Dan Snow's History Hit - The First Vikings in Iceland

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

From icy seas to fire-lit longhouses, Dan heads to Iceland to trace the birth of one of the world’s most unique medieval cultures — at the very edge of the known world. He joins experts across the country to discover how those early Vikings survived brutal winters in total isolation, save for their tight-knit communities and (surprisingly) warm turf houses. He explores the remarkable medieval chronicle Book of Settlement (Landnámabók) and the dramatic stories preserved in the Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur) that tell us who the first settlers were, where they came from, and how they carved out a new society on a raw volcanic island.Produced by Anne-Marie Luff and edited by Dougal PatmoreYou can see Dan's adventures in Iceland in his brand new documentary on History Hit. Sign up to watch the mini-series Icelandic Vikings here: https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.If you'd like to explore Iceland yourself, head to https://www.visiticeland.com/You can email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the year 874, a Viking chieftain named Ingolfo Arnison still on the prow of his ship. His eyes fixed on a new land. He had sailed for days across icy seas, and behind him, Norway was troubled. Chieftains were feuding, kings were demanding allegiance and taxes. Before him, though, stretched volcanic cliffs and glaciers and green valleys untouched by human hands. This was Iceland.

the edge of the known world, the hope of a new beginning. Over a thousand years later, I am now standing on that rocky shore that Ingolfo Arneson would have seen from his ship. I've got the black volcanic cliffs under my feet and I'm staring out of these big rollers coming in and buffeting this shore. I'm also leaning into those same freezing winds blowing across the North Atlantic Sea. You're listening to Dan Snow's history yet. In this very special episode, I'm taking you on an epic voyage to Iceland to tell you the story of how the Vikings became the first settlers on this remote, previously undiscovered island.

We're going to explore what they found when they got here when they came ashore, how they survived those first sub-arctic winters and what challenges they overcome to create a thriving home here. Volcanic eruptions scarred the landscape, ice and snow gripped the valleys. For these settlers, survival would test skill and resilience and their imaginations. This story is as dramatic as the landscape I am staring at now, created from fire and ice. Let's head inland. The Vikings were tough seafarers from Norway, Sweden and Denmark. and they remembered for their long ships and their raids and their relentless spirit. The word Viking could possibly come from the Old Norse Wikinger, meaning pirate or sea raider.

From the late 8th century they sailed into the unknown, driven by a hunger for land and wealth and glory, pushed from their homes perhaps by scarce farmland, harsh winters and overpopulation. They went to seek their fortunes abroad. The story goes that as he was approaching the island, in Galfour Arnison, he took his high-seat pillars, and that's a pair of ornately carved sacred wooden posts that they would stand on either side of the chieftain's throne. He took these high-seat pillars,

and he cast them overboard into the sea, and he said that wherever the Norse gods directed those pillars, that is where he and his Vikings would land. And the place where those pillars apparently landed was where I am now, Rekievik, which was also conveniently one of the best natural harbours in Iceland. Perhaps the Norse gods knew that. It translates as Smoky Bay.

It's now the capital of Iceland, and it gets its name from the steam that rises from those iconic hot springs. And how do we know this story? Well, the legend was written down in the Book of Settlements, which is a monumental work of literature. It's now housed in the Arnie Magnuson Institute at the University of Iceland. It's a sanctuary for Iceland's ancient manuscript. and I'm just walking up to it now and I'll take a look at it for myself shown around by Professor Gisley Sigerson

Hi there, how are you down? Welcome Gisler-Cyrson. Gisley nice to meet you. Here we have that. What are the founding documents of Iceland? Book of settlements. That's exciting. It should give us a medal in the Olympics of cultural achievements if there ever was one. It should be. So it's got a modern leather bind and then inside this 17th century vellum. Okay so we're seeing here it comes into the very early 1700s it comes into the collection but this is written in the 1600s. In the 1600s. So it's a copy of a copy of the book written in the late 1200s. Before 1284 when the compilers whom we know and know a lot about died.

