Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Old Norse word saga means what is said, utterance, oral account, or notification before evolving into a structured narrative. This linguistic root shares a cognate relationship with the English words say and saw while linking to the German Sage.
Most sagas of Icelanders take place between 930 and 1030 yet they were mostly written down between 1190 and 1320. The majority of this corpus was composed in the thirteenth century with the remainder appearing in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Heimskringla stands as the pre-eminent example of kings' sagas compiled and composed by Snorri Sturluson during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. These texts chronicle the lives of Scandinavian kings but differ structurally from their family-focused counterparts.
Völsunga saga and Heiðreks saga represent the core of legendary sagas which blend remote history set on the Continent before the settlement of Iceland with myth and legend. Their primary aim is to offer lively narrative entertainment rather than strict historical record.
The Icelandic Commonwealth created unique political incentives for aristocrats to produce literature offering chieftains a method to establish social differentiation from the rest of the population. Gunnar Karlsson and Jesse Byock argued that Icelanders wrote sagas to document past feuds and establish commonly agreed norms within their decentralized system.