This book contains a story of such interest and beauty that, after and existence of more than forty years in its English dress, it is here presented in an abridged form with full confidence in both its charm and its value.

At the time when Harold Fair-hair gained rule over all Norway, those who fled from his enmity took refuge in an isle in the sea til then unpeopled and little known. They called it Iceland, lest a better name should tempt pursuit; there they built up a commonwealth which long remained "the only absolutely free republic in the world." Through successive generations the Icelanders kept in touch with their brethren across the sea, whose history and whose legends they eventually wrote. That history and those legends have been used a thousand times in later song and story, until they are familiar to us all. But at the same time, during their long winters, the Icelanders wrote the tales of their own early times, which are still too little known. This book contains the greatest of them, a saga or story which is to be compared, in interest and beauty, with the great epics of the earlier races . . . 

From the preface