All the Icelandic sagas portray a world well aware of the power of words: to praise, to blame, to curse and to taunt. Yet these five stories are unusual in putting a skald, or poet, centre stage and building the plot around his travels to seek fame, his doomed love for a married woman and his hostilities against her menfolk.<BR>Although the mainly thirteenth-century authors drew on semi-historical traditions about people and events from over two centuries before, they portrayed vivid and enduring scenes of everyday life in the farmsteads of windswept Iceland - making hay, hunting seals, rounding up sheep and struggling through blizzards. Most of the poet-heroes are notably difficult characters, whose restless energy threatens the peace of their communities, and whose own faults, as much as fate, bar them from happiness. Full of fights, invective and voyaging, these sagas also deploy their terse prose and intricate verse to explore human motive and behaviour in non-aristocratic society, and as such they are almost unique in the medieval literature of Europe.