BBC The Viking Sagas

every country has its treasure trove of beloved tales but one nation has an unrivaled passion for storytelling for ten centuries Icelanders have been enthralled by a series of homespun stories you they're some of the most wonderful tales ever told how they came to be written is one of the great mysteries of the dark ages thousand years ago at the edge of the Arctic Circle there was an explosion of creativity which remains pretty much unparalleled in history when the Vikings came here to Iceland one of the first things they did strangely was to settle down and begin telling each other tales these sagas as they're now known some of the greatest stories ever told they're haunted by ghosts and plagued by witches mighty heroes ride to the rescue wielding magical swords the sagas captivated audiences ten centuries ago and they're still entertaining millions of people today they're about money and sex and you know and death and if this is just you know the essence of good story sex and death it is probably the greatest book ever written you know this is magnificent story both has everything's good novels supposed to have she has love and bottle and great poet and everything it's everything in the sagas are not only great works of fiction they're based on the lives of real people and they challenge many of the stereotypes of the Viking Age they reveal the power Scandinavian women wielded they were explorers and colonizers they may even have written some of the sagas Iceland's ancient tales also had a profound effect on us the sagas influenced many of Britain's greatest writers and inspired some of our most treasured stories get it flat never had mulch Shawn be art Marvin hammer hysterical in order yo Kim said our hundred thousand catties of tricky hard squamos Roth IRA Frankie fifties Kanaka three was the lantern of your onnum the Alma storm Ana Muhammadan Appleton terror a tewara rally via syndicated system of our enough winking Multi multi this is how great stories begin with a journey a quest a search for a promised land and so it is with the sagas they recount the moment when Norwegian exile set sail in their longships they defied the wild oceans to found a brave new world they named it Iceland I wonder what the first settlers here in Iceland thought when they arrived it's the least likely of promised lands certainly the strangest place I've ever been to it feels primeval like a woolly mammoth should come lumbering along the horizon there's nothing growing here there's no trees or crops and under the ground there's no iron ore or gold and yet these Hardy pioneers didn't just turn tail and sale off in their long boats they stayed and tried to create something out of this extraordinary landscape what they created was truly magical words ah my dear album warmer than death with him fine good swimmer now the famed Montenegro from within what randomized rooftop semester option it's permitted enjoy our manifest skill than a very speedy fancy toilet in Iceland is where Europe ends and the Arctic begins it's more than 700 miles northwest of Scotland remote far-flung isolated but when it comes to the world of words this country has always been one of the centres of literary activity one in ten Icelanders is a published author this love of letters began long ago with the writing of the sagas I think all modernizing the writers they have their background in this one way or lille during researchers we didn't have any universities no academies and we didn't have many types of arts no architectures no no theaters no music no opera no sculptures no ballet of course maybe if you lick without history this is the only thing that you have ever been good at it's writing stories and telling stories the greatest of these stories are known as the family sagas they're set in the first hundred and fifty years of Iceland's history from the original settlement in 870 ad the sagas were written down in the 13th and 14th centuries in just over a hundred years dozens and dozens of stories were composed it's a creative outpouring that has few parallels in history well it was very very remarkable that such a lot of earth such a large volume of literature should come out of this relatively tiny ice at a tiny island with really come over his small population but remarkable too is the the genres the forms of this literature while the rest of medieval Europe was writing courtly romances about Knights and princesses the ice lenders were creating dramas about real families in real locations doing real things the thing that they're most like actually is much much later 19th century novels they're there they're in prose they're naturalistic they deal with social issues so they're they're big expansive narratives you see something that is so much in common with our time and this time so you feel wow this is really human that's how human being is you know you get something like ah we have no chance you know it I know this it's like peep into a hole into a party they're doing the same thing they are of course about in essence always about a very primitive thing they are about the inner circle in human action about you know lust and power and fight and they're about you know they are about the glue that binds us out of the many sagas that were written four or five are classics but there's one in particular that's always intrigued me we all love a good story but who'd have thought when you're flicking through a book at bedtime or lying reading on the beach that this is where it all began one of the first great works of fiction the pages may be blackened by the passage of time but despite being over 700 years old the story still leaps out at you it's got everything a good book needs love and lust violence betrayal and revenge it's called laxdaela saga and in my opinion it's the greatest of the Icelandic sagas lack Stella means salmon river valley and it's in the rich farming and fishing country of northwest iceland that