Saga Age Iceland, c. 870–1030

Iceland’s Saga Age conventionally covers the settlement of the island and the generations whose feuds, marriages, voyages and legal disputes were later preserved in the family sagas. Chieftainship, kinship and the Althing structured a society without a king resident on the island.

Farmsteads, seasonal assemblies, overseas trading and raiding connected Iceland to Norway, the British Isles and the wider Viking world. Honour disputes could move between formal arbitration and cycles of revenge, while conversion to Christianity changed law and belief around the year 1000.

This is the most specific setting for H. Rider Haggard’s Eric Brighteyes, which deliberately imitates saga narrative and places its fictional feud and romance in tenth-century Iceland.