In the Library
Laxdaela Saga
Anonymous, 1245
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Muriel A. C. Press (1899)
- Chapters
- Chapters 78
- Length
- Length 71k words
£1.99
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To him I was worst whom I loved best.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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About the book
Four dreams trouble a girl in the Salmon River Valley, and a wise man reads them for her: a headdress she throws into a stream, a silver ring that slips off into deep water, a gold ring that breaks, a gold helmet so heavy she cannot hold her head straight, which falls from her into the fjord. They are her four husbands, and every one of them comes true. Gudrun Osvifrsdottir loves Kjartan Olafsson, and while he is away in Norway she marries the foster brother he was raised beside, Bolli Thorleiksson, after Bolli lets her believe Kjartan will not come home. What follows is the most quietly devastating killing in the sagas: ambushed in a narrow pass, Kjartan throws down his weapons and refuses to defend himself against Bolli, and dies in the arms of the man who struck him. The prose never once tells you what to feel. Decades later, old and blind at Helgafell, Gudrun answers her son's question about which man she loved best with a line Iceland has never stopped repeating.