Welcome to the Nordic mythology podcast, I'm Daniel Farund on the company Horns-Bodin and I'm joined today by Carl Ferruja.

Cal do you want to tell everyone a little bit about who you are,

what you do, what you specialize in,

and what we're going to talk about, I guess.

Sure. So yeah, so as you said, my name is Karifaruja. I'm doing a PhD at the University of Oslo,

the Department of Linguistics and Nordic Studies. And yeah, so I specialized particularly in the relationship between medieval Scandinavia and the Muslim world.

So I did my masters. I worked specifically on the Arabic literature from Spain about Vikings, about the

Viking attacks in Spain, and now I'm working on the other way around the sanctions.

So I'm working on the Norse literature about Muslims and sort of what they thought about Muslims, what was their imagination of Muslims at the time.

So that's what I specialized in. So yeah, so I thought that today we could speak a bit about more perhaps the stuff that I worked with

my master's that is more Viking related that is in the Viking age and it relates to Viking grades in Spain mainly.

So and yeah, that gives me excuse also to speak about Arabic sources which I don't think a lot of people know too much about.

Absolutely no. You did forget one thing and that's a spot of awesome beard. There's not many times I get, there's how many times I get beard envy, but that's an impressive one.

Yeah, it's a true. It looks good. It suits you. Yeah, so before we touched on the you said you were Maltese by birth and then that made me ask the question kind of, is that what got you into the Arabic side of

kind of this whole thing? Yeah, you know what?

It's in a way it did really because what happened to me when I was being my bachelor and in London, I did my VA and at UCL in London.

We did such a bit upon some of the Arabic texts, especially Ivan Padlan, which I think is perhaps the best-known Arabic source that we have from, it was a Baghdadi author, who wrote about Scandinavians, supposedly.

So we did a bit of that, and which I, at the time I had no idea existed.

And I thought, you know, I speak Maltese and Maltese is very close to Arabic.

I mean, it derives from Arabic.

It's a Semitic language like Arabic.

So I thought, you know, might as well use my knowledge of that and learn Arabic. So I thought, you know, might as well use my knowledge of that and learn Arabic.

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