"In Iceland, the Age of the Vikings is also known as the Saga Age. A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world's greatest literary treasures - as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare.

Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured farther west - to Greenland and, ultimately, the coast of North America itself.".

"This new Viking edition of The Sagas of Icelanders, commemorating the thousandth anniversary of Leif Eiriksson's historic voyage, is drawn from the first English translation of the entire corpus of the Sagas, together with the forty-nine connected tales - a five-volume set published by Leifur Eiriksson Publishing, Iceland. Thirty translators were selected for this monumental project, including leading international scholars from seven countries."--BOOK JACKET.