Michael Ridpath's "Where the Shadows Lie"

"Amid Iceland's wild, volcanic landscape, rumors swirl of an ancient manuscript inscribed with a long-lost saga about a ring of terrible power..."

Whoever wrote the jacket copy for Michael Ridpath's thriller Where the Shadows Lie, number one in his Fire & Ice series, might just as well have added, "This one's for you, Nancy," because, though I've never met Ridpath, I think he had me in mind as his perfect reader.

Rarely have I read a book about Iceland by a non-Icelander in which I can find nothing to complain about. (Okay, maybe the behavior of the golden plovers.) Ridpath may have grown up in Yorkshire and live in London, but it's clear he's visited Iceland--probably as many times as I have--and he hasn't just hung around Reykjavik and seen the standard tourist spots. He's read a lot of the books I have on my shelves, from Njal's Saga to Jesse Byock's Viking Age Iceland to J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and he's mashed them all up inside a wholly believeable crime novel that has real people bumbling around in a real Iceland.

Here is an example. Our hero, Magnus, an Icelander who has grown up in Boston and is now a Boston police officer, and an Icelandic woman named Ingileif are driving through south Iceland, in the shadow of Mount Hekla:

At Ingileif's direction, Magnus turned off the road and along a dirt track, winding up through the hills and into a small valley. His police-issued Skoda strained to maintain traction: the road was in poor condition and in places very steep. After a bone-rattling eight kilometres they finally came across a small white farm with a red roof nestling in the hillside at the head of its own little valley. Beneath the farm the obligatory lush green home meadow stretched down to a fast-flowing stream. The rest of the grass in the valley lurked brown and lacklustre, where it wasn't still covered in snow.
Alfabrekka.
"'How fair the slopes are,'" Ingileif said.
Magnus smiled as he recognized the quotation from Njal's Saga. He finished it: "'Fairer than they have ever seemed to me before.'"

I've been in that car. I've had that interaction--though usually the Icelanders with me don't offer such an obvious quotation to complete.

And when the story continues, I recognize the farmhouse, the kitchen, the people there:

The father, an impossibly wizened man, stirred himself from a comfortable armchair, while the mother busied herself with coffee and cakes. A stove warmed the living room, which was chock full of Icelandic knick-knacks, including at least four miniature Icelandic flags.
And a giant high-definition television screen. Just to remind them that they were truly in Iceland.
The younger farmer who had greeted them did most of the talking. His name was Adalsteinn. And before they could ask him any questions he told them about his parents, the fact that he himself was single, the fact that the farm had been in the family for generations, and particularly the fact that farming these days was tough, very tough indeed.
The coffee was delicious, as were the cakes.

Michael Ridpath has met Icelanders and paid attention to their wisdom and depth, as well as to the obvious quirks and foibles most journalists seize upon. He understands how Icelanders feel about volcanoes and glaciers--as well as elves and trolls. Most importantly, he understands Icelandic sagas and the role they have played in Icelandic culture.

And not only in Icelandic culture. One of the reasons I wrote my biography of Snorri Sturluson, Song of the Vikings, was to reveal how, through Tolkien, medieval Icelandic literature has shaped modern American and British culture. A number of readers have told me how surprised they were to learn, as one put it, that Snorri Sturluson was the "granddaddy of Bilbo Baggins."

Ridpath makes the same point--effortlessly and convincingly--in Where the Shadows Lie, though he has the advantage of fiction where I had to stick to fact.

For centuries, a family of Icelanders has hidden away a saga--and the ring of power it refers to. One of the only people they allowed to read it was J.R.R. Tolkien, and it clearly inspired The Lord of the Rings. (They even have letters from Tolkien to prove it.) So when the economic crisis hits Iceland and one of the family members decides to bail out her business by selling the family saga, it finds a ready market in LOTR fans. One of them is a Silicon Valley billionaire. Another is a Yorkshire truck driver. A number of people get bashed in the head and/or plunge to their deaths beside waterfalls before Magnus, our Boston cop, solves the mystery. As he and the Yorkshire truck driver are rushing to prevent the final killing, the Yorkshireman says,

"'There's nothing wrong in being a Lord of the Rings fan… What is wrong is when you let it blind you to what's going on in the real world.' He looked around at the extraordinary countryside flashing through the mist around them. 'Although sometimes I find it hard to believe that this country is part of the real world.'"

