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In the thirteenth century, on a volcanic island, populated by farmers (though some of them were of aristocratic descent), a literature emerged that had no analogs anywhere in the Middle Ages: tales of the country's first settlers and their descendants. These tales are called sagas, and they are intensely interesting. Some are short (between 30 and 60 pages); others are long (the size of an average modern novel). They are about men and women in whose lives the idea of honor and the ties of kinship determined every step. The passions are as volcanic as the island itself. Bloody feuds, the tragedy of enmeshed loyalties, murder, tempestuous courtship, and broken marriages intermingle with attacks by ghosts and adventures of shape-shifters. Scenes of litigation are numerous and breathtakingly interesting. Continental Europe had to wait 600 years until it developed anything comparable. The stark realism of the narrative produces an illusion of absolute verisimilitude. Scholars wonder to what extent the report of the events in the sagas can be trusted, how the writing of the sagas began, to what extent the ideas of 13-th century Christianity colored the descriptions of the pagan past, what the ethics of saga writers was, and why, despite the perfection of language and composition, the tales are universally anonymous. The prose in the sagas alternates with poetry, and this poetry is as unusual and unlike any other verses produced at any time anywhere as everything else in the sagas.