Epidemics in Medieval Iceland: The Evidence of Contemporary Annals
Elizabeth Rowe discusses how epidemics repeatedly struck the isolated community of Iceland in the later Middle Ages, and contemporary annals record them in ways that range from the horrifying to the humorous.
‘Viking’ Humour
Do we share a sense of humour with Vikings? Dr Hannah Burrows talks about what might have made the Vikings laugh, and what was considered a serious matter in medieval Scandinavia. She will explore what puns, jokes, insults, and satire can tell us about early Scandinavian culture and social concerns.
Did the ancient Greeks discover Iceland before the Vikings?
We know that Norse settlers came to Iceland in the ninth century, and that Irish monks likely lived on the island before that. However, new research suggests that the ancient Greeks came to the northern island before the year 300 BC.
The weird story of an Icelandic ghost named Þórgunna
Then, in the middle of the night, the party was awakened by a noise as of someone fumbling about in the darkness: someone had broken into the farmhouse. The larder: the thief was in the larder.
Does the medieval past affect the present? In Iceland it does
As a medievalist it is sometimes a difficult task and I’m all too familiar with the refrain, “Why does something that happened 1,000 years ago matter?
Medieval Scandinavia: The Rise and Fall of the Icelandic Commonwealth
Beñat Elortza Larrea describes the settlement of Iceland, the formation of its commonwealth and the eventual incorporation into the Norwegian tributary territories of the Atlantic Ocean.
Wood And Woodlands In Icelandic Literary, Documentary And Archaeological Sources
The 12th-century AD Íslendingabók describes Iceland as having been ‘covered with woodland from the mountains to the seashores’ at the time of the Norse settlement in the late 9th-century AD.
Looking for the Northern Lights in Medieval Iceland, finding Jane Austen
Ármann Jakobsson attempts to answer the questions he keeps being asked about Icelandic sagas.
The mystery of plague in medieval Iceland
Icelandic annals record two severe plague epidemics for 1402-4 and 1494-95.
Cannibalism in the Icelandic Sagas: a bad habit or an ancient magical practice?
In Icelandic sagas, giants are described as awkward, evil and uncivilized, and curiously their diet mainly consists of two elements: horse meat and human flesh.
Weather and Ideology in Íslendinga saga: A Case Study of the Volcanic Climate Forcing of the 1257 Samalas eruption
This eruption, which took place in 1257 at the Samalas caldera in Indonesia, caused a cooling effect across Europe until 1261, as the sulfur emissions from the volcano encircled the globe.
The Yule Cat of Iceland: A Different Kind of Christmas Tradition
By Minjie Su You know the Christmas Cat, – That cat was enormous. People know not where he came from Nor to what…
What Imported Viking Age and Medieval Artifacts Can Tell Us about Trade and Exchange in Mývatn, Iceland
This article examines how Mývatn Icelanders were able to partially connect to the continental trade in beads, the Baltic trade in flint, and to other European trade networks operating between the 9th and 15th centuries, and to what extent these networks were able to influence the early Mývatn economy.
‘The Limits of my Language mean the Limits of my World’: Multilingualism in Medieval Iceland
In this thesis, I discuss how medieval Icelanders would have considered foreign languages and those people who could speak them.
Messages from the Otherworld: The Roles of the Dead in Medieval Iceland
The ghosts in sagas are no phantoms or incorporeal spirits, but appear to the living in their physical and tangible bodies at a dark time of the day or year. The dead look the same as they used to when they lived, and are thus easily recognized by the living.
Dating the Viking Age Settlement of Iceland
This thesis tackles a globally significant issue in archaeology and palaeoecology that is subject to fierce and long-running debate – how best to synthesize large sets of radiocarbon (14C) dates to determine the most accurate and precise age ranges for key events in history.
Outlawry in the Icelandic Family Sagas
The present study scrutinizes the outlawry and outlaws that appear in the Icelandic Family Sagas.
Medieval PhD Dissertation turned into comic
A doctoral student at the University of Iceland has recreated his dissertation in a novel way – by making it into a comic.
Norse arrival on Iceland led to extinction of its walrus population, study finds
A team of researchers have shown that soon after the Norse arrived in Iceland, that island’s species of walrus went extinct.
The Saga of Jón the Playmate: A ‘Cannibalistic’ Story
At first sight, Jóns saga leikara is but your average chivalric romance, filled with exciting but somewhat generic little adventures.
Spatial Reading: Digital Literary Maps of the Icelandic Outlaw Sagas
Digital literary maps in particular, or maps that produce spatial data from texts that are considered imaginative or creative as opposed to charters or historical records, offer new critical possibilities for visualizing and understanding the interaction between spatial and geographic knowledge in literary texts.
Horror in the Medieval North: The Troll
In the Middle Ages, trolls were not really thought of a race or a species; that was a later development influenced by scientific taxonomy.
The Poetic Edda
Comic, tragic, instructive, grandiose, witty and profound, the poems of the Edda have influenced artists from Wagner to Tolkien and a new generation of video-game and film makers.
A Possible case of Facio-Auriculo-Vertebral sequence (FAVs) in an adult female from medieval Iceland (13th–16th Century)
This paper offers a visually distinct case of an under-represented and under-documented congenital condition for future identification within paleopathology.