"I know what you mean," Magnus says.

I know what he means too.

Learn more at http://www.michaelridpath.com/icelandic-series-home.html

A Visit to Thingvellir

On a sunny day in Iceland, when I'm traveling east out of Rekjavik, it's almost impossible not to detour to Thingvellir, as I did last week.

Approaching these Assembly Plains in 1871, William Morris wrote, "My heart beats, so please you, as we near the brow of the pass, and all the infinite wonder, which came upon me when I came up on the deck of the [ship] to see Iceland for the first time, comes on me again now, for this is the heart of Iceland…"

In spite of his flowery Victorian prose style, Morris speaks for me too: My heart does beat faster when I see the great rift valley of Thingvellir beside its deep blue lake.

Here is where the tectonic plates are pulling apart, America getting infinitesimally farther from Europe with each passing year.

And here, on the tenth Thor's Day of summer each year from 930 to 1262, Icelands chieftains and their wives and children and followers gathered for the Althing, the General Assembly of all Iceland.

In the medieval Icelandic sagas--what Morris familiarly calls "those old stories"--the Althing is a grand party. Thousands of people stayed for two weeks in tents and turf-walled booths on the banks of the Axe River, drinking ale, telling tales, taking part in horse fights and wrestling matches, races and dice games, making wedding plans or finalizing divorces, witnessing court cases, and wrangling over the law.

Disputes between Icelanders of any rank could be settled at the Althing, by appeal to Iceland's laws. There was no king to enforce the laws. Instead, there were five law courts: one for each quarter of the country plus an appeals court, each with 36 judges. The judges were chosen by the chieftains, each chieftain being allowed to nominate or to veto a certain number.

Presiding over the courts was Iceland's only elected official, the Lawspeaker. The first Lawspeaker brought the laws of western Norway to Iceland in 930. For nearly two hundred years, until 1118, the Lawspeaker recited from memory one third of the law code at each Althing. After that, the laws were read aloud from a lawbook.

The place where he stood to recite, the Law Rock, is marked now by a flagpole. (Notice that the flag is hanging limp. It's almost never this calm in Iceland.) This height of land, with its backdrop of columnar basalt, formed a natural amphitheatre. The chieftains gathered below the Law Rock and, after the recitation, the laws were debated, adjusted, and agreed upon for, as it says in Njal's Saga, "With laws shall our land be built up, but with lawlessness laid waste."

There were laws concerning stolen horses, rented cows, dogs that bit, or bulls that ran amok in the neighbor's haystacks. There were laws about betrothals and divorces, buying sheep or claiming debts. There were laws concerning the welfare of orphans, widows, the sick, the handicapped, and the poor. There were laws about renting land or investing in a trading ship. There were numerous laws defining murder and homicide, setting the compensation a killer should pay the victim's family if he hoped to avoid being exiled from the island.

Of course, not everyone followed the laws and not every feud was peacefully settled. One of the great themes of the Icelandic sagas is what happens when someone defies the law.

Of Iceland in general, William Morris wrote, “It is an awful place: set aside the hope that the unseen sea gives you here, and the strange threatening change of the blue spiky mountains beyond the firth, and the rest seems emptiness and nothing else: a piece of turf under your feet, and the sky overhead, that's all; whatever solace your life is to have here must come out of yourself or these old stories, not over hopeful themselves."

Iceland is indeed an awful place: a place that fills me with awe. "Whatever solace your life is to have here must come out of yourself or these old stories." Is it different anywhere else?

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland of the medieval world.

Touring Saga Land

I'm in Iceland, for the 18th time, to learn more about the sagas. And although today is a library day (gray skies, spitting rain, fierce wind), I'm hoping to visit some saga sites over the weekend. I might rent a car, or even take a bus tour.

When I first went to Iceland in 1986, saga tourism was minimal. I, like many writers before and since, wanted to see the places made vivid and unforgettable by the medieval authors: 

Where Njal and his wife, their house afire, their enemies surrounding it, refused to come out. Said Njal, "I am an old man now and ill-equipped to avenge my sons; and I do not want to live in shame." Said Bergthora, "I was given to Njal in marriage when young, and I have promised him that we would share the same fate." 

Where Gunnar's horse stumbled and he spoke the famous lines, "How lovely the slopes are, more lovely than they have ever seemed to me before, golden cornfields and new-mown hay. I am going back home, and I will not go away."

