The detective and the Sagas: Erlendur in the novels of Arnaldur Indriðason

Abstract

Arnaldur Indriðason’s Erlendur novels are popular crime fiction stories set in Iceland. Detective Erlendur Sveinsson’s team deals with serious crimes, murders, and missing persons. Their cases are contemporary, but Indriðason has always said that he is influenced as a writer by the medieval Icelandic sagas. How is this illustrated by his crime fiction? The sagas, like crime fiction, contain stories of murder, revenge, love, loss and family conflicts. The paper uses examples from the novels and the sagas to examine the links between them. These links include the importance of traditional and local stories and the significance of fate. The paper also describes how Erlendur’s character develops over the series until he becomes an archetypical saga hero.