Anonymous 
Laxdaela Saga 

As in the case with many other Icelanders’ sagas, the author of Laxdaela is unknown, but believed to have been composed in the middle of the thirteenth century. The tale has often been regarded as curiously feminine and speculated to have been written by a woman. The Laxdaela Saga, a story of the men and women of the Salmon River valley, is of an Icelandic family that relates the history of some five or six generations of prominent individuals descended from emigrant Norwegian chieftains, tracing the disastrous removal of many lives during the early Icelandic Commonwealth period. The years prior to Iceland’s annexation by Norway in 1262, were a time of settlement, Christianization, and national independence. The saga begins with two branches of the family: those of Unn the Deep-Minded and Bjorn the Easterner, whose lines produce the heroic Kjartan and fiery protagonist, Gudrun. A mixture of historical fact, epic, myth, anachronism, romance, and literary inventions, this saga is a dramatization of the circumstances surrounding a blood-feud between two sides of a great dynasty.