But these places were on working farms and the farmers, understandably, treasured their privacy. I passed by on the main road, looked from afar, was never quite sure I'd found the right spot.

Now, I'm happy to say, there's a museum devoted to Njal's Saga at Hvolsvöllur [www.njala.is] in southern Iceland, offering exhibits and guided tours to the saga sites. There's even a community-wide activity, embroidering the Story of Burnt Njal in the style of the Bayeux tapestry.

In fact, according to an Icelandic publication called The Museum Guide 2013, there are currently 134 museums in Iceland--for a population of 320,000. Can you imagine 134 museums in Pittsburgh, PA or St. Louis, MO? Of these 134, by my count 11 focus on the sagas or the Viking Age. 

In addition to the Saga Centre in Hvolsvöllur, one of my favorites is the Settlement Centre in Borgarnes in western Iceland. [www.settlementcentre.is] One of its exhibits explores the settlement of Iceland between 870 and 930, as told in the sagas; the other tells the story of Egil's Saga through renderings by modern artists. An audio guide for your smartphone allows you to drive around the vicinity and find the places mentioned in the saga.

Such as the farm of Borg, where Egil, depressed, lay down to die after the drowning of a beloved son. One of his daughters craftily revived his will to live by getting him to make a poem about it, the beautiful “Lament for My Sons”: 

My mouth strains

To move the tongue,

To weigh and wing

The choice word:

Not easy to breathe

Odin’s inspiration

In my heart’s hinterland,

Little hope there… 

The poem is as much about poetry, the “purest of possessions,” the “word-mead,” as it is about the dead boy. “Now I feel it surge, swell / Like a sea, old giant’s blood.” As he created the poem, the saga says, “Egil began to get back his spirits.” When it was finished, he took his seat in the hall and declaimed the lament before all the family. 

A little further inland is Snorrastofa [www.snorrastofa.is], a museum, library, and research centre named for the 13th-century writer Snorri Sturluson on the site of his estate, Reykholt. Snorri may have written Egil's Saga. He is better known as the author of Heimskringla, a set of 16 sagas that contain almost everything we know about the history of Norway from its foundation to 1177. His masterpiece, though, is the Edda, which is our major (and sometimes our only) source for the stories of Norse mythology. 

In my biography of Snorri, Song of the Vikings, I imagine him in the hot-tub at Reykholt, regaling his friends with the story of Odin's eight-legged horse, Sleipnir:

One day while Thor was off fighting trolls in the east, a giant entered the gods’ city of Asgard. He was a stonemason, he said, and offered to build the gods a wall so strong it would keep out any ogre or giant or troll. All he wanted in return was the sun and the moon and goddess Freya for his wife.

The gods talked it over, wondering how they could get the wall for free. “If you build it in one winter, with no one’s help,” the gods said, thinking that impossible, “we have a deal.”

“Can I use my stallion?” the giant asked.

Loki replied, “I see no harm in that.” The other gods agreed. They swore mighty oaths.

The giant got to work. By night the stallion hauled enormous loads of stone, by day the giant laid them up. The wall rose, course upon course. With three days left of winter, it was nearly done.

“Whose idea was it to spoil the sky by giving away the sun and the moon—not to mention marrying Freyja into Giantland?” the gods shouted. They wanted out of their bargain. “It’s all Loki’s fault,” they agreed. “He’d better fix it.”

Loki transformed himself into a mare in heat. That evening, when the mason drove his stallion to the quarry, his horse was uncontrollable. It broke the traces and ran after the mare. The giant chased after them all night and, needless to say, he got no work done. Nor could he finish the wall the next day with no stone. His always-edgy temper snapped. He flew into a giant rage. The gods’ oaths were forgotten. Thor raised his terrible hammer and smashed the giant’s skull.

Eleven months later, Loki had a foal. It was grey and had eight legs. It grew up to be the best horse among gods and men. 

There's a wonderful exhibition about Snorri Sturluson's life and art at Reykholt now. Last June I spent a good hour or two going through it with a group of tourists from the horse-trekking company America2Iceland. I had very few quibbles with the text--not surprising, since it was written by Óskar Guðmundsson, whose masterful 2009 biography, Snorri: Ævisaga Snorra Sturlusonar 1179-1241, inspired me to write Song of the Vikings. 

