The following dialogue was inspired by recent scholarship in creative practice research, which is a method that centers creative practice as a valuable means for reflecting on and making meaning from knowledge traditions; in this way creative practice is a method that challenges forms of traditional academic research that foreground objectivity and facticity. The interlocutors both hold PhDs in Old Norse-Icelandic studies and are housed in creative writing departments that are concerned with both traditional scholarly research in literary studies and a wide array of approaches and methods that assist practitioners to produce new works of writing. In this conversation, we explore the tensions and opportunities between literary criticism and narrative creativity, in particular in relation to the portrayal of female characters in medieval Icelandic literature. At the same time, we argue for a method of creative inquiry that builds upon literary criticism and historical research and seeks bridges between traditional and new research frameworks.

Our shared corpus is the Sagas of Icelanders, or Íslendingasögur as they are known in Icelandic. They comprise forty stories that narrate the Norse settlement of Iceland in the ninth century, and the lives of Icelanders over the course of two centuries, that is, until around 1050, fifty years after the country adopted Christianity. Most scholars agree that the stories came into existence as oral traditions and that it was not until the twelfth century that the first manuscript versions were compiled. In the twentieth century, many of the Sagas of Icelanders were translated and published for general readers, including in the Penguin Classics series. Alongside this recent accessibility, descriptions of Viking culture have been incorporated in a wide array of artistic responses in novels, poems, on screen, and in art works.Footnote 1

We also share a method: that of creative practice research. Creative practice research has only recently begun to attract attention in medieval studies (see, for example, Lees and Overing 2019; Varnam 2022), though its presence as a research method more widely can be traced across at least two decades of growth of creative practice disciplines within university programmes (Bell 2019, 3). At the core of programmes such as the ones in which we teach is an understanding of creative practice as both a form of ‘making’ and a way of reflecting about the thinking and steps that have generated the work (Carter 2004: xi–xiii). While such analysis often concentrates on the creative process itself, there is also a body of methodological writing about how practice-led research can contribute to questions beyond the specifics of the artform at hand, since creative works are often produced through well-documented, replicable practices that lead to insights of value beyond ‘craft specifics and the mysteries of individual media’ (Bell 2019, 9; see also Candy 2020, 49). Crucially, creative practice that is focussed on historical subjects also often engages other, more traditional research methods that offer writers credible historical and contextual information for their stories.


Kári Gíslason: Perhaps I’ll get the conversation started by introducing some of the literature around which I have positioned my own approach to the Sagas. While I acknowledge that the Sagas of Icelanders contain important historical information about medieval Iceland and Scandinavia, I also recognize their value as dramatic works that are notable for their use of scene setting, complex plot lines, succinct but highly evocative characterisation, and thematic sophistication. The Saga of Gísli, for instance, a work I would like to return to later in this dialogue, has been praised for its portrait of sexual desire, jealousy, and the tensions that could exist in the intensely close family lives of Viking society, which placed kinship loyalty at the heart of all social relations and indeed safety (see, for example, the critical assessment of Meulengracht Sørensen 1986, 235-37). Scholars in reception studies have remarked on these dramatic aspects of the Sagas in assessments of the cultural legacies of Old Norse literature (Crocker and Geeraert 2022) and in a study of the Vikings in popular culture by Laurent Di Filippo (2022); two years earlier, The Vikings Reimagined appeared (Birkett and Dale 2020) as well as Old Norse Myths as Political Ideologies (Meylan and Rösli 2020; see, for other examples, Wawn 2002; O’Donoghue 2004; Larrington 2015 and 2023; and Bennett and Wilkins 2019). By and large, such studies have been concerned with what modern works tell us about the contemporary writers, artists, and societies that produced them, and how and why modern audiences engage with the stories and historical settings of medieval Scandinavia. And yet, as a creative writer I have often wondered whether and how creative practice might also offer new insights, or at least points of inquiry, into the original works themselves. That is, could the practice of re-telling and re-imagining saga stories also involve a form of critical reading that helps us to interpret the sagas and the societies they portray?

