The eleven sagas and six shorter tales included here—set mostly around the turn of the first millennium AD (although written two to four centuries later)—charted new literary territory. While the rest of medieval literature was locked in lines of verse, the unknown authors of the sagas freely employed prose to fashion fictions of mythic roots and visionary scope that nonetheless portrayed, in realistic detail, the lives of the Norse families who first settled Iceland. Long before the advent of the novel as a robust form, these tales of independent men and women—farmers, poets, warriors, adventurers, outlaws, and matriarchs—expanded the domain of storytelling in tales that remain both puzzling and compelling today. Encompassing history and myth, the epic and the tragic, the comic and the sublime, these tales re-create a world of honor codes, feuds, and abiding obsessions in which the demands of agricultural work are treated with the same respect as heroic motives and burdens.