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Anonymous: Hrólfs saga kraka (1230 (?) - 1450 (?))
[The Saga of King Hrólf Kraki]

By Carl Phelpstead (Cardiff University)

Indexing Data:

  • Domain: Literature.
  • Genre: Saga.
  • Country: Iceland, Continental Europe.

Life, Works and Times

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Hrólfs saga kraka, the Saga of King Hrólf kraki, is a colourful and dramatic prose account of legendary events in and around Denmark that was composed in Iceland in the later Middle Ages. Characters and plot elements are shared with a number of other texts that survive from medieval Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon England, including Beowulf and Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum (Hrólfr kraki himself, for example, corresponds to Hroþulf in Beowulf and Roluo Krake in Saxo, and there are intriguing similarities between Beowulf and Böðvarr Bjarki, one of Hrólfr’s champions in the saga). On the basis of comparison with these and other texts the events of the sa

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Published 03 September 2003

Citation: Phelpstead, Carl. "Hrólfs saga kraka [The Saga of King Hrólf Kraki]". The Literary Encyclopedia. 3 September 2003.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=13133, accessed 9 February 2010.]