Nora Caplan-Bricker Jordan S. Rubin 
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The original sagas were Icelandic prose narratives that were roughly analogous to modern historical novels. They were penned in the 12th and 13th centuries, and blended fact and fiction to tell the tales of famous rulers, legendary heroes, and average folks of Iceland and Norway. And they were aptly named: saga traces back to an Old Norse root that means "tale." The English word first referred only to those original Icelandic stories, but saga later broadened to cover other narratives reminiscent of those, and the word was eventually further generalized to cover any long, complicated scenario.
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A Brief History of Saga
Saga was originally used to describe Icelandic prose narratives composed in the 12th and 13th centuries. The word first appeared in English in that sense during the 18th century; by the middle of the 19th century we were employing saga in a somewhat looser fashion, in reference to modern stories involving heroic deeds that bore some resemblance to the Icelandic tales of yore. By the 20th century saga had come to be applied to other written works, typically a novel or series of novels, especially those that took place over a significant period of time. Today the word may also be used to describe a long and drawn-out story that is either written or spoken (as in “my neighbor told me the saga of his divorce again”). Saga comes from an Old Norse word of the same spelling. It does not have any connection with the adjective sagacious (“possessing quick intellectual perceptions”), which comes from the Latin sagax (“sagacious”).
Examples of saga in a Sentence
Mike Lillis, The Hill, 17 Dec. 2024
That's the main takeaway from the Boston Globe Spotlight team's deep dive into the Steward saga published over the weekend.
—Mike Deehan, Axios, 16 Dec. 2024
But the dog domestication saga gets even murkier in the context of the peopling of the Americas, which might have occurred sometime between 27,000 and 16,000 years ago.
—Sarah Kuta, Smithsonian Magazine, 16 Dec. 2024
Pizza beans, a cozy dish from Deb Perelman's Smitten Kitchen cookbook, have unexpectedly landed at the center of a true crime saga.
—Stephanie Gravalese, Forbes, 15 Dec. 2024
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Dictionary Entries Near saga
Cite this Entry
“Saga.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/saga. Accessed 30 Dec. 2024.
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saga
noun
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