Profound and intriguing, Grettir's Saga is the last of the great Icelandic sagas. It tells of the life and death of Grettir, a great rebel, individualist, and romantic hero viewed unromantically. Grettir spends his childhood violently defying authority: as a youth of sixteen he kills a man and is outlawed; all the rest of his life he devotes, with remarkable composure, to fighting more and more formidable enemies. He pits himself against bears, berserks, wraiths, trolls, and finally, it seems, the whole population of Iceland. Yet he is not a bloodthirsty killer, but only a man who...