We dipped our fingers in Snorri's hot-tub, before mounting our horses to continue our week-long trek through the countryside of Borgarfjord. Yes, you guessed it, I am now leading saga tours myself. They're not precisely the kind of tours I was looking for in 1986--but I hadn't discovered the joys of riding Icelandic horses back then. If you'd like to join me in 2014, visit America2Iceland.com and put your name on the list.

Join me again next week at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.

Einar Kárason's Skáld

In May I had lunch with the Icelandic novelist Einar Kárason. His uncle introduced us, knowing we both had published books about the 13th-century Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson, mine nonfiction (Song of the Vikings) and Einar's fiction (Skáld).

I'd heard about Einar's book. You won't like it, my Icelandic friends had warned. His Snorri is not your Snorri. Snorri Sturluson is not the main character in Skáld, but much in the shadow of his nephew, Sturla Thordarson. If you've read Song of the Vikings, you'll know I never much cared for that nephew.

Sturla wrote part of Sturlunga Saga and The Saga of King Hakon, our only direct sources of information about Snorri's life. As I wrote in Song of the Vikings, "In neither book does Snorri come off well; no one knows what grudge the nephew held to portray his uncle so poorly. Unhelpfully, Sturla’s two sagas also contradict each other."

It's the mark of a great novelist that he or she can change your mind. Having now read Einar's Skáld, I feel quite differently about Sturla. Think of what Hilary Mantel did for Thomas Cromwell's reputation in Wolf Hall. Einar Kárason's Skáld does the same for Sturla Thordarson.

I'm not ready to call Sturla a better writer than Snorri Sturluson. And I still feel Sturla (and Einar) portrayed Snorri poorly. But now I understand why Sturla wrote the way he did. I understand the conflicts he was dealing with, the encroachments of the world, the desires and threats, the yearning for peace and quiet and an unending supply of parchment, the loves and hates and little acts of friendship that motivated him, his ambition, his ego, his inadequacies, his grudge. In Skáld, Snorri's nephew becomes real.

It's fiction. Don't forget that. Einar, as a novelist, has a license I did not when writing Song of the Vikings. Einar can--and does--stretch the facts, make leaps of interpretation, draw conclusions that don't hold up to scholarly investigation. It's fiction.

And yet…

The Saturday after our lunch date, I heard Einar give a lecture. I could not follow all of it--I understand written Icelandic much better than spoken. But Einar also gave me a copy of an article he had written in Skirnir, the journal of the Icelandic Literary Society.

He was arguing that Sturla Thordarson also wrote Njal's Saga, the best of the Icelandic sagas, widely acknowledged a masterpiece of world literature, the first saga I had read and the one that (along with Snorri's Edda) had inspired me to devote my life to Icelandic literature.

In Skirnir, Einar goes to great pains to point out that other people have had this idea before him. Other scholars have pointed out the many similarities between Njal's Saga and those in Sturlunga Saga: similarities in names, in the way characters are introduced, in whole scenes (the burning of Njal, the burning of Flugumyri). To these Einar added similarities in style, in pacing and structure, and most of all, in voice.

Lecturing, Einar is very dramatic. His expressions are exaggerated, his gestures wide. He stamps back and forth before the podium in his motorcycle boots. He runs his fingers through his long, graying hair. He's a big man. His voice booms. Writing in the journal Skirnir, he borrows some of that bombast.

In Skáld, he is very subtle. The story builds slowly, told through many different voices. It's not a long book. But no one knows better than a novelist that by making it real, by bringing Sturla Thordarson to life as the author of all these works, Einar has made his case.

Once you have fully imagined Sturla engaged in composing Njal's Saga--by reading Einar Kárason's Skáld--it's hard to go back to thinking it's only a theory.

Skáld, I'm sorry to say, is currently available only in Icelandic. You can order it from the publisher, Forlagid, here: http://www.forlagid.is/?tag=einar-karason

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.

The Dapple Gray

When I was in Iceland to buy horses in 1997, I fell in love with a dapple gray mare. My host, the breeder Elvar Einarsson, who was taking me around Skagafjord horse-shopping, lost his temper. “You’ll be sorry if you buy that horse,” he said.

For a moment I wondered. Were those stories about gray horses really true?

