What you are about to listen to is part one of a two-part episode covering the

continued Christianization of Iceland in the 1100s with a particular focus on the development of literate culture and the implications of this new culture on Icelandic society.

This episode turned out to be a tough one for me to organize.

I wanted to provide you with enough context without

absolutely overwhelming you with every minute detail about medieval Icelandic society.

I tried writing and organizing it in a couple of different ways.

And what resulted was either two long episodes, which dove far too deep on individual topics,

or one excessively long episode, which just covered too much ground too quickly, to be easily digestible.

My solution, and take it for what you will, was to take the single long episode and split it up at a reasonable stopping points

into this episode and a second episode which will come out just next week.

These are intended to be listened to hot on the heels of one

another and the second episode isn't going to have an introduction or anything fancy like that.

But I hope that creating a reasonable stopping point between the

two will help to make this information more digestible. If this shorter episode just isn't

enough and you're looking for more Viking stuff though.

I recently did an interview on the history of the Vikings podcast which was a whole lot of fun and

I'll include a link to that in the description of this show if you want to go check that out.

So all of that said, let me know what you think of this format and I hope you enjoy. We're going to.

We begin.

We begin today's story by winding back our clocks a bit from where we left them

and returning to Iceland during the tumultuous years which led up to the conversion of the country in the year 999 or 1,000

With our clocks properly set

...