
In Viking sagas, the ‘truth’ is a tangle of history and fiction
Historical ‘truth’ looked very different to medieval Icelanders, whose old sagas reveal a tangle of fiction and history
by Anatoly Liberman
Anatoly Liberman is professor in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic and Dutch at the University of Minnesota. He writes the weekly Oxford Etymologist column for Oxford University Press, and his books include Word Origins … And How We Know Them (2009) and The Saga Mind and the Beginnings of Icelandic Prose (2018).