A LUNCH ABOUT
THE VIKINGS AND
THE LEGENDARY
ICELANDIC SAGAS
BY VISITING AUTHOR KÁRI GÍSLASON
Viking history comes alive with best-selling
author Kári Gíslason at the lunch event on
Friday 16 February 2018 at the Shangri-La
Hotel on the waterfront, where the Cairns
Tropical Writers Festival will be held later
in 2018.
Kári Gíslason was co-author of the
book Saga Land with ABC’s popular
Conversations
broadcaster
Richard
Fidler. Kári is coming north in February as
part of a weekend Tropical Writers retreat
on the Tablelands. Bookings for the lunch
and / or the Writers Retreat are now open
online at Eventbrite.
Regarded as classics of world literature,
the Icelandic Sagas are among the greatest
stories ever written.
In 2015, Kári and his friend Richard Fidler
travelled to Iceland with a plan to make a
radio series and write a book together. They
criss-crossed the land to record the true
stories of the Vikings in the period 1000 years
ago up to the Middle Ages, all the legendary
blood feuds and fearless warrior women
made popular by The Vikings mini-series.
The Iceland mission also set out to solve
a family mystery for Kári. His complicated
family history and his revealing of a tightly-
held family secret about his Icelandic father
was the subject of a beautiful and moving
memoir, The Promise of Iceland. Kári says
this book was the book he had to write
before he could write anything else.
But now, as
an Associate
Professor
teaching Creative
Writing and Literary
Studies at QUT, Kári
wanted to know if it was
true what his father had told him
at their last meeting, that they shared a
bloodline to the greatest saga author, the
so-called ‘Shakespeare of Iceland’?
The sagas, recording the history of Iceland
settlement, were originally written on calf
skins hundreds of years ago, but over the
centuries, these fell into disuse, sometimes
even rolled up and used to block the wintry
wind under doorways. More recently, those
that remained undamaged were eventually
collected and transcribed for posterity.
The result is 40 unique and realistic stories
describing the settlement of Iceland,
detailing the heroic Viking raids abroad
and blood-feuds at home. The Sagas are
the absolute crown jewels of Icelandic
culture. They are credited with being the
true inspiration behind Lord of the Rings
and the mini-series Game of Thrones.
The runaway success of
the book of Saga Land by
Richard Fidler and Kári
Gíslason, published in
October this year, is available
at all good bookshops.
Issue 21 |
15