The body of prose narratives written in Iceland between roughly 1200 and 1400 CE — describing the settlement of Iceland, the feuds of its first generations, the Norse discovery of North America, and the lives of Scandinavian kings — that constitute the founding achievement of secular prose fiction and the most detailed literary record of any early medieval society.
Sometime around 1280, an Icelander sat down and wrote a novel. Not a chronicle, not a saint's life, not an epic poem — a novel: a sustained prose narrative with psychologically complex characters, ironic distance between author and subject, scene-by-scene construction, and a tragic arc driven by human choices rather than divine will. It was called Njáls saga. Nothing comparable existed in English, French, or German literature for another three hundred years. That this happened in Iceland — a volcanic island at the edge of the habitable world, with a population under 100,000, in a language almost no one outside Scandinavia could read — is one of the strangest and most instructive facts in literary history.