A review by quoththegirl
The Sagas of Icelanders: (penguin Classics Deluxe Edition), by Various

5.0

Good gravy, what a doorstop of a book. At almost 800 pages, it took me more than two months to read. This is a phenomenal collection, though. The sagas are translated by different linguists but still have a cohesive tone, and I found them to be fascinating. Fair warning, there are about a zillion people with the same name, and I will admit that after the dozenth Thorkell or Thorstein showed up, I was a hopelessly lost as to which one was which, but fortunately the geneology complications didn't detract much from the stories. I had hoped to have seen a lot of the locations described in person by now, but our trip to Iceland will have to wait until next summer. At least the delay gave me a chance to finish all of the tales in the collection. Massive as this collection is, it by no means includes all of the Icelandic sagas; it doesn't even include all of the sagas of the Icelanders (one of the four categories of sagas, encompassing the family sagas or Íslendingasögur), although it does include all of the most well-known (and possibly best) ones. Since this collection doesn't touch on the legendary sagas, chivalric sagas, and sagas of saints' lives, I'll probably look into reading more of those one day...after I recover a bit from all the Thorkells.