the story takes place the laxdaela saga charts the fortunes of the families who settle in the area it follows their triumphs and tragedies over several generations the love affairs the blood feuds the marriages the murders the story is rooted in a timeless landscape it's still possible to pinpoint the fells and fjords where key events occurred this sense of place underpins the relationship between Iceland ders and their ancient stories this happens in my area these characters are my forefathers and they are still in my mind I say they you know I know the farmers who lives on their farm and I found the similarity to them I don't think we having so much changed since this time we are still the same farmers as we were in these days and I almost imagined myself when I was for example taking sheep down from the mountains I was some time thinking about these things that they have done I'm in the same steps as they were and they were there and they're in there you start Blackstone Lasogga with a portrait of the great matriarch owner and her nickname is the deep minded it's the deep minded mean clever wise with a huge memory philosophical what a wonderful epithet what a surprising maybe epithet for it for a woman in saga the deep minded active that for hung on at La Brea via the deli akhmim seer learnt Slava the Sam Hahnville T Ceylon Hilton ership PC new if you are the bottom enlightened by a race' far FC Thun hater become me Ock big thick Thoth many of the characters in the sagas are real people the moments of high drama can be traced to genuine historical events and few moments are more dramatic than the discovery of the new land so who the first settlers in this area then that was either the deep mind that the two blue guys we call it on Iceland see she was she came sailing up this Bay and had settlement over there by the other end of the base he settled there and park called klumberg then it was a woman yes tell me a bit about her then she was she probably came here on the year of 892 she she came from Scotland that is what happened is that her husband went into battle there and he died then and she had to go away with her crew and she act stablish the crew on the boat made the boat ready yet nobody nobody was supposed to know it and then she sailed away from Scotland she was all what you see a running away from there but but that was a magnificent that a woman could do that oh no see those days so she say the first settler in this area is a woman yeah and she's Scottish yes and she's able to control a boatload of men yes come on and then what happened when she got here this she settled down in this poem called Cumberland and what she did is that she gave her crew all the men got independency they they lived here in this area in the establish lay area you can imagine lots he must have been at least a very big woman very big minded you know can imagine that's here she must have been very clever as he must have been very fair she was fair to people's he gave everybody with her so she must have been what she does is a very big woman in mind she must have been great wonderful gosh and it she earns the title and the deep minded yes yes it's a good it's a very apt one isn't it it's tell us a lot yeah about it is it really possible that a thousand years ago a British woman colonized part of Iceland it sounds like the stuff of adventure fiction not historical fact but recent archaeological evidence actually supports the story told in the laxdaela saga this is a skeleton of one of the first settlers in Iceland she's a woman only 25 years old when she died she was probably someone's wife mother daughter she's here in a position of rest just as she was laid in the ground a thousand years ago and it was precisely this time that the laxdaela saga was being composed but is there any truth to these tales that Iceland was settled by foreign women well DNA studies on bones just like this has shown that while the majority of the male population were coming over from the Nordic homelands and Scandinavia over 60% of the women were British so this evidence shows us that right from the word go Iceland was a multicultural melting pot the story of Unruh deep minded shows us how close the links were between Iceland and the British Isles both countries were staging posts in a maritime Empire which stretched from Norway right across the North Atlantic and beyond here we have a collection of silver coins discovered in Iceland and dated to the turn in the first millennium but what's really remarkable about this collection is the majority of coins are English at this point around the Year a thousand over two-thirds the British Isles was ruled directly by Vikings and here we have a payment known as the Dan guild which was made by the English kingdoms to the Vikings in order to keep them off their land but we've also got coins here from Germany and Arabia and the Middle East which shows that the Vikings were also raiding trading and settling right across the known world the Viking Age began in the eighth century over the next 300 years they raided traded and settled leaving a profound mark on Europe and especially the British Isles well that's what's the most obvious effects are on place names and in so many place names in in northern and eastern England just thinking about where I grew up there thorne abhi Ormsby Norman B the language of course that's even more obvious if you like that's the Scandinavian long words are very basic words so they're words like husband window law egg and even the pronoun system in English is derived from Scandinavian pronouns so they then they're they're they're derived from the Scandinavian pronouns not from the the corresponding Old English ones thus can 11 settlements resulted in a thorough enrichment of English society the Vikings who settled Britain had to fit in alongside other people but the Scandinavians who sailed to Iceland found an uninhabited land here the Vikings had to build a new