I’d never before gotten any books from Iceland but today a package arrived from Reykjavik containing a set of The Complete Sagas Of Icelanders — the first more or less complete English translation of all the Icelandic Sagas along with forty-nine related short stories.

There are five volumes in this set, bound in leather dark-blue like the sea, stamped in dragon-hoarded gold and smythe-sewn.

I only ordered them about a week ago, which just goes to show that those longships can still make time.

Click on the images to enlarge.

Thanks to a friend’s recommendation and some excerpts he posted online, I decided to take a look at Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. It turned out to be astonishing — I couldn’t put it down. The narrative skills of the original (anonymous) poet and Heaney’s dynamic modern-English verse combine to make for a thrilling read. The work is well over a thousand years old and it’s still a page-turner.