I am particularly fascinated by how creative responses to earlier works come to involve a form of close reading and study undertaken with a view to the material’s ‘significance for the writing to be done’ (Brien 2006, 56; see also Web and Brien 2010, 187), that is, as part of the composition process. As a writer wishing to respond creatively to a medieval Icelandic text, I can begin by analysing source texts and secondary literature in much the same way as a humanities scholar. The composition process that follows becomes a ‘deliberate exploratory cycle of reading, writing, testing, reading, rewriting and retesting’ (Brien 2006, 57) that creates storylines that respond to work by others and to the iterative nature of drafting, editing, and re-drafting. That is, the writing process involves a response to the original stories, and to my own narrative as it grows and changes, as well as to relevant scholarship that assists one to inhabit characters’ points of view in specific and historically credible ways. This is a process we would describe as reading to write. Creative writing scholars suggest that the intensive, embedded nature of this process can reveal qualities in texts that were not apparent to the practitioner initially, while the process of ‘making artefacts whilst adopting a consciously reflective mode of research, leads to the emergence of questions and issues almost “naturally” from the practice’ (Candy 2020, 241; see also Bell 2019, 16 and 67-68).

Creative writing scholars also argue that artists are most likely to generate new insights and original outcomes if they are willing to develop their story while also maintaining a degree of doubt about its final form and content. In that sense, creative practice is ‘discovery-led rather than hypothesis-driven’ (Bell 2019, 97) and is best approached as a ‘contingent activity’ (Haseman and Mafe 2009, 214) that challenges a writer’s planning and control of the narrative in order that they better understand and realise its full dramatic potential (Webb and Brien 2010, 193). For me, this means suspending or even avoiding fixed views about the characters I am portraying, so that my portrayal of them can better respond to the internal dynamics of the story.

That said, the creative work that develops will also usually adopt some of the conventions of the form or genre that is being used. Thus, while creative practice is necessarily a contingent activity, it is also one that is influenced by earlier works and audience expectations (Bennett and Wilkins 2019, 3). For example, in the case of novels that respond to older literary texts, sometimes referred to as revisionist writing or ‘historical metafiction’ (Hutcheon 1988), we see writers use changes in point of view in order to develop plot, characterisation and interiority, and historical perspectives tied to contemporary social and political concerns. Think of Margaret Atwood’s re-casting of The Odyssey in The Penelopiad (2005), Foe by J. M. Coetzee (1986, in which Robinson Crusoe’s widow is given the central role), Madeline Miller’s re-telling of ancient Greek myth in Circe (2018), and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966, conceived as a prequel to Jane Eyre).

I recall, too, Peter Carey’s 1997 novel Jack Maggs, a response to Great Expectations in which the narrative point of view is changed from that of the main character Pip to Magwitch, the convict who gives Pip money and establishes him as a gentleman. As Carey explains in a radio interview about the project, point of view was central to his reading of Dickens’s novel and to a methodology by which to interrogate it:

There’s no doubt that what that book [Great Expectations] encourages you to do — and which so many of the books we grew up reading do encourage, to take that particular point of view: the British, the English point of view. And soon you’re in it. You love Pip. He’s your person. And suddenly Magwitch is this dark, terrible other […] but he’s my ancestor. […] I at once recognised I’d read a truly great book. Maybe a perfect book. But I was sort of mad with Dickens. I mean, why was Magwitch’s money worse, really, than Miss Havisham’s money? I think there’s nothing there to suggest it was.’ (Carey 2015 , 0:50-1:33)

Carey’s project was not didactic or closed. Rather, his novel is concerned with what kind of reading may develop if other viewpoints are explored. He remarks, ‘[Great Expectation’s] point of view is of its time and its period. I think it’s perfectly fine that it should have that point of view. But I thought it would be interesting to take the other point of view.’ (Carey 2015,‘’ 19973:23-3:35) The result is a novel that raises questions about the original work through close reading and a process of re-writing that emphasises the role of point of view, especially in how we see characters who have not been centre-stage until now.

Lisa Bennett: What Carey has done in revisiting and reimagining Great Expectations clearly speaks to our shared interest in creatively responding to the Sagas of Icelanders. Like you, Kári, I certainly see how retelling these stories can generate new insights, not just about the source material but indeed about the people and culture that created them — but I’m compelled to take issue with Carey’s reason for focusing on Magwitch in his novel. He ‘thought it would be interesting to take the other point of view.’ Is that all? Just … interesting? It might seem unfair of me to nitpick on this point; after all this was an interview in which he was no doubt downplaying the many considered choices that went into crafting the convict’s point of view in Jack Maggs, but what irks is the blasé shrug inherent in this explanation. Deciding to revise and re-present a classic piece of literature — whether it’s a famous Victorian novel or, in our case, gems from Iceland’s trove of literary national treasures — is about much more than telling an interesting story. It’s writing with an agenda. A provocative purpose.

