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I'm joined by Dr. Matthias Nordvik.

He teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Nordic Studies Program.

He teaches pre-Christian Nordic mythology, Scandinavian folklore, Nordic memory studies, myth and disaster

studies, North Atlantic and Greenlandic literature, reception history of the Viking Age, and

neo-paganism. He also has done fascinating research on

volcanoes in Norsemith. Dr. Matthias Nordvig, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you, Noah. It's a pleasure to be here. Absolutely. So, Dr. Nordvig, you really have,

you know, done it all. You're quite the expert on many aspects of the Viking Age,

but one thing that we haven't really covered in great detail on this show yet are the sagas

of the Icelanders and really how we can use them as a source for the Viking Age. So kind of one

question that I always have going through my head when I read the various

sagas is, you know, exactly that is, can we use them as a source for the Viking Age?

After all, they are sagas, and I know many sagas have some sort of mythological elements,

which may suggest that they are a form of historical fiction.

But I guess just kind of a big question right off the bat is, how can we use the saga

of the Icelanders as a source for the Viking Age?

Yeah, so this is an ongoing discussion that has basically been fought over by different scholars for at least a century.

The discussion has been raging back and forth on like what is the historical component in this literature?

Is there any historical component that goes beyond the time of writing, so to speak?

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