Okay so let's see what it says. What's it tell us about early Iceland? So it starts off by trying to set it all in the time frame, the Anodomini timeframe, with reference to your very own the venerable bead. That's our bead, the father of English history. In line one. Wow. And because he has a reference in his writings to Tule, hermit sailing. Yeah, and then these hermits that were here and that the Icelanders called Papar, and they were Christians and they left when the Norse came and left behind Sir Bukes, Beikr, Irish bells and bagels, and they were called Westman.

So that is all this information about the Irish hermits first. But then Iceland is settled properly from Norway in the time of Adrian's Pope. Oh yeah, the Pope in Roma. Yeah, and then when King Haraldor was the King of Norway and then he goes on to the sporadic visits by named individuals here that were coming through the eight hundreds so these individuals here they're arriving but they're not settling no no they're coming they

the island is known is discovered some go to check it out call it snye land first is that snowland yeah oh she kept that and then this fellow garthar from sweden and after he has been here it's called Garthas Holmur, so Garthas Island. And then this character Flogey comes along, sails through Shetland, where his daughter drowns in a lake, still remembered there. And then comes to Iceland, enjoys the wonderful summers, fishing, and what he deems to be a paradise and forgets to prepare for the winter. Oh.

And leaves the year after, very disappointed. Tough winter, can I imagine. Yeah, and so tough that he gives the name Iceland to the island. He calls it Iceland. And that sticks. So, Ingleford, why was he the one who decided to come and stay and bring cattle and settlers? He, like so many others of the people who decided to come here first, were having some difficulties in Norway.

They were not happy with the current ruler, Harald Harfairi, or they had some local issues that they were fleeing away from. So he leaves Norway not just to explore some new territory, but intent on settling with his foster brother. There's a bit of mythological origin aura about the story of the two going together to the new land. But it's also realistic in the sense that they come up to the southeast coast and then they explore the entire land where they want to settle in this land. And the entire south coast is very tricky from their perspective because landing a ship there is very difficult.

Whereas the first natural harbor that he gets to is Reykjavik. And that's where they decide to stay. There are islands off the shore where they have plenty of birds and eggs to feed on. There's a salmon river running nearby and lakes. It's close. So it's excellent for his type of life. And so there's men and women. This is a colonial project.

Yes. So he comes with his wife and family, and they become then the leading family in the first decades of the country. The first thing is held here nearby Reykjavik. We have located the site just east of. Oh, interesting. The thing, this Norse tradition of coming together to meet to discuss. Yes.

And they were enslaved people along with them. as well yes yeah that's the sad part of this that the slave market in Dublin probably florist because of the settlement of Iceland which required cheap workforce to just break the land for farming and then we also have in the archaeology and also the legal records that people were building walls around their farms high walls that would hold the cattle and and these were built out of turf and every had to have one wall around its immediate vicinity and then another one further out. And this seems to have been done in the 10th century on an organized scale.

All sorts of people. Yeah, mostly they seem to have been in the memory, at least from Scotland and Ireland. Amazing. And were they bringing everything needed? Were they very self-sufficient? Could they make most stuff here or were they key imports? You can make local iron. local iron but iron was imported and grain was imported as well grain and honey that

seems to the ingredients for their meat yeah of course so that seems to have been the main import iron and grain but and all kinds of things that wealthy people can buy on the market they would have bought here also spices wine from southern regions of Europe and luxury goods were also available to the very rich. And the book of settlements, it's the origin story. It's the origin story. Who came first, where they came from, who are their descendants, and thus, whom does the land belong to?

