data/saga/saga.md

metadata

pretty_name: Saga Corpus
language:
  - is
license: cc-by-4.0
license_name: CC-BY 4.0
size_categories:
  - n<1K
task_categories:
  - text-generation
  - fill-mask
task_ids:
  - language-modeling
source_datasets:
  - original
domains:
  - Books

Dataset Card for Saga Corpus

The Icelandic sagas

The Saga Corpus contains 49 Old Icelandic narrative texts:

• Family Sagas (Íslendingasögur, published by Svart á hvítu in 1985-1986),
• Sturlunga Saga (published by Svart á hvítu in 1988),
• Sagas of the Kings of Norway (Heimskringla, published by Mál og menning in 1991)
• and the Book of Settlement (Landnámabók, published by Hið íslenzka fornritafélag in 1968). The spelling was normalized to Modern Icelandic spelling and some inflectional endings were changed to Modern Icelandic form.

Most documents are individual sagas or þættir (tales). One document, Íslendinga þættir, is a single collection bundling many tales together.

Dataset Description

• Number of samples: 49
• Number of tokens (Llama 3): 3.65M
• Average document length in tokens (min, max): 74.52K (7.04K, 641.51K)

Dataset Structure

An example from the dataset looks as follows.

{
  "id": "saga_F01",
  "text": "Bandamanna saga - Konungsbók\n\nÚr: Íslendingasögur I\n\nÓfeigur hét maður. Hann bjó norður í Miðfirði á[...]",
  "source": "saga",
  "added": "2026-07-23",
  "created": "1100-01-01, 1400-01-01",
  "token_count": 21687
}

Data Fields

An entry in the dataset consists of the following fields:

• id (str): A unique identifier for each document.
• text (str): The content of the document.
• source (str): The source of the document (see Source Data).
• added (str): The date when the document was added to this collection.
• created (str): The date range when the document was originally created.
• token_count (int): The number of tokens in the sample computed using the Llama 3 tokenizer.

Dataset Statistics

Annotation Overview

Each document comes with annotations describing its content, such as content quality, information density, and educational value. Each bar shows the share of documents at each level of one annotation, from worst (light) to best (dark). To learn more about the annotations and how to use them, see the annotations section of the main readme.

Additional Information

Limitations

The sagas are medieval texts, written down roughly in the 12th–14th century, but the source records no per-text composition date. The created field spans the whole range to reflect that uncertainty.

The spelling was normalized to Modern Icelandic spelling and some inflectional endings were changed to Modern Icelandic form.

Source Data

The source publisher is The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, and the repository handle for this release is http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12537/32.

Citation Information

If you use this dataset, cite the source release:

The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. The Saga Corpus (Fornritin). http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12537/32

License Information

The corpus is distributed under CC BY 4.0 per the CLARIN-IS repository record. Note: the availability statement inside the source files states CC BY 3.0; the repository metadata (CC BY 4.0) is taken as authoritative here.