The fear (or, more plausibly, the anxiety) of hunger can be considered a general characteristic of our past. Life used to be much harder, much more challenging than it eventually became after the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, until the 1800s, the vast majority of the world's population lived on the equivalent of less than US$ 1 a day: more or less like a Roman slave, or a medieval peasant. By today's standards, that pretty much corresponds to the poverty line according to the World Bank as it was set in 2008 (US$ 1.25; in 2015 it was updated to US$ 1.90). The Middle Ages, much like most of the past, were a truly hard period to live through: a time when life expectancy was only 35 years – a level that had been stable since the time of the hunter-gatherer societies. In such a threatening world, food represented a concern: maybe not always a major one, but most definitely a constant one: this was true for the whole of Europe, and even more so for marginal areas such as Scandinavia.

Among the several typologies of sources that scholars can study to examine the anxiety of hunger in the medieval North, the Icelandic sagas represent a key opportunity, for they unveil details of cultural and social reactions to situations of emergency.