At the time when he is running his legal businesses, then you have this document, well, so-and-so came here first, how are you related to them, okay? and so this clearly belongs to you. I've seen history written for all sorts of different purposes, political, entertainment, religion, but this has a very particular, this has a legal and commercial reason for its existence. It does, and indeed still today,

now we are clarifying where the boundaries are between private ownership and state ownership of land, and then this document is still in use in courts. Wow. Now, this piece of land was claimed originally, so okay it can be private. This piece of land was never claimed according to this document here.

So the state can claim it. This is a serious business. It's not just so comics for fun. What is your sense of how much we can trust these stories? We don't necessarily have to assume that it's all a lie. Which is, of course, the first reaction of an historian about a documentary written in the late 1200s, trying to tell us stories about the late 80s,

Well, I'm not taking any of that. Okay. That's the starting point. Be skeptical. But then we start like with the chronology. The time the settlement correctly to the eight 70s, that can be confirmed with archaeology. They get it right that people are coming from Norway and the British Isles. We know from the DNA.

Yes, we know from the DNA. We know also even though they are not us preoccupied with the women, us with the males, We know if we make a even number of the information that we get here, that they also have an awareness that there are more women from the British Isles than there are males. So they get that right. They also get it right that paganism is the dominant religion, the first century or so in Iceland, which is then converted to Christianity. They get that right.

So there are many things that they get right in these are outer structure of society that we can confirm with archaeology. Also get it right that people from Iceland went to Greenland in the 980s and settled there. They have that chronology correct. So those anonymous things that we can confirm with archaeology, they all fit in the frame that they have. Of course, archaeology will never tell us the names of the individuals who killed whom, who was in love with whom, and so on, which is the stuff of history, why this place name came about, and because someone lost a comb here or had his breakfast here or broke his leg there and so on. We will never be able to confirm these details, but the overall feeling is that when these things are written, people feel that they are remembering them. So this is the best that your grandparents can tell you about the past. And also it's important information because it is about the land claim.

So who came here first? Claim this land, this is the boundary, which is legally important in the present. And the reason I own this land is that it's my hereditary right to the land. So it's like a confirmation of your... right in the world to be. And therefore, even in the third century, it was probably robustly challenged. It went through a process of rigorous. Yeah, and also we know from studies of oral traditions that traditions bend.

They tend to adjust to the present at all times. So if things did not change that much, then we can more or less be certain that the memories didn't change all that much either. But if the power structures changed, if people, moved if someone challenged someone else and got their land then probably within a generation or two the story was about that person's family having been there first so of course there is this fluidity in the tradition but this is a structured society with the memory structures built in special people taking

care of memory of the past lawmen poets professional poets so So the past is not just anything that you can meddle with at will. You listen to Dan Snow's history. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come. So centuries after Ingolfr Arnison made Icelanders home, the stories of how he arrived and who was with him found new life in writing. The book of settlements is a gold mine committing to text all the settlers' names. But, you know, names aren't enough for us on this podcast.

I want to know more about the actual people behind those names, how they lived and survived in this harsh, difficult landscape on the edge of the Arctic Circle. So to really get into it, to find out more, I've come about two hours north of Reykjavik to a real Viking Age farm called Eriksdard. I'm here at the end of September, but I'll tell you what, it feels like winter is coming.

It's absolutely freezing as we go to the top of this valley. there are these huge hills on either side. There's some lush looking agricultural land in the middle. The hazel been bailed up for the year. The sheep are still grazing. There's a river running down the middle of the valley. And at the moment, the sun is flashing off that river. It's golden light right the way through this valley.

Absolutely beautiful. And I've arrived at this remarkable feature, which is a Viking Age longhouse. It's so exciting. It's the center of this farm, the center of the community where the family and I think some of the workers would have lived and would have taken shelter from these savage winters.

