These things are conventional in Icelandic family sagas. Still, the appeal of the saga is not its historicity but its presentation of Gudrun, the most memorable of all saga heroines, and the tragic conflicts that lead to familial enmity and a seemingly endless cycle of vengeance. However, the author’s sense of chronology and historic detail is flawed. Laxdaela Saga is clearly based on historical events, as evidenced by the records in the 12thcentury Icelandic Landnamabok (Book of settlements). In her old age, after the advent of Christianity in Iceland, Gudrun becomes the first nun and anchoress in the country. After this is accomplished, she marries again. Bolli himself is killed later in retribution for Kjartan’s murder, and Gudrun ultimately urges her sons to take vengeance for their father’s death. She marries Kjartan’s foster brother Bolli, and (once again like Brynhild) plots vengeance on her former love with her new husband. Gudrun loves Kjartan, but like Brynhild, she is denied his love. The main action of the saga concerns three of Ketill’s descendants in the seventh generation: Gudrun Osvifsdottir, Kjartan Olafsson, and Bolli Thorleiksson, whose love triangle has been compared with that of Brynhild, Sigurd, and Gunnar in the heroic tradition recounted in the Elder Edda and elsewhere. She dispenses land to her kinsmen and to others,who later quarrel over boundaries as Iceland becomes more settled. His daughter, Unn the Deep-Minded, leaves Scotland for Iceland with her grandchildren a generation later, and there becomes established as matriarch of a large family and holds sway over a significant portion of land at Breidafjord in western Iceland.
Laxdaela Saga begins as Ketill Flatnose flees Norway to escape the tyrannical policies of King Harald Fairhair. The saga is remarkable in its emphasis on strong woman protagonists, which has led to speculation that the anonymous author was a woman. Set in Norway, Scotland, and Iceland, the saga covers the period from the settlement of Iceland in the ninth century through the country’s acceptance of Christianity in 1000. The Laxdaela Saga (Saga of the people of Salmon River Valley) is a 13th-century Icelandic saga telling the tragic story of eight generations of the descendents of Ketill Flatnose.
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