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Old Norse literature --- Sagas --- History and criticism.

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Njáls saga is the best known and most highly regarded of all medieval Icelandic sagas and it occupies a special place in Icelandic cultural history. The manuscript tradition is exceptionally rich and extensive. The oldest extant manuscripts date to only a couple of decades after the saga's composition in the late 13th century and the saga was subsequently copied by hand continuously up until the 20th century, even alongside the circulation of printed text editions in latter centuries. The manuscript corpus as a whole has great socio-historical value, showcasing the myriad ways in which generations of Icelanders interpreted the saga and took an active part in its transmission; the manuscripts are also valuable sources for evidence of linguistic change and other phenomena. The essays in this volume present new research and a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on the Njáls saga manuscripts. Many of the authors took part in the international research project "The Variance of Njáls saga" which was funded by the Icelandic Research Council from 2011-2013.

Literature --- Sagas --- Manuscripts, Icelandic --- History and criticism --- Njáls saga.

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Ecocriticism and Old Norse Studies is the first anthology to combine environmental humanities approaches and the study of premodern Nordic literature and culture. The chapters gathered here present innovative research based on the most recent developments within ecologically informed literary and cultural studies. Covering a wide variety of sources, the volume provides new insights into the Old Norse environmental imagination, showing how premodern texts relate to nature and the environment — both the real-world environments of the Viking Age and Middle Ages, and the fantastic environments of some parts of saga literature. Collectively, the contributions shed new light on the role of cultural contacts, textual traditions, and intertextuality in the shaping of Old Norse perceptions and representations of nature and the environment, as well as on the modern reception and (mis-)use of these ideas. The volume moreover has a contemporary relevance, inviting readers to consider the lessons that can be learned from how people perceived their environments and interacted with them in the past as we face environmental crises in our own times.