"Peter Hallberg's book Íslendingasögur was published in Sweden in 1956. For four decades it has been one of the main aids for students everywherereading the Icelandic Sagas - which are the Nordic world's most renowned contribution to world literature. Hallberg's book, which deals largely with the great family sagas, was and still to a great extent still is, an excellent book for beginners, being as it is objective and informative, well written and readable. The opinions it expresses on saga writing and the origins of the sagas are, however, out of date.

The literary problem in which Hallberg had by far the greatest interest was the relationship between the oral tradition and written works of authors. According to the free-prose theory, the family sagas had existed in an oral form from the time the events took place, that is a hypothesis ever since the Viking Age. According to the book-prose theory, to which Hallberg himself subscribed, the sagas were written in the 13th century, the work of a handful of original, outstanding authors, including Snorri Sturluson. According to this theory the authors were not influenced to any real degree by other medieval literature.

Now Professor Vésteinn Ólason of the University of Iceland, known internationally in his field, has publishedan excellent work on this subject in English, an ideal successor to Hallberg's book. Ólason, like Hallberg, deals primarily with the classic family sagas; however, Ólason is not so preoccupied with the question of the origin of the sagas and their authors. Instead, he focuses on the narrative art and artistic character of the sagas, their structure and style. The books principal theory is that the text of the sagas should be examined as a dialogue between the authors, who lived in the 13th century, and the Viking Age, when the stories take place. This dialogue makes its mark upon the narrative approach and the attitude to reality.

The concept "dialogue" may here be understood in at least two ways. Firstly, as a "cleaving" of the text, of the type described by theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, and secondly ,as a real dialogue passed down orally between two voices: writer and tradition. Vésteinn Ólason, like many other contemporary scholars, believes that the anonymous saga writers actually had oral traditions to work from, which are now lost. He also belives that these writers or "authors" (if one may so call them), applied the artistic skills of in the later middle ages to this narrative material, and also viewed the past from a Christian perspective.

In Ólason's view it is the tension between these two different eras, the Viking Age and the late Middle Ages, that moulds the sagas: their power derives from this dynamic. Although the family sagas are largely set in the Viking Age, before the adoption of Christianity, they often address the meeting of these two worlds, the heathen and the Christian. This watershed is reflected in the text's narrative approach, their form and the ideology behind them. Ólason is especially successful when he analyses the narrative technique of each individual saga, for instance the interplay of verse and prose in the Saga of Gísli Súrsson. He is, admittedly sometimes a little obscure when discussing the various theories about the sagas. But this is because he wishes everyone well, wants to be fair to all scholars of former times, and preferably avoid criticising them. (In this sense, Hallberg was often refreshingly direct , although he was invariably wrong.) In spite of this, neither students nor the general reader will easily find a better guide to the country of the Icelandic sagas than Vésteinn Ólason; he has few equals in terms of knowledge and judgement, and his familiarity with the latest theories in the field is unsurpassed. It is to be hoped that Ólason's book will be translated into Swedish as soon as possible, and adopted as a textbook in Swedish universities."
(Svenska Dagbladet, Lars Lönnroth)