God of Wednesday

On the way to Strandagaldur, the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft , I had a panic attack. Getting to our B&B at Kirkjubóll ...

In 2010, on the night of Snorri Sturluson’s murder, September 23, I sat on the stones surrounding his hot tub at Reykholt in western Icel...

To explore the Outlaw's Cave, my friend told me, you need "a headlamp and serious shoes." I had a headlamp, though it ma...

In the year 997, the excommunicated archbishop of Reims sent the Holy Roman Emperor a kingly gift: a copy of Boethius's On Arithmeti...

British writer Sarah Moss and I are kindred spirits. Shortly after I visited Greenland to see Viking Age archaeological sites in 2006, I...

“See those towers?” Costantino Sigismondi points to the two square Romanesque towers crowning Saint John Lateran. “We can imagine Gerbert...

We celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary in 1992 with a camping trip to the Hornstrandir on the northwestern tip of Iceland. Once the ...

As I said last week, for me the hardest part of writing a book is deciding what to say. But in the Middle Ages, as I learned when resear...