The late medieval Icelandic romances were popular reading in Iceland right down to the beginning of this century, and are consequently found in a very large number of manuscripts, the great majority of which are late paper copies. The extent of the manuscript material makes a critical edition af each individual one of these sagas a complicated and extremely lang piece of work. So far only a very few exist in scholarly editions. The remainder are either unedited or printed in Iceland in popular editions, long since out of print, and almost always based on late, secondary manuscripts.
The present series, which has been given the title Late Medieval Icelandic Romances, is intended to provide a long-needed provisional basis for the study of this hitherto despised, but by no means uninteresting genre - a genre which has had the misfortune to be judged nearly always in comparison with the classical literature, and as a result been weighed and found wanting.