Matthew Roby, professor on Icelandic sagas

There are classic books from a few centuries ago, and then there are classic classic books from distant and remote regions covering events that are long-lost to the sands of time. Today’s episode is about this kind of book: the Icelandic sagas written in the 1300s and covering events from the start of the second millennium.

The saga I read for this week’s episode is called Njal’s Saga and it is written anonymously, as many of the texts at the time were, probably through a long oral tradition and it is a fictionalized history of the start of what was called the Icelandic Commonwealth, which was a pretty unique society, largely agrarian, with no king or aristocracy and a system of laws and norms that maintained some form of stability. 

However, that stability would soon come under grave threat with a series of spiralling feud, mostly based on stupid slurs leading to bloody murders, that would eventually lead to the collapse of the Icelandic Commonwealth.

My guest today is Dr. Matthew Roby, who’s an assistant professor at Mount Saint Vincent University in Nova Scotia, Canada, and he’s a leading academic on the sagas and medieval literature in general. Today, he takes us through what exactly are the Icelandic sagas, why and how they were written, what influenced them and what did they influence (e.g The Lord of the Rings) and all sort of other fascinating tidbits on this long-lost form of story-telling. 

Books mentioned in the episode:

• “Old-Norse Icelandic Literature: A Short Introduction” by Heather O’Donoghue (2004)
• “Gisla Saga” is the saga he recommends, which has noble heroes, and it centres on concepts of family, friendship and ties and it is relatively accessible.
• Favorite book that I’ve never heard of: “Letters from Iceland” by the poet WH Auden & Louis MacNeice (1937), which is a series of vignettes of life in Iceland at the time.
• The book that he loves but can’t recommend to friends: The family sagas which are a sub-genre of the sagas focused on the historical aspects of Iceland. 
• The best book that he’s read in the last 12 months: “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” by Thomas Hardy (1891), a classic novel about the tragic treatment of a woman in 19th century British society.
• The book that he finds over-rated: “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens (1861) in which he found the morals too contrived and overt.
• The book that he would take to a desert island: “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy by JRR Tolkien (1954)
• The book that changed his mind: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by TS Eliot (1915), his first published poem, which made him want to pursue literature. He also mentioned the children’s book “We Sang You Home” by the Canadian indigenous author Richard Van Camp, published in 2016.

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