 The sagas connect us to the distant past. Even though they were written a thousand years ago, readers can still engage with these stories. They can really enjoy the bromance between Njals and Gunnar in Njalsaga. And they can feel the rage that Gudrun feels when Kjartan marries another in Laxaila Saga. The sagas demonstrate a strong literary culture in a vernacular language during a time when most of Europe's books are still written in Latin. These stories teach us, just like other folk tales from other cultures, about the values and ideals that Icelanders hold dear. You can also find them all across Scandinavia. These kind of ideas are things like how to treat a guest in your home or how to deal with someone who has harmed you with violence and without. Or even the unique role that men and women play in guarding the family honour. The sagas have long been praised as early antecedents of literary realism. And yet when you read them close enough, you find that these stories are teeming with the supernatural. Ghosts, demons, the undead, and all sorts of scary figures. That's like a lot of other medieval literature. The sagas of the Icelanders are stories of not only kings and princes and knights and princesses, but also the wealthy and the poor, chieftains and slaves and women and children. The Icelandic sagas are a unique instance of a medieval literature where you can watch how an entire society comes into being and develops from scratch. It's a decentralized social order with no executive power, so the individual himself is responsible for the upkeep of justice and his own welfare. You should take this class because it's fun! Icelandic sagas, the Icelandic oseur, are a great place to start if you want to get into exciting culture, snappy dialogue, great insults, exciting action sequences, and you can go from there to stories with talking dragons, poems of love, and stories like the maiden sagas where women are not going to take any crap from men.