nation from scratch and what they created was unique for the Dark Ages we're in this very significant place aren't we it's got geographical and political and spiritual significance can you tell me a little bit more about it this is the site of the I'll think of the early meeting place of the Icelandic Commonwealth where people came from all over the country to discuss legal matters formulate the new law and the settled disputes so history more or less happened in this location this is a parliament that the settlers come up with here after a few decades of living in the country as a free man and they sit here in a very structured assembly that has a democratic function in a way for the three farmers and males and and decide by voting is it unusual in terms of what what's going on elsewhere in Europe at this time in terms of European history this is quite unique because they don't have a king they don't have a centralized power and that is the beauty of the system you have independent chieftains coming together and they decide on something and execute whatever is decided Icelanders set up a nation from about from from 870 onwards and they set up a parliament and they set up a legal system and in a way I think perhaps that the that the outpouring of literature that you get in Iceland this huge flowering of not just sagas but also unique kinds of poetry I think maybe that was part of being a new nation that you had a Terranova and you didn't only settle that and build it up as a nation socially you also inscribed a kind of literary culture the first things that were written where family trees tracing the Icelanders back to very no pool people in Scandinavia and I think one of the reasons they did this may have been that there were rumors in our neighboring countries about the people that moved to Iceland in the years about 900 to 1000 we're mostly anti-social elements thieves fugitives murderers people that didn't survive around civilized people so maybe the first reaction was when they had this alphabet and could write down they were building these family trees saying that this was the most noble people because all Icelanders they can trace the roots back to kings and queens and and even or Odin intolerant and so on for some storytelling may have served an even more profound function reminding them of the homes and loved ones which they would never see again while a few British women like on the deep minded chose to settle in Iceland others were brought by forced one of the next characters we meet in the laxdaela saga is a concubine today we call her a sex slave she's been abducted from Ireland her name is Mel Kaka most of the women they will grow up either in slave markets in Scandinavia or brought directly from the British Isles mostly from Ireland of course when they came here they became a part of the population and the male culture the Scandinavian male culture became dominant the language and so on but they had an experience for generations of telling stories in their own language and even writing books in their own language the Celts the book of Celts and so on there's something really interesting taking place in Icelandic literature then you've got this male population with the oral tradition of storytelling combined with this influx this exodus of women coming from Britain so the Celtic influence could be this idea that you take that literature and then write it down absolutely absolutely foreign women like Mel caca were just characters in the sagas these lonely literate exhales may have helped create the sagas by writing down their stories in the laxdaela saga we find out that Mel coca the Irish slave girl is pregnant by her master a Viking called Hoss called a wallet and everything fight the fiddler her school swing / / school - a tonka cutler wanna seem too threatening so two owners and flayed him another key Meitner parts Ian's near storm on a scooter Asperger cos witness guilty hata campus raining Karla Ola Ola burger out of last Roberta / school to let me Klaus - Shane Olaf is a major character in the early part of the saga he's kind and wise he marries and raises a family Olaf has one child that he dotes upon a boy called cotton how long Absalom onofrio's did that I fiestar whistle aunty I am a collector Oh real funny and flipping a manga best either host later make it out halihan 5 to 6000 Oscar Fiat limit make it mother or starfish Olaf also has another lad a foster son by the name of Buckley Buckley is a gifted child but he grows up in Cotton's longshadow olice family and farmer flourishing all is going well rather - well of course it's at this point that a new and sinister character enters the story sorcery is ever-present in the sagas reflecting the Viking belief that magic really could transform the lives of ordinary folk in me either fear ow Chianti Oh happened in our race cruelly Fenton today we modern people we we often look at magics are some kind of superstitions it's difficult for us to understand it because we live in another time and perhaps in another world in a way but for them that was a real thing they need they they knew that they could achieve something by doing some rituals and with that they could affect the world around them both in good and bad ways of course in a way it was a very much practical magic to let a cow with more magics to let the grass grow faster and therefore people had some kinds of magics that could could help them to to look more positive in in the coming days and have extra power to to to survive but sorcery could also be used to maim and kill for Vikings curses were weapons of malign magical power the word in Iceland has always been the most important thing in in the whole culture people believed that if if you had the power to control the the language and put the words in out of your mouth in in the right order then it could give you actually up more power of light-years Oldham must assess Ashworth they're the same money Alpana he either