Leifur Eiriksson Publishing is an Icelandic publishing house established in 1993 by Jóhann Sigurðsson and Sigurður Viðar Sigmundsson with the ambitious aim of translating the complete body of the Sagas of Icelanders into English. The project brought together around thirty translators and a specialist editorial team under general editor Viðar Hreinsson, with contributors drawn from the fields of Old Norse literature, medieval studies and professional translation. Their work culminated in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, a coordinated English translation of the surviving Icelandic family sagas and associated shorter tales. The translations were subsequently used as the basis for a series of Penguin Classics editions.
The books associated with Leifur Eiriksson Publishing are medieval Icelandic sagas rather than works written by a modern author. They include stories of Viking-age explorers, warriors, poets, farmers and feuding families, covering such figures and traditions as Egil Skallagrimsson, Grettir the Strong and the Norse voyages to Greenland and North America. Individual Penguin editions, including Egil's Saga and The Sagas of Icelanders, draw upon translations produced by the Leifur Eiriksson project, with translators and editors such as Bernard Scudder, Robert Cook, Terry Gunnell and Keneva Kunz responsible for the modern English texts. The sagas combine family history, warfare, law, exploration, poetry and legend to provide one of the richest surviving literary records of medieval Scandinavian society.
