The Death of Kjartan Ólafsson

Inspired by the remarkable characters in one of medieval Iceland's most famous sagas, The Death of Kjartan Ólafsson 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 Laxdæla saga's main protagonist, Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir, 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.