iced and mr. scar they call me earth of Oska play aghast call me this bottlee inherits the cursed sword and with the handing over of the weapon the story takes a new turn the focus shifts to Cottle and Botley and a beautiful young woman with whom their fate will be intertwined with Rawat renovates Arif box away sláinte by the Oceano Whitman where room acoustics kana so I don t mo photo art partner Reaper Roderick owner of the is Carta johani more pest or different van against in or Erland corner there are many leading ladies the towering above them all is good room a complex and tempestuous beauty the number of strong women characters is a striking feature of the laxdaela saga so too is the delight the writer takes in clothes and jewelry love and romance and this has led some historians to question the authorship of the saga so we think that probably the traditional view of the sagas is that they're very heroic tales they're written by men for men and starring them is that the case with laxdaela saga no I think it's all the way around an italics scholar professor halka class has suggested that the writer though the one who wrote down like stylus aura was a woman there are so many scenes in that book that tell you about women's lives it must have been told by women and listened to by women and you see up to the time of television probably where you would have storytelling evenings in Iceland in the farmhouse you have this long winter months eight or nine months and you have to pass the time there's no tele so you tell stories you would have the people sitting on those benches on both sides of the longhouse and you would have one person either you in the middle reading or telling stories woman's domain is within the house man's domain is without that so storytelling must have been a great part of life as women just as meant absolutely so we have this saga centered on women possibly told by women about women women's roles within society definitely I would say something this is the site of one of the greatest romances in all of Icelandic literature it's the hot spring at the tiny hamlet of Lao Gong Lao god is good runs home and it's at this spa that yard sale and Goodrem begin their courtship Gudrun falls passionately in love that cotton is a true Viking he's consumed not by love but by lust wanderlust with marriage beckoning he up sticks and leaves Iceland Cottenham Botley sail away to norway they arrived in scandinavia at a pivotal moment in European history take a look at this amazing little object this man just oozes character he's got a flamboyant moustache deep penetrating eyes and really strong features he's wearing this conical hat he's sitting on a chair holding a very weird looking object but when we take a closer look you can see that the Hat is in fact a crown he's seated on a throne and the object could be either an upside-down crucifix or the hammer wielded by the pagan god thor as he creates thunder this wonderful little man encapsulate s' the moment when the viking world has one foot in the pagan past and one in the christian future well Phil Italia or Spiros FM's to Ma overall Tahari me PD this is a ceremony to mark the end of summer and the beginning of winter it's the last remnant of a once mighty faith the religion of Odin and Thor Norse paganism the word paganism comes in many negative connotations it might seem odd peculiar perhaps even a little sinister but that's because for two thousand years Christians have been writing tracks and treaties that down these so-called pagans to hell in fact for thousands of years this Norse paganism was the religion of the Scandinavian people it helped them make sense of the universe it acted as a comforter to them in times of need and it even helped them chart the passage of time it's a mark of its influence that it's still doing this today a thousand years ago this ancient religion was under attack from a new crusading faith Christianity the man who was driving the conversion of the Vikings was olaf the king of norway were there reasons then for converting to christianity what were the benefits basically joining the European Union yeah same thing right so it was trade and yes trade because the markets were closing down we could no longer to trade with England because they were not except they consume you and for a period of years so people could do what they called prime signing which was a basically crossing yourself before you did converse that was no longer accepted Denmark was basically very strongly Christian no way had become Christian at one protocol to sweeten was about to become Christian so it was basically a regime was closing cool yeah so it was a very practical business decision but many people didn't want to give up the faith of their ancestors the Icelanders resisted Christianity to make them convert the Norwegian monarch King Olaf decided to keep cotton as a sort of B IP hostage the King's sister Inga bjorg keeps cotton entertained in medieval courtly romance the hero would have escaped from Norway and returned to his true love but what sets the family sagas apart is their realism what's so surprising is that the characters are archetypal kind of so easy to identify with the characters I mean sometimes deceptively easy we forget how very different their circumstances and beliefs and cultural traditions were but the characters in family sagas are their feelings and their failings their hopes and their fears their their passions and their weaknesses they're very easy to identify captain is not only beautiful and good you know he's also he come on he's doing the princess in Norway and he is not a holy figure or a holy guy all the literature in Europe is very creased in that sense that there are martyrs there are good guys and they're bad guys and good things happen to good guys and bad things happen to bad guys in the saddest this is not so the science can be a bad bad guy and also it does something very bad to everybody and