Chivalric sagas

Starting in the thirteenth century with Norse translations of French chansons de geste and Latin romances and histories, the genre expanded in Iceland to indigenous creations in a similar style.

Karlamagnús saga is a compilation of more disparate origin, dealing with Charlemagne and his twelve paladins and drawing on historiographical material as well as chansons de geste.

[7] Particularly during the eighteenth century, some chivalric sagas were taken to be useful historical sources for the history of Sweden and Denmark, underpinning their imperial aspirations, and were printed in these countries.

[8][9] The most comprehensive guide to the manuscripts, editions, translations, and secondary literature of this body of sagas is Kalinke and Mitchell's 1985 Bibliography of Old Norse-Icelandic Romances.

[10] The genre received a fairly substantial survey in Margaret Schlauch's 1934 Romance in Iceland,[11] since when the main monograph studies of the genre have been Astrid van Nahl's Originale Riddarasögur als Teil altnordischer Sagaliteratur, Jürg Glauser's Isländische Märchensagas, Marianne Kalinke's Bridal-Quest Romance in Medieval Iceland, and Geraldine Barnes's The Bookish Riddarasögur.

[10] Romance sagas continued to be composed in Iceland after the Middle Ages in the tradition of the medieval texts; ten are believed to have been penned, for example, by the priest Jón Oddsson Hjaltalín (1749-1835).