The Saga of the Jomsvikings

In Lee M. Hollander's faithful translation, all of the unknown twelfth-century author's narrative genius and flair for dramatic situation and pungent characterisation is preserved. Hollander was professor emeritus of Germanic languages at the University of Texas at Austin and an authority in Nordic language and literature. His translations of the best prose and poetry of the Old North - among them Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway and The Poetic Edda - have also appeared under the imprint of the University of Texas Press. In A.D. 986, Earl Hakon, ruler of most of Norway, won a triumphant victory over an invading fleet of Danes in the great naval battle of Hjorunga Bay. Sailing under his banner were no fewer than five Icelandic skalds, the poet-historians of the Old Norse world. Like good war correspondents of the present, they went home after the battle to relate what they had seen and heard: and, being poets as well as reporters, no doubt they seasoned their versions well with imagination. Two centuries later their accounts of the battle became the basis for one of the liveliest of the Icelandic sagas, with special emphasis on the doings of the Jomsvikings, the famed members of a warrior community that feared no one and dared all.