pVerse quotation is intrinsic to the literary style of the medieval Icelandic corpus of emslendingasgurem sagas of Icelanders, one of the most important vernacular literary genres of the European Middle Ages. The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that the combination of prose and verse constitutes a distinctive literary aesthetic, and that in the medieval Icelandic literary tradition, it was not a question of choosing between prose and verse as the vehicle for stories about the foundational generations of settlers on the island, but of combining both modes to forge the unique literary form of the saga. Verse quotation has always been recognised as an important aspect of the emslendingasgurem, but to date, the significance of verse to the aesthetic of the narrative has mainly been explored with reference to the sub-genre of the emskldasgurem sagas of poets, in which the proportion of verse to prose is at its highest. p pThe contributions to the volume analyse the emslendingasg