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Trojumanna Saga: First Full English Translation
Paperback
Ancient History GeneralFiction Anthologies
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 25 2023
Pages: 102
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.26 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The first full English translation of Trójumanna saga, the medieval Icelandic saga of the Trojan War: the story of Troy as it was told in Old Norse, from the causes of the war to the fall of the city.
The war at Troy is the event behind Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, and a long line of later retellings across medieval Europe. One of the most unusual of them was written in Iceland. Trójumanna saga, the saga of the men of Troy, is generally dated by scholars to the middle of the thirteenth century, the same century of Icelandic writing that produced the Prose Edda and the great family sagas. It tells the whole story of the war in Old Norse prose. Until 2023 it had never been published complete in English. This edition, translated by Jeremy Jasper Owens, was the first.
The saga's authors did not work from Homer, whose poems were little known in the medieval West. Their main source was the De excidio Troiae historia, a short Latin history attributed to Dares Phrygius and presented as the eyewitness record of a Trojan priest. Medieval readers trusted Dares more than Homer. The Icelandic writers drew on other classical material as well, including the Ilias Latina and, in places, Ovid and Virgil, and they shaped all of it to suit their own audience.
The result reads as a saga: plain and direct, concerned with lineage, oaths, honor, feud, and the deeds of fighting men. Priam builds a hall to Thor, and Kassandra and Andromache hide in the temple of Frigg. The story starts a generation early, with Jason's voyage for the Golden Fleece and Hercules's first war on Troy. Then come Paris and Helen, Hector's last battle, Achilles's love for Polyxena and his death by Hecuba's plot, Penthesilea and her warrior women, likened in the saga to the shield-maidens of the North, and Antenor and Aeneas opening the gates by night. The saga even gives the length of the war: ten years, six months, and twelve days.
The saga also matters for the study of Norse mythology. In the Prologue to the Prose Edda, the sir are presented as people who came out of Troy and were later worshipped as gods, and scholars have argued that much of what Snorri knew about Troy came from Trójumanna saga. Reading the saga shows how Christian Iceland connected its pagan past with classical history.
In this edition:
- The complete text of Trójumanna saga in English, first published in full in 2023
- The whole war in saga form, from Jason and Hercules to the burning of Troy
- Paris, Helen, Hector, Achilles, Troilus, Priam, and Aeneas as medieval Icelanders saw them
- Material from Dares Phrygius, the Ilias Latina, Ovid, and Virgil, reshaped by Norse writers
- Greek gods given Norse identities, with Thor in the place of Zeus
- A translation that follows the order and structure of the Old Norse original
The saga survives in several medieval redactions, which differ in how closely they follow Dares. This translation stays close to the structure of the original. It does not smooth the text into a modern novel or fold in material from Homer, so readers meet the saga in its own order and its own manner.
About the translator: Jeremy Jasper Owens is a writer, editor, and historian whose books cover Norse myth, the medieval sagas, and world history.
This translation is for readers of Old Norse and Icelandic sagas, students of medieval literature and the Troy legend, readers of the Eddas, and anyone interested in comparative mythology and the meeting of the classical and Norse traditions.
For a revised translation with chapter-by-chapter notes comparing the saga with its Greek and Roman sources, see The Annotated Trójumanna Saga (2025). Also by Jeremy Jasper Owens: Tales from the North, Norse myths, hero legends, and folk tales of the North.
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