We are both concerned with depictions of women in the Íslendingasögur, as we discuss in further detail below, and in rewriting their stories we’ve both gone to great lengths to situate them at the centre of our creative works. But why? It’s not like they’re invisible or necessarily insignificant figures in the original narratives — not at all. Women abound in the sagas. In fact, according to statisticians Pádraig Mac Carron and Ralph Kenna, around ‘20% of the characters in each of the five major sagas [Gísla, Njála, Egils, Laxdæla, Vatnsdæla] are female’ (2013, 15). Helga Kress has argued that Laxdæla saga’s entire narrative structure is organised around the life of Guðrún Osvífrsdóttir (rather than simply around male feuding) while Patricia Conroy likewise argues that ‘Eiríks saga rauða is framed as a female biography’ (both cited in Clover and Lindow 2005, 257). Other scholars have identified several recurring images or ‘types’ of women in Old Norse-Icelandic myths and sagas — Jenny Jochens narrows hundreds of female characters down to ‘the warrior, the prophetess/sorceress, the revenger, and the inciter’ (1995, loc 213) and Judy Quinn adds ‘troublemaker’ to this list (2007, 528). But, although useful for broad strokes discussions, these categories don’t quite capture the nuanced and often lively representations of women we find in these accounts.

For instance, there are bondswomen like Þorgerðr brák (Egils saga), who raises and protects Egill Skallagrímsson, to this day Iceland’s most famous warrior-poet, and Melkorka (Laxdæla saga), who lives as a thrall until her true identity (Irish princess!) is revealed. There are stalwart wives like Bergþóra (Njáls saga), who supports her husband right up to the moment they’re burnt to death in their family home; difficult wives like Hallgerðr (one of Quinn’s ‘troublemakers’), who denies her hero-husband a single strand of her long hair to restring his bow, even though this small gift could save his life; and far-travelling mothers, like Freydís and Guðríðr víðförla (‘the far-travelled’, both in Eiríks saga and Grænlendinga saga), the latter of whom famously gave birth to her son Snorri while in ‘Vinland,’ a region that’s hard to pinpoint precisely in the sagas, but seems to extend from modern-day Newfoundland in Canada down the coast to New England. There are witches and widows — and sometimes women are both, like Geirríðr landnámskona (‘the settler’) and her granddaughter, also (confusingly) named Geirríðr (both in Eyrbyggja saga) — and unforgettable ‘paragons of women’ like Unn djúpúðga (‘the Deep-Minded,’ Laxdæla saga), one of Iceland’s first settlers, who owned and generously distributed one-fifth of the island’s habitable land to her followers. Finally, there’s Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir, whose disastrous love triangle with two foster-brothers rivals any of Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Young and old, rich and poor, peacekeepers and attention-seekers, bold matriarchs and quiet servants, primary characters rendered in three dimensions, and flat caricatures who provide comic relief or simply appear as plot points — these women represent all echelons of early medieval Icelandic society. Active or passive, narrative linchpins or background characters, they ‘function as literary vehicles to engage with some of the most contested values of the period, revealing the preoccupations, desires, and anxieties of its authors and audiences’ (Friðriksdóttir 2013, 1).

They are, to echo Carey, interesting.

But on its own, that’s not reason enough to retell their narratives. Even though female characters are relatively prominent in the sagas — or perhaps because they are — their stories demand re-casting, re-framing, re-presenting from their own point of view. Women are everywhere and yet still marginalised. In part, this reflects the patriarchal world they inhabit, in which they are largely excluded from accumulating the honour, fame, and social superiority that has ‘to be acquired, and constantly reacquired by wresting it from others’ (Clover 1993, 13); this perpetual grappling for reputation and renown is primarily reserved for male characters (Evans 2019). Women rarely participate directly in the violent feuds that are the mainstays of the family sagas’ epic generational plots. Rather, they’re often shown to wield words as weapons — the oft-repeated proverb eru oft köld kvenna ráð ‘cold are the counsels of women’ springs to mind — inciting conflict by critiquing men’s actions (or lack thereof), thereby functioning as monitors ‘who did not stand by silently when male performance failed to pass muster, indeed whose words were what made the social gears shift’ (Quinn 2007, 519). Yet even the most active and visible of women is at the mercy of distant third-person narrators — and with their trademark laconic style and ‘curse of knowledge,’ these narrators only reveal so much.

