Icelandic Sagas
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Old Norse, New Audience: Dr. Jackson Crawford’s Curious Path From Academia To Youtube
Up in the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming, a pickup truck pulls over and out steps a pair of cowboy boots. A man saunters toward the camera and, tipping his brimmed hat, begins to lecture about historical language change and umlaut mutation. Far…
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Ask An Expert: How Were Clothes Symbolically Depicted In The Sagas?
For a modern reader picking up the Sagas of the Icelanders for the first time, they can often be struck by the strange modernity of the prose. However, there are just as many, perhaps more, instances that leave us confused. The world…
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Icelandic Sagas Delivered In 75 Minutes
So here’s the thing, I’m new to Iceland. And while I’m thoroughly enjoying Iceland’s rich art and music scene, there are days when all I want is to be transported back in history. Specifically, between the 9th and 11th centuries, or the…
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Saga Spots: Searching for Egill in Borgarnes
Every time I drive by the gas stations and supermarkets along Route 1 as it passes through Borgarnes, I’m reminded of the stark disjunction between the town’s substantial medieval inheritance and the prosaic reality of modern day life there. Although Borgarnes was…
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Gervais and Colbert Argue The Existence Of Elves In Iceland
“They believe in elves in Iceland,” claimed Stephen Colbert on the latest episode of The Late Show. It is one of the more tiresome of the many clichéd claptraps that exist about Iceland, with “do you get paid to marry an Icelander?”…
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RECAP: The Tale of Shady Halli
This Old Icelandic story begins and ends with dick jokes, which is totally my type of story. It’s classified as a tale rather than a saga because it is pretty short, but goddamn if it doesn’t deliver. (And no, that is not…
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RECAP: Saga of Egill Skalla-Grímsson
This saga starts out with some big, hairy asshole named Kveld-Úlfur (“evening-wolf”), who may or may not be a werewolf. He is suspected of such based on his frequent bouts of rage in the evenings, but these could just as easily be…
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RECAP: The Dream of Star-Oddi
So some dude named Oddi, who is a good at astronomy but shitty at poetry, eats a bunch of psychedelic mushrooms and trips some craaazy shit. Technically, he is on a “fishing expedition” and “dreams” it but we’ve all told our parents…