our success with cotton is happy to stay in Norway but bottlee wants to go home before he leaves he criticizes cotton for the way he's treating Goodrem norio Pawan Telford our Amenti appeal Athena masturbator evev Alshon brave re-lace Lara M final Ferreira new and we are seeking state Scalia Alcuin Corps veteran community blossom-laden all the result of a moon roof up tothe Ethel Scott Tanner arriviste want a thorough set wrote 11 in keep your cocoa no sister bottlee arrives home he tells Goodrem about Cotton's affair with the King's sister the reason for his anger with cotton now becomes clear Botley is in love with Goodrem a few months later he takes a fateful step and proposes in the year 1000 a slim finally converts to Christianity cotton is free to return home he brings with him a wedding gift a priceless headdress for his fiance good room yatin has the bridal gift but not the bride he marries another woman but he's consumed by what he sees as a double betrayal there were regular feasts in the area so the two couples Watley and Goodrem and Charton and his new wife couldn't avoid each other whenever they met Charton publicly humiliated good room and he spurned bot Lee's attempts at reconciliation with each slight the hatred grew the precious headdress that was supposed to have been good runes was now the property of Cotton's new wife and this headdress became the focus of the feud one particular feast the headdress goes missing everyone suspects it's Goodwin's doing if she can't have it then no one can with the destruction of the headdress cartons pent-up fury explodes he barricades Bob Lee and Goodwin in their home cutting them off from the toilets which are outside is deliberately inflicting maximum humiliation revenge is the kind of engine of quite a lot of saga narrative because obviously if you get a feud for instance that's going to kind of keep on through generations for instance resentments build-up and a number of family sagas it's these proud independent women who are pushing the vengeance and it's quite often the men who are trying to kind of damp it down by due legal process and lick settlements and the women are inciting the violence as in laxdaela saga Goren provoking Watley to kill kirtan because she can't bear not to be married goaded on by his wife Botley and his men ride out to confront cotton so siggy the tension is really mounting in the saga now isn't it Goodwin has goaded her brothers and motley to ambush cotton and then then what happens this is the place where everything happened cotton was coming from this direction with his friend who was coming from certified and and but Lee and the brother of Ghulam they came from this direction and probably they picked up this place because they the valley is slimmest here and probably they were staying or we think that they were staying up there in the hill on the rats there there is a hole down there where a deep hole and they could hide themselves with the washers and having a look to both directions easily so when when Japanese in this direction they saw that he could fight him then they went down here and attack him of course they were attacking him three or four attacking one person so must have been lot of noise with weapons they were free for attacking one person lot of threat probably Jean plot because captain was producing them a little bit with his shorts and it was a bad sort so you can imagine that he got tired for example you can imagine that it was a lot of hype meeting and they were they were tired yatin fights bravely but finally he weakens with his strength failing he turns and addresses bubbling you half light-years Sultan must assess Ashworth where the same money Alpana either I am s to scar the earth full stop you you in connectivity sewer moly captains and so we still won't burn us all publicity staring the heroin or unties carton eek neon bottle it was poorly favored versions only Stevie Wonder blood has been shed the curse of leg biter has been fulfilled all this sorcery and violence and vengeance has led to this a bloodied corpse lying on the grounds Botley has killed his brother and his best friend he's broken two of the great Viking taboos by severing the sacred bonds of friendship and family what must he be feeling right now intense guilt profound shame or perhaps a sense of deep foreboding because the wheels of revenge have now been set in motion a posse tracks down Buckley and slaughters him Goodrem sends her son to avenge his murder both families are trapped in a bloody spiral of revenge it seems that the feud might go on forever but then the saga takes an unexpected twist Goodrem the woman who has helped send cotton and Botley to early graves converts to Christianity and becomes Iceland's first nun it's an unlikely act of repentance was it genuine or not I'm not sure I don't know but I just think this you know perhaps those who told the story the audience liked the Flair of that perhaps you know it's a way for the for the author or the author's if you can say that that you know this perhaps this woman was just you know there was no one worthy of her but the king of kings good rent repentance sent out an important social message in the 13th century when the laxdaela saga was being written down the Republic had disintegrated Iceland was wracked by Civil War and this may have persuaded the writers to pennant overtly Christian ending mow some chieftains are getting more powerful than they should be according to the quota system for power and influence that was set up in the beginning and they seem to long for peace in the text that we have so the saga texts they are written with the idea in mind to show how Christianity brought peace to the country what guess a mental problem is that pagan ethics and the cult of ethics that tells you that you have to take revenge and one revenge after another and leads to more death and in the text you see that Christianity is believed to bring peace and forgiveness