The essays in this book are a selection of papers originally delivered at the symposium Creating the Medieval Saga in Bergen 2005. The essays have been revised after discussion with respondents and other members of the audience, and further refined in exchanges with the editors and the general editors of the Viking Collection since.

Focus at the symposium was on the ways in which editorial practices have created out of complex manuscript witnesses (dating from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century) a body of deceptively neat narratives, the medieval Icelandic sagas.

The Viking Collection was founded by the late Gerd Wolfgang Weber and Preben Meulengracht Sørensen to provide students and scholars in the field of Scandinavian studies, especially Old Norse and other Medieval areas, with a library of books on central topics of Northern civilization. It was -- and is -- the editors' hope that this selection of studies will appeal also to the general reader with an interest in the Scandinavian past. The Viking Collection contains mainly original works, but a few translations are also included. English is the language of the series.