Composed around the thirteenth century, Njal's Saga has survived in various parchments and fragments to this day. While many Greek works available to modern readers were preserved and copied down by later civilizations such as the Byzantines, an extraordinary number of the sources we have for this saga have been dated to the 1300's: 21 of the 60 manuscripts. The vellum manuscripts were classified most recently by Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, an Icelandic scholar of Old Norse, in 1953, for his 1954 Íslenzk fornrit edition of the saga, which remains the standard edition. The first printed edition of the saga was published in 1772.
While the English-language translations have undergone massive changes in spelling, word choice, and grammar, the Icelandic version has remained relatively stable, with improvements coming mostly in critical editions.
Here is an example of one of the earliest extant manuscript fragments. If this is considered an easy job, it's hard to imagine what a difficult job would look like.