I'm going to check it out. I'm walking up to the long house now. It's turf. I can see that. So there's brought a beautiful, passionate herringbone shape of turf that's been laid on the outside. There's a stone foundation,

so big blocks of cut stone, about a foot high. On top of that, this turf, and then on top of the turf, you've got the roof, and there's lots and lots of wild grass going out of the roof, and that's all waving in the wind, looks beautiful. There are no windows. It just looks like a solid mass of turf and stone and grass designed to keep out the Icelandic winters. There's only one entrance. It's a wooden carved door and I'm going to pop inside. Get out of this wind. Oh, it's chilly. Oh my God, so nice.

Immediately it's almost about 20 degrees warmer as you head in. And this is where the family lived. This is where the community, everything revolved around what went on. in here. And this isn't just any old long house. This is a very special one indeed. This is why the Icelandic government was so keen to excavate this area and then reconstruct this house because this was quite briefly, but it was the home of Eric the Red, who was a particularly fierce Viking.

And that, as you can imagine, means you're very fierce. He was known for his fiery temper. He killed people possibly deliberately, possibly accidentally. But anyway, people were killed. And he was exiled from Iceland for this moment. murder. Instead of going back to Norway where he was from originally, he sailed west extraordinarily bravely. He sailed west into the unknown and he discovered Greenland. But what's so special at this house ever since now is this is where he lived with his wife and he had his famous son, Leif Erickson,

who had also gone to be an extraordinary explorer who had sail west. So this is where Eric lived and Leif was probably born and raised for a bit. And in here as a member of the team he's going to tell me all about that way of life, and the particularly famous Vikings who came from here. So talk me through what we can see here. As we came in, there's a sort of a workshop area there. Yeah. So this is the front room where you would be keeping your outdoor tools, outdoor clothing, but not really perhaps very much work because it's quite dark.

There's no windows here. So that's a thing. You would be working outside. Okay. Yeah. And then there's a partition there. Yeah. get through to this main living area.

Yeah. And you need the doors between to close off the cold. And yes, this is the main chamber where people would be cooking, eating, sleeping, etc. And it is warm in here. I mean, do you keep it heated overnight in modern ways? Or has this been kept in from the previous day's fire? So, yeah, I mean, the temperature doesn't fall during the night. Even though we take down the fire, in the olden days, you would have fire going all night long.

but it's not really necessary in the autumn. And in winter the temperature outside gets down to... Minus 10, but it doesn't really count. I mean, the degrees don't count. It's the wind. So it's really, really cold. Even if it's just minus 3, it could be really, really freezing. But inside here, you've always...

It's always snug. Yeah, it is. And especially if you have the 15 inhabitants that you would have in a house like this. So everyone would have been packed in? Absolutely, yeah. Two to three people per bed and yes, quite stuffy. Well, I mean... You might have been glad for the warmth though.

Yeah, absolutely, yeah. But you know, you can actually fit about 20 people here, but you would expect about 15 or something like that. Or one extended family. Yeah. You'd have got to know them very well. Absolutely. Everything that you hate about them as well.

And that you love. So who's living? We've got beds along here. Yeah. We have beds along all the chamber. Okay. These three here are the luxurious ones, where you have a little bit of privacy. Not that much privacy.

No, not at all. And I think really our level of privacy is they would probably just be lonely, you know, compared to their kind of living. But you would be having two to three people sleeping in each bed, but people would also be sleeping on this side. so everybody from one year old to 99. And they would have helped to warm it up as well. Absolutely, yes.

And you've got these lovely thick wooden posts here, so they're holding up the roof. Yes, they are. There is a frame that is holding up the roof. And then this paneling in the ceiling, that's really just to make it nice. But then there is an insulation layer also of branches, birch branches.

and those would be domestic or you know they are not from somewhere else they have been cut down here in the valley and so the turf needs replacing every 10, 15 years I imagine those branches do but these wooden posts these could be generations old absolutely yes and if you move away you take the wood with you

that's absolutely how it is and for example when the ruins of this house was examined we did not find a scrap wood or actually just one piece And it was probably the bottom of the skierbaros. There was some protein, milk protein on it still. And we should say this is based on archaeological finds this house. Yeah, absolutely.

