New Podcast: Victorian Vikings and the World of Saga Tourism

Tourists today visit Iceland to confront its awesome geology, or to visit sites associated with its Viking past, but in the nineteenth century, British explorers who encountered this strange land did not always understand what they were seeing: sailors mistook puffins for flying rabbits, and geographers reported icebergs that could spontaneously combust into flame. Iceland...

Imagining Vikings Revisited

Vikings! The word possibly conjures up images of fur-clad warriors, swords drawn, charging from a longship to raid a village. During his week curating a twitter series on #imaginingvikings, Thomas Spray explored the ways in which Vikings are portrayed today, and how the historical reality is more complex than popular culture often presents it. Here...

Victorian Vikings and the Alluring World of Saga Tourism (Public lecture, 2nd September)

The third lecture in our Late Summer Lectures series will examine how writers from Walter Scott to George R.R. Martin have been inspired by the history and literature of Iceland. Join Thomas Spray on 2nd February at 17.00, for a tour of the mysterious north from the nineteenth-century to now. In 1856 Lord Dufferin set out to...

Top Ten Victorian Books About Vikings

As part of our week-long exploration of how Vikings are imagined in literature and beyond we have to discuss the role of the early Victorian translators, historians, and novelists. It was the Victorians who first became interested in questions of Scandinavian ancestry. They translated key texts from Old Norse into English, and wrote influential histories on...