Icelandic Sagas

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.6 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2013

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Icelandic Sagas. First written down in the 13th century, the sagas tell the stories of the Norse settlers of Iceland, who began to arrive on the island in the late 9th century. They contain some of the richest and most extraordinary writing of the Middle Ages, and often depict events known to have happened in the early years of Icelandic history, although there is much debate as to how much of their content is factual and how much imaginative. Full of heroes, feuds and outlaws, with a smattering of ghosts and trolls, the sagas inspired later writers including Sir Walter Scott, William Morris and WH Auden.

With:

Carolyne Larrington Fellow and Tutor in Medieval English Literature at St John's College, Oxford

Elizabeth Ashman Rowe University Lecturer in Scandinavian History at the University of Cambridge

Emily Lethbridge Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Árni Magnússon Manuscripts Institute in Reykjavík

Producer: Thomas Morris.

Transcript

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0:40.0	UK slash radio4.
0:42.0	I hope you enjoy the program hello the late middle ages was a
0:45.8	period when literature flourished across Europe as never before Italy produced
0:50.1	the masterpieces of Dante and Petrarch English literature began in style with the works of
0:54.2	Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer, and the medieval poets of Wales and France laid the foundations
0:59.0	of great national literary traditions.
1:01.8	But some of the richest and most original writing of the early Middle Ages
1:04.8	was produced on a remote island in the North Atlantic that even today has a population slightly
1:10.0	smaller than that of Leicester. Iceland was first settled in the ninth century by Vikings,
1:14.9	and the deeds of these first Icelanders and their families
1:17.6	are recorded in the Icelandic sagas.
	...

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