In 1996, there was a dig here done by the National Museum of Iceland. And it really, it showed us really the foundations. It didn't show us any wood. For example, there was a little bit of turf, but you can see the outline of the house. You can see how it was structured. It really needed both archaeological data but also quite a lot of knowledge

about just woodworking because you have to put a house like this together not using almost any iron. Everything is pegged together with wooden pegs. And presumably you've learned a huge amount from the upkeep, how often you have to replace the turf and the roof.

Absolutely, yes. Yeah. And we are actually assuming that the roof might have not been as steep as it is because it dries completely in a dry summer. So we are learning as we go. So what's through that door at the far end? There's another partitioned room. So that's the pantry. That's where you would be keeping all your provisions for the winter. It should be locked actually and then distribute evenly throughout the winter. That was an important job. Yeah, absolutely.

Really powerful person who had the key. Absolutely. So we're here in September. This would have been quite a time of year because this is last minute time. Is it? You're laying things up for them? Absolutely, yes.

You would be gathering the sheep. It would be the time when you slaughter animals, when you make sausages, you know. You would have a full barrel of skid. And then you would have another full of way for preserving the. their meat, et cetera. So. It must have been stressful, but also satisfying, knowing everything's there and you're going to

get through the winter. Absolutely, yes. There's some weapons around, but there's also some weaving equipment. Yeah, yeah. So stoneweight loom, that's really where you make all of the fabrics, whatever they are, from sails to clothing. And wool was absolutely essential, just as important as turf for keeping you warm. Layers and layers of... wool and it was also our biggest export industry made only by women and that made them really powerful because they were the knowledgeable people they were the providers really and you can imagine a lot of that going on during the winter I suppose yes as long as it's not something that

you need to very much light for you know that's really there was a term called weave light If it's we've light, you can work. If it's darker than that, you'll just really have to tell stories. That's a sort of unit of measurement for life. Yeah, yeah. Stories is what has kept us alive for a millennium here, really. Because even though the architecture of this house is a thousand years old, living in one chamber is something we did until the 19th century.

So it's really a way of life that we have just left now. How should we imagine people's roles in this house? You've got the adults. Well, someone's got the key to the pantry. That's an important job. Yeah, that's the lady of the house. Yeah, obviously. Don't trust anyone else with that.

Then you would have the master of the house. He might be absent. Probably. Going waking somewhere. Okay, so yeah, interesting. So in the summer, might there be a sense that he, some of the men might be away, trading, fishing, raiding? Yes.

Okay. Well, raiding abroad. We didn't raiding abroad. Of course. Yeah, of course. I mean, but you just don't pop out of the country. You go for a year.

Right. So the ladies of the house were quite powerful. They were ruling everything while their husbands were away. They're probably ruling everything while the husbands are here as well. Possibly also. But there's farming? Yeah. There's farming.

And here probably sheep farming. And the kids can really help with that sheep farm? Absolutely, yeah, all chores really. I mean, chopping wood, etc. This is actually visible when you look at bones from this period you see a lot of labor from early age and not divided between slaves or workers or the master of the house. Everybody had a really, really hard labor.

It was tough? Yeah, it was. There would have been slaves here as well. Yeah, there would have been. So you would be having slaves, you would have carl, which is really just a free person, and Kertl and Kertling. And then you would have the earls or the rulers.

The aristocrats. Yeah. And would they have lived fairly intimately like this, do you think? Would there have been separate quarters for workers? It seems, at least in a small household like this, you would have everybody together. Slaves, it's a quite different term from the later slavery of African people, for example,

because you could actually become free and quite a lot of the slaves were, I mean, people who would even have been aristocrats before. So it's really different. And they were valuable, of course, so you would really like to keep them warm and fed. You've got a fire in the hearth, but you're in semi-darkness for months.

