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I'm Hello and welcome to the history of Vikings.

Today I'm joined by Professor John Carl Helgeson, who is a professor

at the Department of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Iceland.

He is the author of several books on the modern afterlife of Icelandic medieval literature,

including the rewriting of Niel Saga. But I want to talk about his most recent book, which is something that I've had the pleasure of reading over the past couple weeks, and it is called Echoes of Valhalla, the afterlife of the Edas and Sagas, which I highly recommend, and I will put a link to in the description below. But Professor Helgeson, thank you so much for joining me today. Well, thank you.

Well, I'll tell you, I very much enjoyed reading echoes of Valhalla, and perhaps a good way to

open the conversation today would be these stories and these myths that we find in the edas and

the sagas are so timeless. And I think they really have been proven to be timeless because they've

lasted for so long and as you most eloquently present in your book we can see all sorts of

traces from Old Norse and Viking Age literature in medieval and even modern pop culture but

why do you think it is that these myths have lasted so long?

Well, I think because they are always being rewritten and redefined.

And when we think about timeless literature,

usually what really affects classical literature is time.

And we tend to think about old texts as something that has not changed through time,

but we tend to find new things in them and actually reinterpret them according to our own interests, our own times.

So timeless is a tricky concept in this context.

Certainly.

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