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Kári Gislason and Richard Fidler travelled to Iceland with a two-part mission: to tell stories from the Viking sagas written early in the country's history in the places where they actually unfolded a thousand years ago, and to settle a longstanding family mystery.

Kári Gislason

Iceland was all but empty when Viking settlers arrived in the ninth century, so they were free to create their own version of the Nordic mainland they had fled. In a sense, Iceland was the first New World country, settled many centuries before Europeans sailed out to colonise the Americas.

Kári likes to quote the English poet WH Auden, who nursed an obsession for the island: 'I'm never not thinking about Iceland.'

The country was spectacularly beautiful, but harsh and at times unforgiving. The long, dark winters were tempered by sweet summers where the light never completely disappeared. The island lay on the tectonic fault line between Europe and America; volcanoes pushed up from beneath the earth's surface, while massive glaciers pressed down upon it.

Warm relief could be found in the hot springs, but getting too close to a scalding mud pool could mean instant death. The violence of the landscape often stood in stark contrast to the grassy, rolling hills, the sparkling streams and thundering waterfalls.

Life in Iceland was often difficult and dangerous; at times human settlement barely hung on. But despite the hardships (or perhaps because of them) the early Icelanders created an astonishingly rich culture and a vibrant new politics. Among the deep gorges and ridges of Iceland's broken landscape, they established a national parliament, often called the world's first modern democracy.

In the centuries that followed, the Icelanders built a nation without an army, castles, monuments or regal traditions. Aside from some scant archaeological ruins, the only real proof that the country existed at all during these centuries lies in its stories: the sagas, poems, and songs that Icelanders told each other to illuminate long nights.

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The Icelandic sagas arose out of the dramatic stories of the Viking men and women who came to make a life on this impossible island. These are tales of blood feuds, disastrous love affairs, dangerous women and doomed warriors. They bring us within a breath of the Vikings—through them we feel the full force of their loves, desires, and their humanity. Together, the sagas of Iceland form one of the greatest achievements of world literature. They are the country's truest monuments.

Icelanders think the sagas are among the greatest stories ever written. They unfold in ways that are often shocking and deeply moving. The Vikings never tell us what they're thinking and feeling; we have to draw our own conclusions based on what they say and do. Even today, Icelanders can be drawn into arguments in public places over the true meaning behind the melancholic words of Gudrun from Laxdæla Saga: 'I was worst to the one I loved the most.'

The sagas are not fantasy tales from Norse mythology: they're very human stories of real Viking men and women who actually existed in medieval Iceland. The stories were passed on from one generation to the next, honed to a sharp edge by oral tradition and storytellers sitting in Viking longhouses and around campfires until Christian scribes wrote them down on calfskin vellum in the 13th century.

The Vikings who appear in the sagas made sacrifices to the old gods, but the Christians who penned their stories were clearly in awe of their illustrious pagan ancestors, and they admired their fierce sense of honour.

In the old Viking culture, honour was a finite thing; you couldn't just earn it, you had to take it from someone else. Violence was expected to be answered with retributive violence, but honour could also be accorded to Vikings who were prepared to leave Iceland, to go into exile to end the cycle of revenge. In the sagas, Viking women are just as quick to defend their honour as the menfolk, and they often go to the greatest extremes to do so.

Today, the sagas are embedded in the lives of everyday Icelanders. One reason for this is that the language hasn't changed; schoolchildren read the sagas virtually as they were written. Another is ancestry: thanks to a meticulous genealogical record, Icelanders are deeply aware of their family lineage and most can trace their ancestry back 20 or more generations to the people who wrote the sagas.

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Whatsapp Richard Fidler and Kári Gislason.

Richard Fidler

Kári was born in Iceland and has lived there for long stretches, but has spent most of his life in Australia. On the face of it, the two nations could hardly be more different, but there are some powerful similarities: the landscapes of both places are rugged, dangerous and filled with grandeur; the peoples of both countries have long lived in the knowledge that they live on the far edge of the world, yet still are hopelessly inclined to believe they live at the centre of things; and both countries were founded as New World nations, although the establishment of Iceland did not require the dispossession of an indigenous people.

Kári left Iceland as a boy, and he still feels a profound homesickness for the island of his birth. He says this is melancholic yearning is common among Icelanders: they always feel homesick, even when they're home. Kári likes to quote the English poet WH Auden, who nursed an obsession for the island: 'I'm never not thinking about Iceland.'

I've always longed to go to Iceland. I talked vaguely with Kári for a while about going there to 'do something', to collaborate on some kind of creative project. Then one night, while in a bar in Brisbane, I prevailed upon Kári to tell me one of the saga stories. From memory he told me the tale of Gunnar and his destructive love affair with Hallgerd, the most dangerous woman in Iceland. From the distance of 16,000 kilometres and 1,000 years, the saga had lost none of its power.

A month later we were making plans to go to Iceland, to record the stories of four Viking men and women, and to tell them in the places where they happened; to meet the Vikings in the fjords, the pastures, and along the streams of the sagas.

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There was another motive to go to Iceland, though. We wanted to unravel a family mystery, to follow the trail of a tantalising clue given to Kári by his father, Gisli. Kári only ever met his father four times in his life.

When Kári was born, Gisli already had a wife and five children, so Kári's existence was kept a secret. This story was at the centre of Kári's memoir The Promise of Iceland.

Over time, the need to conceal his existence became more burdensome to Kári, and so at the age of 27 he wrote a letter to his siblings revealing his existence. To his immense relief and gratitude, his siblings welcomed him into the family. A gathering was arranged, which turned out to be the last time Kári saw his father before his death. At that meeting, Gísli mentioned in passing that he wasn't surprised that Kári wanted to be a writer: 'You know,' he said, 'that you're related to Snorri Sturluson, don't you?'

Sturluson, a poet-statesman from the 13th century, is commonly acknowledged as the author of some of the greatest sagas. In Iceland, Sturluson is akin to Shakespeare. Such a connection would be deeply meaningful to Kári but so far, he's been unable to confirm the truth of it.

So this became the second, more personal reason for our journey into saga land: to establish if there truly is a bloodline connection between Kári and the greatest of the saga authors.

And so, in the high summer of 2015, when the temperatures reached into the teens, we began to follow the coastline—leaving the small, funky capital Reykjavík to wind our way around to the most remote fjords, valleys and farmland of the most beautiful country in the world.

Listen to episode one Meet the most beautiful and dangerous woman in Iceland with Richard Fidler and writer Kári Gíslason

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