Saga

Sagas are prose stories and histories, composed in Iceland and to a lesser extent elsewhere in Scandinavia, originating in the Middle Ages but continued to be composed in the ensuing centuries. The Old Norse saga meant "what is said, utterance, oral account", a relative of English "say" and "saw"; scholars borrowed the word into English in the 1700s. Unusually for medieval history-writing, they were written in the vernacular Old Norse rather than Latin. The best-known type, the sagas of Icelanders (family sagas, mostly thirteenth century), feature Viking voyages, migration to Iceland and feuds between Icelandic families; alongside them stand kings' sagas such as Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, legendary sagas blending myth with remote history, and chivalric, contemporary and saints' sagas.

The family sagas are the direct ancestor of the multi-generation series: one settlement, decades of grudges, dozens of related characters. That is the planning problem of how to write a series, in thirteenth-century dress.