Sagas about Icelanders
Exhibition of a book

On 20 May 2004 a joint exhibition between the Hermitage and the Rare Book from St Petersburg Publishing House opened. Russian entrepreneur Roman Abramovich provided assistance to the exhibition.

Every book issued by Peter Suspitsyn’s publishing house is an experiment in the same way as the book presented at this exhibition. Its print run is ten copies, which are numbered and signed by the artists and the publisher. The odd-numbered copies are created using such materials as cowhide and sealskin, silver and copper-gold amalgam, and rock crystal; the even-numbered copies use cowhide, silver , copper and gold amalgam, ice quartz, and rock crystal. The book contains 48 prints, of which 40 were produced on separate sheets, as well as 46 sheets with calligraphy. Forty prints were made supplementally in five copies and bear Roman numerals.

Four artists worked simultaneously on the creation of this book. Yuri Borovitsky did illustrations for Egel’s Saga using the mezzo-tinto technique. The illustration to Saga of Grettir by Boris Zabirokhin was done using the dry needle method. Mikhail Gavrichkov did the prints for the Saga about Gunnlaut, the Snake-Tongue using etching techniques.The prints for the Njal’s Saga in the illuminated etching method were created by the artist Yuri Lukshin.

Texts in Icelandic and Russian languages by Moscow artist Yuri Nozdrin have become a decoration for the Saga about Icelanders. He used subjects from Eastern Slavic manuscripts of the 17th century. Pavel Ekushev and Viktor Nikolsky designed and produced the binding - a frame of solid cast silver, colored by a copper-gold amalgam and worked to reproduce motifs from medieval Icelandic ornamentation.

The Old Icelandic word saga means told, related and in antiquity the term was used to signify an oral tale. After written language appeared the word came to signify also written tales, and eventually came to mean a written narration of events from the past worthy of our attention.

Scholars speak of several categories of sagas. There are sagas about ancient times; episcopal sagas which tell about the history of life in Iceland during the 12th - 13th centuries; and false sagas about imaginary events. The group of sagas that is most original and interesting for readers is the one known as clan sagas, about the history of people from one clan. Another name for this group is the sagas about Icelanders, because the heroes are always people who lived in Iceland. Some of the clan sagas relate events which occurred in Iceland between 930 and 1030.

The State Hermitage and the Rare Book from St Petersburg Publishing House have prepared a catalogue for the exhibition entitled Sagas about Icelanders. The author of the introduction to the catalogue is Director of the State Hermitage Mikhail Piotrovsky; the authors of the articles are Professor B.S. Zharov, head of the Department of Scandinavian Languages at St Petersburg University and E.D. Kuznetsov, member of the Academy of Critics in the Arts.

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Peter Suspitsyn

At the opening of the exhibition

At the exhibition