Yes, that's true. Yeah, and I can imagine that people had cabin fever every once in a while. But what kept us alive is not really the fire or the... the wool or the food, but the storytelling, I would say. This is Dan Snow's history here. More after this. Hey folks, you have to excuse me getting a bit sort of romantic here, but it really, Iceland does feel like the real life, Asgard. I'm walking across this landscape. It feels like you're in the footsteps of the old Norse gods, certainly in the footsteps of the

Vikings. It is just so dramatic. I'm now in a sort of river valley, this beautiful, rivers streaming past me, the sun is flashing off it, little ripples caused by the wind, big lake up ahead of me, and in the distance, well, I'm surrounded by this bowl of volcanic hills, bare, black, craggy slopes, jagged peaks. Imagine the platonic ideal form of a perfect pyramidal mountain, that's what I'm seeing all around me now. And then in the distance, I'm also seeing smoke, white smoke at various places pouring into the sky. And those are fissures. That's where the geothermal heated water is just rising to the surface and sending you. plumes of steam up into the sky. It's like nowhere else in the world.

And Iceland's beautiful wherever you go, frankly, but this is a very special corner of it because I've driven out of Reykjavik, I'm about an hour north of it, and I'm in Thingvaleir National Park. This is a place that the original settlers chose to be the beating heart, really, of this new territory that they'd settled. And they didn't know about it, but they'd chosen very wisely, because this is actually a geologically highly significant place. I am standing in the mid-Atlantic rift. I am between two tectonic plates. I'm looking at two tectonic plates.

And as a result, this is a place of enormous seismic activity. This is an earthquake actually in Iceland every single day. And if I look to my right, I've got this sheer wall of volcanic cliff. That is the edge of the North American plate. I could reach out and touch it now. And if I look over there to the east, I can see the edge of the erasure plate. So this is where the two great

plates, this is where the two great chunks of the Earth's crust meet. And it is here, in just incredibly appropriately, given these people had no idea about seismology in the Earth's crust, that the Viking settlers chose to be their meeting place. This is the site of the Athling.

This is where the chiefs of those first Viking settlements came together to discuss their issues, to try and resolve conflict to talk rather than fight. behaviour that we perhaps don't associate with the Vikings, but we need to look beyond those myths and realise that they practised a very interesting form

of politics of conflict resolution. And it wasn't just the chiefs that came here, they were the most important, to be fair, but it was every free male Icelandic settler could come here and participate in some way in the political process. As a result, this is not easy for a Brit to say, folks. But as a result, the Athling really is one of, if not the oldest national parliament in the world.

It's just great. They met every single summer here. They came here for two weeks at the very height of summer during midsummer. So I'm sure there was a bit of a festival vibe as well. I'm sure it's fun. And they created new laws. They settled the disputes. I think they'd do some business.

I'm sure lots of marriages were arranged and even a couple of elopements took place. And so this place where tectonic plates created friction and heat and smoke and fire was also a place of calm. of collaboration of cooperation. We know about the Athling from the book of settlements, but also from the sagas. They were collected and written down in 13th and 14th centuries, and they were the stories of the chiefs

and their families and their stories of battles and hardships, but also magic and gods and star-cross lovers, all the good stuff, and they were passed down from generation to generation orally until they were written down. Storytelling spans, all sorts of cultures right across human history, right across the world,

but there's something very special about that Icelandic oral tradition. And here they are known as the Icelandic sagas. So this is one of the famous sagas. Yeah, this is Njul Saga, the main character, a lawman of peace who tries to settle the feuds around him all the time. So he's a politician, he's a lawyer in a violent world. Yeah, he never takes up arms,

but that also is a symbol of his peacefulness because his best friend is the violent hiding warrior, physical character with much less brains than Njali's. So he's Gunnar here. He's the warrior friend of Nail. Yeah, he is the physical guy who travels abroad and achieves wealth and glory from his physical strength, whereas Njadli is the wise man

who wants to solve everything with the law and plotting and... sees how people will react and acts accordingly, but in the end, he cannot prevent fate from having its way. There's a part of both of those in all of us. I suppose. That's the beauty of the saga, that it still reflects the modern psyche in its own way, which attracts us to it as a modern work of art would do.

