商品詳細

Inspired by the remarkable characters in one of medieval Iceland's most famous sagas, The Death of Kjartan Olafsson is the first known play written and staged by a female playwright in Iceland. Following a critical introduction about the play and its remarkable author, the text is presented here in English translation for the first time, along with a reproduction of the original Icelandic version. This play is an extraordinary artifact of nineteenth-century Icelandic literature. Written from the perspective of Laxdaela saga's main protagonist, Gu?run Osvifrsdottir, the one-act play offers an interpretation of the saga's climactic slaying of her first love-an interpretation that speaks as much to the conditions of Iceland's first female playwright and her social position in nineteenth-century Iceland as it does to the medieval source material.