In one of the northern fjords of Iceland, far from the coast, rises a rocky island with steep banks. It is called Draungay, which means "Rock Island". A lot of birds nest on this island. But people never lived on it. About a thousand years ago, Grettir, the most beloved hero of the Icelandic people, tragically died on this island. He was outlawed twice, the second time for what was actually an act of heroism and not a crime. He was thirty-five years old when he died on Rock Island. Of these, he spent nineteen years as a man rejected by society, as an exile, defending himself alone from his enemies and huddling in the most inhospitable and deserted corners of Iceland. To anyone who sees the Island Rock and who knows what happened on it about a thousand years ago, this Rock, rising alone against the backdrop of the Arctic Ocean, unpleasant, gloomy, majestic, may seem like a spectacular symbol of Grettir’s tragic fate. However, in order to form a correct idea of what the Grettir Saga is as a literary phenomenon, it is necessary first of all to understand the following: the goal of the one who wrote the saga was not a literary effect at all, but the most accurate and truthful story possible what really happened. "Grettir's Saga" is one of the "Icelander sagas" (or "ancestral sagas"), i.e. stories about what happened in Iceland during the so-called "age of the sagas" (from about 930 to 1030). Iceland was settled by immigrants from Norway in the 870–930s AD. e. So the “Icelander sagas” are stories about what happened in Iceland in the first century after its settlement.