and the literary techniques of the earlier sagas.¹Grettir’s Sagais one of the longest, most profound, and most unorthodox of the sagas.

This work has sometimes been thought of as a crude folktale filled with monsters and...

There was a man called Onund¹ who was an Oplander on his mother’s side, but his father’s family were mostly from Rogaland and Hordaland. Onund, who was a notable viking, used to go across the North Sea to plunder. On one expedition, he was with Balki Blængsson of Sotaness, Orm the Wealthy, and a man called Hallvard. They had five ships, all of them well manned.

They were raiding in the Hebrides, and when they came to the Barra Isles they met a certain King Kjarval, who also had five ships.² They attacked him, and there was a fierce battle,...