Gray (or white) horses make up an estimated 10 percent of the Icelandic horse population, yet they account for a disproportionate number of the magical horses in legends and folk tales. There’s a gray horse in the story of Fluga, the exceptionally fast mare that Thorir Dove-Nose raced against the sorceror Orn. As I wrote in an earlier blog post, "The Sorceror's Horse," Thorir won the race and Orn went up into the hills and disappeared. But when Thorir came back to fetch Fluga, he was surprised to find a gray black-maned stallion with the mare. Given that Kjolur, the highland route along which the men raced, is in the middle of Iceland, set between two of the largest glaciers, it’s unlikely this stallion wandered off from a nearby farm. Most probably, it’s the sorceror Orn himself.

Another story in the medieval Book of Settlements is that of Audun Stoti and the gray horse of Hjardarvatn. One day, a dapple gray horse came racing down out of the hills. It scattered Audun’s herd and bowled over his stallion. Audun was a big and powerful man, so he went out and caught the newcomer. He hitched him up to a sledge and spent the morning hauling in the hay from the homefield. The work went well until the afternoon. Then the gray horse started stamping. By evening, he stamped so hard his hooves sank into the ground up to his fetlocks. When the sun went down, he broke free of his harness, raced back to the hills, and disappeared into the lake, “and that was the last anyone ever saw of him.”

The horse that lives in a lake in Iceland is called a nykur or "nicker." They are always gray, and can usually be identified by their hooves: turned back to front. They should never be ridden. The Old Icelandic dictionary known as Cleasby-Vigfusson calls them a kind of “sea goblin,” and notes that they can take on other shapes than that of a horse. In this they are like the Scottish water horse, or kelpie, which can also appear as a gnome or an elf. A kelpie waits by the side of a river until he sees travelers approaching. Then he assumes his horse’s shape and drags to the riverbottom anyone foolish enough to mount him. In Iceland, at least the nicker waits for the magic words.

There once was a shepherd girl, one story goes, searching for some ewes that were lost. She was quite tired and a long way from home when suddenly she saw a gray horse standing by a lake. She caught it and tied on a piece of string for a bridle. Then suddenly she lost her nerve. “I don’t feel like riding this horse,” she said. At that the horse jumped into the water and disappeared.

Another time three children were playing on the bank of a river when they noticed a gray horse standing nearby. They went up to look at it, and one of them bravely clambered onto its back. When the horse didn’t spook, a second child climbed on. “Let’s go for a ride,” they called to their brother, but the oldest child refused. “I don’t feel like riding this horse,” he said. No sooner were the words out of his mouth, than the horse leaped into the river and the two children drowned.

The most fearsome gray horse in Icelandic lore is not a water horse but a fire horse. Late in the classic Njal’s Saga, just before Flosi burns the house down around the ears of Wise Njal and his wife and sons, a boy living nearby wakes in the night to hear a tremendous crash. Both earth and sky seemed to quake. “He looked to the west, and thought he saw a ring of fire with a man on a gray horse inside the circle, riding furiously.” The man was as black as pitch, and held high a flaming firebrand. As he rode, he roared out a verse:

I ride a horse
With icy mane
Forelock dripping,
Evil bringing.
Fire at each end,
And poison in the middle…

He hurled his firebrand, “and a vast fire erupted, blotting the mountains from sight.” It was the “witch-ride,” the saga says, “a portent of disaster.” (A modern reader might be inclined to call it a volcanic eruption—still a disaster.)

Elvar Einarsson, when he tried to talk me out of taking home the lovely dapple gray mare I’d seen in Skagafjord, probably knew all of these old stories. But that wasn’t why he warned me against buying her. The problem with this gray horse was her gaits: She didn't tolt, she piggy-paced.

I learned the history and folklore of Icelandic horses to write my first book, A Good Horse Has No Color: Searching Iceland for the Perfect Horse, which I'm now delighted to say is back in print! You can purchase copies of the paperback (or ebook) from Amazon.com, or meet me at Iceland Affair in Winchester Center, CT on July 20 for an autographed copy. Autographed copies will also soon be available at my local independent bookstore, Green Mountain Books in Lyndonville, VT. Call Kim to order.


Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.

Homosexuality in the Icelandic Sagas

 A story I read the other day in The Reykjavík Grapevine, “Iceland’s First Gay Lovers,” surprised me by explaining something I had written about many years ago.

