From beautiful alliterative poetry to action-packed adventure sagas, Old Norse/Old Icelandic literature is rich with deep characters, complex themes, and gripping stories. This challenge includes all the essentials of Old Norse literature, going in order from Eddic poetry, stories of the gods, legendary sagas, Icelandic adventure sagas, Icelandic feud sagas, and miscellaneous. There are also a number of bonus books that I didn’t think were essential, but are fun nonetheless!

As a disclaimer, I am not an expert in Old Norse literature. I’ve read many of these books, but not all of them. The prompts with minimal description are likely ones I haven’t read. I tried to make an exhaustive list of all the in-print sagas with dedicated books to them, but it’s likely that I missed a couple. There are also a number of known sagas with rare or seemingly nonexistent translation, none of which appear on this challenge. Still, this has most of the essentials, if not all the well-known ones!