Take, for instance, Guðrún’s reluctance to accept Bolli’s marriage proposal in Laxdæla saga (Chapter 43). For years, Bolli has played second fiddle to his best friend and foster-brother Kjartan, a privileged golden boy if ever there was one, who is the object of Guðrún’s affections. But Kjartan has been away in Norway for too long by now, and Bolli is determined to one-up him just this once… Guðrún has consistently been depicted as beautiful, haughty, strong-willed, and full of pride. So when Bolli approaches Guðrún’s father, Ósvífr, to make the offer of marriage, he is determined to make this match happen:

As you know, Bolli, Guðrún is a widow, and she therefore has the right to give her own answer; but I shall urge it strongly.

Ósvífr then went to see Guðrún and told her that Bolli Þorleiksson had arrived: ‘He is asking for your hand in marriage, and the decision is now yours. But I can let you know my own wishes at once: Bolli would not be rejected if I had my way.’

 ‘You are being rather hasty over this,’ said Guðrún. ‘Bolli raised this matter with me once before and I tried to put him off. My mind is still unchanged.’

 Then Ósvífr said, ‘Most people would say you are speaking more from pride than prudence if you refuse a man like Bolli. But as long as I live, I shall continue to give guidance to you my children in all matters where I can see more clearly than you.’

 And since Ósvífr took so firm a stand over this, Guðrún for her part did not give an outright refusal, despite all her reluctance. (Laxdæla saga 1969, 154-155)

Although Guðrún does speak ‘for herself’ here, the really telling part of this scene — its emotional crux — is buried somewhere between Ósvífr’s accusing her of being too proud and the narrator’s summary of events in the final line. On the surface, this passage illustrates Viking Age patriarchy at work. Even a widow like Guðrún, who has greater social and legal privileges than a younger unmarried woman, is still subject to the men in her life (a father, in this instance, but if he was absent or deceased then the widow’s rights pass to her eldest son). In other words, Guðrún has little choice in the matter. But in reading this conversation as a creative writer — more than as a literary historian observing the social, ethical and legal elements of such paternal ‘clear-sightedness’, not to mention the whiff of Christian morality (i.e., Guðrún embodying the sin of pride) — I can’t help but feel the sting of Ósvífr’s mansplaining here, and I find it hard to believe that a ‘proud’ character like Gudrun wouldn’t feel it too. The narrative voice of Laxdæla saga, however, doesn’t permit Gudrun to express such emotions. There’s no interiority in saga accounts, only an outsider’s view of a woman’s feelings about exchanges (verbal and marital) like this one. She ‘did not give an outright refusal’ to the proposal ‘despite all her reluctance.’


What more can we learn by changing point of view?

What new dialogues open up with the past when these women’s internal and external voices are heard?

KG: I was compelled by similar questions surrounding what we can know about feminine perspectives while writing The Sorrow Stone, an historical novel that I published in 2022. The Sorrow Stone re-imagines the life of Þórdís Súrsdottir, a woman who lived in Norway and Iceland during the tenth century. Point of view has been central to a scholarly debate about the source of her story, the medieval Icelandic work known as The Saga of Gísli. As I approached the task of re-imagining her life for a novel, I felt it was also important to be conscious of that debate, so that my novel might be supported by scholarly inquiry as well as the questions that arose as part of the compositional process.

As the title of that work suggests, that saga is largely a biography of a main character, Gísli, who is a warrior and poet whose last thirteen years are spent as an outlaw being pursued by his enemies. He is a famous figure of Icelandic history, and it is understandable that scholars have tended to concentrate their analyses on the work’s portrait of him. In the context of a literature that usually does not enter the thoughts and emotions of its characters, this saga is unusually direct in its depiction of Gísli’s inner life. His poems, which are quoted at length, reveal despair, grief, and fears (see Chapters 22, 24, 29, 33, 34; Lönnroth 2002). During a period spent trading abroad, Gísli abandons heathen worship (Chapters 8 and 10), and yet he also appears to remain committed to an honour-driven code of revenge killing (see, for example, Ólason 1999; Andersson 1968; Pálsson 1973; Jørgensen 2017, 43-45). Because of his time as an outlaw, he can also be read as a liminal figure in the society depicted in the saga (Barraclough 2010, 368-69). At times, he seems conflicted in how he balances a sense of loyalty to his family with how he feels towards his wife, Auðr, bringing to light to the saga’s thematizing of the obligations of family life (Andersson 2006, 78; Gíslason 2009). The role of sexual jealousies in this story further complicates the action and Gísli’s characterisation (Pálsson 1973, 13; Larrington 2015, 190).

