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Njáls saga on Horseback

Chris Abram — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 15:45:06 +0000

An intriguing idea for your summer holidays…

Njáls Saga on horseback

Are you interested in travelling on horseback through the setting of Iceland’s most dramatic and popular Saga? In late June Jón Karl Helgason, assistant professor at the University of Iceland and the author of The Rewriting of Njáls Saga (1999), will be co-guiding a four day tour (3 riding days) through the setting of Njáls Saga.

On day one, the group will ride through the landscape of Eystri-Rangá River in which Gunnar of Hlíðarendi had most of his most rememberable duels. On the day, the group will explore the Þríhyrningur Mountain, where Flosi Þórðarson and his men hid after the burning of Njáll and his family, but the destination in the afternoon is Hlíðarendi, the farm of Gunnar. On the final day, the group will ride through the impressive landscape around the Markarfljót River, with a clear view of the Fljótshlíð, the famous volcano of Eyjafjallajökull and the waterfalls of Gljúfrabúi and Seljalandsfoss. The destination in the afternoon is the farm of Njáll at Bergþórshvoll in the Landeyjar-district.

The trip is organized by Riding Iceland, run by Sigurður Ingibergur Björnsson, who will be the other guide in this tour. He has spent a great part of the summers for over 20 years riding in the mountains of Iceland, but a few years ago he turned passion into a profession by organizing and leading riding tours. For more information you can write to: sib@riding-iceland.com and jkh@hi.is.

Recordings of Reconstructed Old Norse

Chris Abram — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 15:35:28 +0000

Kendra Willson writes (in a comment to another post, but I thought it would be better to move it to the front, so more people might see it):

Where can I find recordings of Old Norse texts with reconstructed pronunciation?

I have pointed out Raven of Denmark’s performance of part of Atlakviða
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xagMYiZ2NP0) to my students and to an actor who planned to make an audition video in Old Norse in hopes of getting a part in Mel Gibson’s film with Leonardo DiCaprio (I live in Los Angeles) before that project was suspended due to Gibson’s latest scandal. The only other recording with reconstructed pronunciation I have found online is a recitation of part of Völuspá recorded for Librivox (http://librivox.org/multilingual-poetry-collection-001/ – scroll down to Old Icelandic) by one Julian Jamison, an economist in Pacific Palisades. Are there more out there? Thanks for any tips.

Can anybody offer Kendra suggestions?

Season’s Greetings

Chris Abram — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:40:51 +0000

I just wanted to wish all readers of Old Norse News a very gleðileg jól. Thanks to everybody who’s contributed to discussions on the site or sent me new items to cover. The site’s really started to take off in 2009, with over 20,000 visits, and I hope you’ve found some of the information we’ve given out useful or our conversations interesting. I hope to do a lot more with the site in the new year–posting more often will be a priority, to being with. For now, though, I’m off to try and finish my mythology book, and so there will be an official hiatus in activity here until January.

Peter Foote

Chris Abram — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:43:37 +0000

Some very sad news: Professor Peter Foote died on Tuesday 29 September. Peter was undoubtedly one of the seminal figures in twentieth-century medieval Scandinavian studies. Perhaps best known to a wide readership for The Viking Achievement, which he wrote with David Wilson, Peter’s contributions to the field were many and varied and continued late into his long life. His editions are masterful, and his critical work full of knowledge, good jugdement, wit and style. He will be missed by his many friends in Iceland and Scandinavia, but particularly so in London, where he was first Professor of Scandinavian Studies at University College London (where he continued to teach now and then until 2006, over twenty years after his retirement) and a doyen of the Viking Society for Northern Research. Although I only got to know him in the last five years, I shall remember him with great fondness and gratitude for his generosity and sage advice. It is undoubtedly the end of an era.