In 1997, while researching my book A Good Horse Has No Color, I stayed for some weeks at Snorrastadir in the west of Iceland. One afternoon I listened in as the farmer, Haukur, and another guest, a horsewoman named Hallgerdur, discussed Njal’s Saga, the medieval masterpiece that contains a famous “feminist” character also named Hallgerdur.

Here’s how I described the scene in my book:

…Known for her hip-length hair and her “thief’s eyes,” this storied Hallgerdur had been wooed and wed by the handsome Gunnar of Hlidarendi, that paragon of Icelandic manhood who, according to the saga, could “jump more than his own height in full armor, and just as far backwards as forwards.”

“He could swim like a seal,” the book said.

“There was no sport at which anyone could even attempt to compete with him.”

“There has never been his equal.”

The marriage was a disaster. It ended in Gunnar’s death when, his house surrounded by enemies his wife had made for him, his bowstring broke and he asked for some strands of her long hair to plait into a new one; she refused.

Snorrastadir at midnight.

It was this that Haukur and Hallgerdur were discussing: why the Saga-Age Hallgerdur—an historical woman who lived and died about a thousand years ago—had refused the gift of her hair.

They chattered on too fast for me to more than snatch at the argument. I marveled again that these sagas, of esoteric, antiquarian interest at home, were so alive here, centuries after they were written. I was heading again for that hot cup of tea when Haukur gave out a great guffaw.

“Er Gunnar á Hlidarendi, nú, hommi?!” he asked. “Is Gunnar of Hlidarendi, now, a homosexual?”

I stopped. I looked at Hallgerdur. The answer she was arguing was yes. You could write a dissertation on that one, I thought—Homosexuality in Njal’s Saga. Gunnar did have an unusually close friendship with Njal, whose manhood was in question because he couldn’t grow a beard. I wished I could comprehend the details of Hallgerdur’s thesis and join in the conversation, but though I’d read the saga several times and knew it inside out, my spoken Icelandic wasn’t up to the task. I retreated to the kitchen, where Ingibjorg gracefully drew my attention to the fact that the dishwasher could be unstacked and the table set for dinner. With the clatter drowning out Haukur’s increasing outrage, I replayed the point in English in my head and awarded the set and match to Hallgerdur…

Snorrastadir and the crater Eldborg.

That’s what I witnessed in 1997.

I had gone to Iceland first in 1986, after studying Old Norse for several years—and having been taught that the language was “dead,” like Latin. As I wrote earlier in this blog (“Practical Education”), I was delighted to learn to the contrary on that first visit that Old Norse wasn’t “dead” after all. It had just shifted into Icelandic, changing about as much as English has since Shakespeare’s day.

By 1997 (my seventh trip to Iceland), I knew that the sagas themselves were still very much alive, some 800 years after they had been written. Everywhere I went in Iceland, someone shared an allusion from a saga. The medieval past was remembered in the name of every hill and farmstead (not to mention every beer and candybar). There was a saga everywhere I turned.

What I didn’t know, when I witnessed Haukur and Hallgerdur arguing over homosexuality in Njal’s Saga, was the news peg.

Horses at Snorrastadir.

It’s true that Icelandic farmers are surprisingly keen readers compared to the farmers I know in America. Another day I came upon Haukur and a guest comparing the novel Independent People, by Iceland’s Nobel prize-winner Halldor Laxness, to Growth of the Soil, by the Norwegian Nobelist, Knut Hamsun.

But Homosexuality in Njal’s Saga was not Hallgerdur’s idea. The dissertation didn’t need to be written—a book was already in print, as I learned last week from The Reykjavík Grapevine.

In “Íslenska Kynlífsbókin” (The Icelandic Sex Reader), published in 1990, Óttar Guðmundsson, a psychiatrist at the Landspítali hospital in Reykjavík, “famously argued that Njáll and Gunnar, heroes of ‘Njáls Saga,’ were gay and in love with each other,” the Grapevine says. The newspaper also mentions Óttar’s new book, “Hetjur og hugarvíl” (Anxious Heroes), “devoted to psychoanalysing the main characters of some of the more prominent Icelandic Sagas.”

Looks like I have some further reading to do. And a thank-you letter to send to psychiatrist Óttar Guðmundsson for his help in keeping the Icelandic sagas alive.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another writing adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.