Is there any good source of Norse Sagas in English? I would like to read the stories of Eric the Red and Leif Ericsson directly.
I’m no expert on sagas, but just among the books on my shelf I have a book called The Sagas of Icelanders (with an introduction by Jane Smiley) and a book called Njal’s Saga. Both are published by Penguin. They have various translators.
I’ve read most of them in the Penguin translations and I would recommend them, good introductions too. My personal; favourites are Egil’s Saga, Njal’s Saga and the Laxdaela Saga.
Looking at my shelf again, I see that I also have Eric Brighteyes by H. Rider Haggard and Hrolf Kraki’s Saga by Poul Anderson.
Thanks.
By the way, aren’t the Icelandic Sagas free in Internet? I couldn’t find them.
Here you go: http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/ice/index.htm. The Penguin translations are better, but these are free and online.
There’s also this: http://www.sagadb.org/
Don’t forget The Technicolor Time Machine by Harry Harrison.
The Technicolor Time Machine is a fine book, but it’s not a translation or a retelling of one of the sagas. It’s a science fiction novel where some of the characters are Vikings.
Spoilsport. 
This is an excellent modern recreation of some of the Icelandic Eddas being chanted or sung.
The sleeve notes give both the Icelandic text of what’s being sung, and an English translation so you can follow along, which I found fairly easy to do.
Thanks! I will have fun this weekend reading them,
Like Springtime above, I read them in the Penguin editions. I have several of these. The one entitled The Norse Discovery of America contains the ones the POP asks about, and it was quite slim. I’m not sure if it’s still in print. I see that Penguin has more recently published a massive omnibus edition of sagas. There seems to be something about the publishing industry that militates against the publication of slim volumes these cdays. But you might be able to pick up a used copy through the used book sites.
Thanks! I’ll do.
Don’t miss the Orkneyinga Saga - it’s about the people of Orkney, which you get to by starting out in Scotland and going until you’re out of everything and there you have Orkney. The bits where they go on pilgrimage and try to woo a French lady with battlefield poetry are not to be missed.
Like Newfoundland? You get to by starting out in Canada and going until you’re out of everything and there you have Newfoundland?
Another Penguin: The Vinland Sagas – The Norse Discovery of America.
The 1965 edition (which I have) is easy to come by; a new translation was published in 2008.
Features Eric the Red, Leif Ericson, and a lot of folk whose stories all seem to start with, “So-and-so had to leave the community because of some killings he had done …”.
Seconding this. A very interesting book. It’s an attempt at retelling parts of the Frodissaga and Ynglingasaga as a modern novel, but aside from filling out what is assumed to be known to the original hearers for the modern reader, it sticks quite close to the original saga stories. In modern prose, of course, where the sagas would (usually) have been alliterative four-stress distichs.
Already referred to in #13 above.