into society finally calming down the fueled family fuels that have been going on for generations and you can just stop and go to Rome and be blessed and live happily ever after peace came in 1262 but at a heavy price the Icelanders were forced to accept the rule of the Norwegian King it was the parade two centuries of suffering things went downhill or the Atlantis we were almost extinct because of diseases starvation isolation and so on and you at that time maybe one of the reasons that we survived the few who did it was because they had this mythology based in the literature we were we were taking all our courage and all our identity from the circus this was what we based our hope and and ambitions on ironically just when Iceland's pain was most acute Britain was discovering the great stories Iceland had produced in the 18th century the sagas reached our shores they had a profound influence on one of our greatest poets I think it's a very very big influence actually on Blake's work I mean perhaps that one of the most characteristic things about about Blake's poetry and and one of the most notoriously difficult things really is that he he has created this huge and hectic mythological world this is great a kind of alternative Blake Ian mythology so many of Blake's poems contain elements derived from old norse myth very significant I think by the 19th century more and more writers were borrowing from Norse literature Britain was hooked on the romance and heroism of the Viking Age Victorian entrepreneurs industrialists and explorers I had a [ __ ] a fellow-feeling with with what they saw as as the Viking achievement that is the exploring the white heat the white heat of technology the new ships the the seafaring which are the great ships of the of the Vikings and that sense of Independence and and and taking your fit in your own hands and and getting ahead and so on the influence of Icelandic literature reached its high watermark in the 20th century in the work of one famous oxford academic talking total motion Tolkien published on Old Norse and talking's imaginative world was was surely shaped by his reading of Old Norse and a lot of the rings he definitely uses names that he's cold from his Old Norse reading actually The Silmarillion which people don't read so much Eccles more some of the themes of of the sagas this have what what betrayal and and darkness in The Silmarillion so I think the talking was really steeped in Old Norse literary culture through Tolkien the world had woken up to the power of the ancient stories but in Iceland the sagas had never gone away generation after generation had fallen in love with these strange otherworldly tales it's very unusual in Britain for people to read such old literature and find it exciting still why is it the sagas are so exciting just the drama and the action know a girl can choose we marish she wants someone and the brothers don't like him they say no and if he doesn't understand they kill him so I think it's the revention what they believe in hmm because they believe in where it strange things very strange things what sort of things I'm like and when someone cheated on their wives they're like have to kill him and burn them something like that so that's enjoyable to read now sometimes yeah I think it's just very interesting that we live the way they lived around the places that they did it's like learning about your ancestors and what they did in the past yeah somebody cheats on your wife they kill him she's just creepy expertly fun okay it's read the sagas were written to help the Vikings make sense of a bewildering new world a thousand years later they still serve the same purpose as Iceland has come to terms with a country transformed by financial crisis they're turning once more to their stories some years ago we decided that we were the most brilliant international bankers of the world it turned out to be a Nautilus a myth I don't have to be a myth but we have a 800 or 1,000 years of tradition of making literature so and the and the me like other writers week we go back to the circus to find our ideas for how to tell stories and even what to tell stories about we are of course a small island in the north and that's what we are famous for are the writers and the books the old books I think that's who but slice in the heritage of the Icelanders to read this books the language and the words and the poetry that's what our culture is about having control over the world and in the language so therefore the like the language for Iceland is for example is is the most important thing in the whole world you feel that you are discovering something you're seeing something it's like mind openers and you like you get a window into another world and for me it's a great thrill because this is a true window there is something about the backgrounds of the stories interesting magic of good story of good story works a good story becomes a classic because it works I feel really inspired being here in Iceland I've been trying to work out what it is and I think the thing is that it's such a sparsely populated country just a third of a million people and it does feel very distant from the heart of Europe up here on the edge of the Arctic but despite that the people haven't developed an island mentality or turned in on themselves in fact they've done the opposite they've gone out into the world they've embraced the world and had given something back for ten centuries they've been welcoming us into their homes and settling us down around their hearts and entertaining us with their stories tomorrow we're off walking in Iceland with Julia Bradbury at nine in Icelandic walks next tonight they'll stay with us for Icelandic cinema with Jar City you

Channel: Valdimar Vilhjálmsson

Views: 852,247

Keywords: BBC, The, Viking, Sagas, Documentary, Iceland, Saga, History

Id: taVsvYWp1UU

Length: 58min 55sec (3535 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 11 2012