Thoughts from the first week's reading

I thought it was interesting that "Iceland was Iceland before France was France or England was England or Italy was Italy." It sounds like the Icelandic people who wrote the sagas had a strong sense of who they were, because "the inability of an individual to fit in is noticed, remarked upon, analysed and perhaps admired, but always dealt with in the end" (p. xii). Since "the saga heroes occupied a social place of the edges of society (p. xviii)," maybe other characters' reactions to the hero in a saga can tell us about what was acceptable or not in their society. I've been told that good stories happen when someone defies the rules of the day, so I'm looking forward to reading about all of these renegade types and finding out what happens to them.