What is the lesson of this saga? We're supposed to sympathize with that? We're supposed to say, Neil, if everyone was more like him, everyone will be happier in Iceland? The overall message of this saga is the coming of Christianity that brings peace to this violent world. So it's the Ragnarok of the pagan period that burns up in a house fire at Njelz farm.

And it's only after that, after a series of events, that peace can come with the help of Christianity. Because we have to embrace this new... This new faith, they go on a pilgrimage to Rome and they come back and they can forget. and eventually they marry representatives of the two opposing groups and Christianity and love bring peace eventually to this very violent pagan world that Nelssoa depicts. Law feels important in Iceland that people came together to try and make laws,

to try and ameliorate the violence that was around them. It's preoccupied with law and legal settings. The Althinji, the legal assembly is, formed in 930 only shortly after the settlement. So that's almost a parliament? It is what we call a parliament in modern terms. It has an elected law speaker who is responsible for knowing what is the right law. But then quite often the sagas describe that the ideal solution is perhaps not always working.

So there is violence underneath the ideal world that is always aimed at in this world as in ours. What were these sagas for at the time? At the time they were written. Chief Tins were getting the idea that literature brings you prestige in the culture. To be able to entertain your guests with a written text, read out, is something that noblemen do. So it's capturing tradition in written form, which is a very problematic process. And it's not self-evident. How do you do that?

So endless scholarly ink has been spent on that question. How was the oral tradition transformed into writing? But it clearly must have had some social function to have it written rather than oral. And then it catches on, like any trend can do among the rich. You can tell them if it's private jets, then they will all go for private jets. If it's a skiing resort, they will go for a skiing resort. If it's books, they'll go for a skiing resort. books. If it's tower, the rich in Italy, they had to build towers to make a name for themselves.

In Iceland, they had to have a saga written about their own region. What do the sagas mean to you as a proud Icelander? Oh, it's the sagas, in my view, so important and so great and so enjoyable because they draw up a complete worldview of the Middle Ages, pre-Christian worldview, even, partly, even though it's clearly influenced by Christianity, with the pagan deities in the sky and with all the lands that explored and visited during the Viking Age into Russia, British Isles, Greenland, North America

have stories taking place in this entire area set in a period of three, four, five hundred years. So a huge time span, entire cosmos, attached to the landscape that we have in front of our eyes using still the place names as we have the origin stories for in the texts. So it's just in order to live here, you walk into the world of the sagas. Listening to you what's so striking about these sagas,

how familiar many of these characters and names are now to a global audience. These sagas have taken a life far beyond the confines of this island. I think it lies in the characters, that the characters in these texts they are not like a stereotypical medieval character but rather portrayed individuals that are much more like humans

of flesh and blood in modern novels so we get somehow a sense of the real persons, living persons behind the literary works which makes them so fascinating and still captivating. For some settling on Iceland was not the end

but the beginning from these shores Eric the Red sailed westward to Greenland his son Leif Erickson pushed further still he reached the coast of North America around the year 1000

the frontier spirit of Iceland made it the springboard for discovery for me this has just been the most incredible experience to sit inside of Iking Longhouse to see the names of those first settlers over a thousand years ago written down to read those stories of

incredible resilience and endurance against an inhospitable landscape preserved in the sagas which would become the backbone of Icelandic culture. The Viking settlement of Iceland was not just about carving farms out of the wilderness. It was about law without kings. Memories becoming legends, journeys without borders. From Reykiewicz's hot springs, the smoking volcanoes to the Rift Valley. The story of Iceland is the story of how people turned unclaimed land. unclaimed land into a society that still endures today. Until next time, say O'Well.