saga [E18th] The original medieval sagas told traditional stories of the families of Iceland and the kings of Norway. No one in Britain paid much attention to them until the early 18th century, at the same time as the word saga entered the language. Its old Icelandic original is the equivalent of English saw [OE] in old saw, an old proverb or maxim, and meant ‘a narrative, a story’. From the mid 19th century saga came also to apply to stories of heroic achievement and then to novels tracing families through several generations.