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

Today I'm joined by Dr. Janina Ramirez, inspirational historian, broadcaster, and author

based at the University of Oxford. Dr. Ramirez hosts a podcast called Arc Detective, which I will

put a link to in the description below, and is the author of a new book called Riddle of the Rooms,

a Viking mystery. Dr. Ramirez, thank you so much for joining me

today. It is an honor now. I thank you so much. I'm delighted to be in a space where I can

quite happily talk about Vikings at length. It's a real thing. Oh, that's awesome. Well, thank

you so much for joining me. So, you know, I'll just jump right into the first question. Your book, Riddle of the Rooms, which I actually have a copy of, and very much enjoyed. What inspired you to write the book? And where did your fascination with Vikings begin?

Oh, gosh. Well, it's kind of a two-pronged question there, really.

I'll start with why I wrote that book particularly.

I wanted to write children's fiction from when I was a child.

I read English literature at university because I just was transported from the age

about six or seven into these wonderful worlds. And a lot of

what I read was based in the past. And I found that the more historical fiction I read,

the more passionate I got about history. And so it was always my ambition to write children's

fiction. But when I went to university, I had to do a module at Oxford on old English literature,

and everybody else found it deeply boring and just copied the translations out of books.

But I got so immersed in the language, the culture, the imaginative world of, first

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