Grettir's Saga

"Iceland , per capita, is said to print the most books and have the most published authors of any country in the world, and this is nothing new. Long before sagas were written down, Icelanders were known as master storytellers. Living in a frontier land settled by Norsemen in the 9th century, they had an extraordinary geographic reach, translated voraciously from other languages, and told many different types of sagas. Grettir’s Saga is an outlaw saga, telling the story of the anti-hero Grettir from his early years as a difficult teen who quarrelled with his father, to a man famed for his strength and courage, to a hunted man with a bounty on his head. Things look promising for Grettir at first. He wins admiration by helping others defend against pillaging berserkers, proves very effective in getting rid of trolls and monsters, and is sought after for putting a stop to hauntings and the walking dead. But Grettir is not an easy man to get on with, and with a history of violence he ends up sentenced to full outlawry, meaning that nobody can offer him refuge or help him leave Iceland. What makes life on the run especially hard for this most macho of men is that he is incredibly afraid of the dark. That, and a man who has it in for Grettir keeps sending assassins after him, resorting to ever more extreme methods to finish him off once and for all. There is an intriguing after-story of vengeance, romance and dubious morals which takes place in Constantinople, centred on Grettir’s Norwegian brother Thorstein, who joins the Byzantine emperor’s Varangian guard to seek out Grettir’s antagonist."