Yet, while Gísli is certainly a complex figure who sits at the centre of events, the saga also includes scenes in which others feature in ways that elevate them beyond the role of secondary characters. As you say, Lisa, the women in the sagas, though sometimes ancillary characters, have a considerable impact on events and are realised in complex and sophisticated ways. One of the strengths of The Saga of Gísli, for instance, is that it does not ignore the points of view of characters other than Gísli. For example, it includes depictions of the relationships between Gísli’s siblings and his enemies Þórgrímr and Bárðr (Chapters 2, 7, 9, 13) as well as descriptions of life at his sister Þórdís’s farm after Gísli and his wife Auðr move to a second farm in Haukadalr (Chapters 11-12).

As such, it is not out of keeping with the style of this saga or indeed others to find that the work both indicates his sister Þórdís’s importance in events while also leaving much unsaid concerning her emotions and motivations. For instance, as Heather O’Donoghue points out, during the early Norwegian section of the saga, when Þórdís is reputedly involved in a sexual encounter with a neighbour Bárðr, it is not made clear whether anything actually happens between them. ‘We are left to draw our own conclusions – or even, perhaps, to leave the matter unresolved’ (O’Donoghue 2021, 125). The saga says, instead, that Bárðr dismisses the rumours and that ‘Gísli’s brother – a friend of Bárðr’s – insists that Gísli has killed without just cause’ (O’Donoghue 2021, 125). Later, after Gísli kills her husband, Þórgrímr, the work gives little indication of Þórdís’s emotions or state of mind until she learns that Gísli is the killer, and even then, all we discover is that she is affected enough by events to reveal the killer’s identity to Þórgrímr’s family (Chapter 19). At the time that Þórgrímr is killed, Þórdís is pregnant with their child. And yet, the fact that her son will grow up fatherless and in a terrible position in relation to his uncle, is introduced without emphasis or detail, and once again the audience of the saga is left to draw its own conclusions about the full meaning of this situation and its effects on the characters. When Gísli hears that Þórdís has ‘betrayed’ him, he accuses her of falling short of the standard of sisterly conduct set by the legendary Guðrún Gjúkadóttir (Chapter 19), who had killed her children as an act of revenge when her husband murdered her brothers. But this is still all about Gísli’s reaction to events and shows little of what Þórdís has endured.

Understandably, Old Norse-Icelandic scholars have sought to give fuller explanations, ones that attempt to examine the action of the saga from points of view other than Gísli's. As Vésteinn Ólason has remarked, ‘critics have not hesitated to pass their value judgments’ of the saga’s characters (Ólason 1999, 163), and the lack of direct internal characterization of Þórdís in particular ‘has encouraged a wide range of interpretations of her motivation’ (Larrington 2015, 191), especially for revealing of the identity of her husband’s killer and thus contravening the performance of sibling loyalty exemplified by the legendary Guðrún. Indeed, given that the saga overwhelmingly adopts Gísli’s point of view, ‘the weight of judgment is on Þórdís’ (Lethbridge 2005, 52), with such ‘sympathy for Gísli among the saga’s readers that many of them have judged Þórdís rather harshly’ (2015, 165).

Critics have referred to Þórdís as ‘unstable’ and ‘vacillating’ (Turville-Petre 1944, 378-379), as a woman who ‘attracts men whose compulsions cause them to set conventions aside’ (Bredsdorff 2001, 68), and as displaying ‘wantonness’ (Hight 1928-29, 71). A 1981 film version of the saga, meanwhile, omits the confession that Gísli makes (that he has killed Þórdís’s husband Þórgrímr) and instead attributes to Þórdís ‘the power of reading guilt from Gisli’s inexpressive face’ (Larsen 2020, para 20), thereby placing yet more responsibility for Gísli’s fate at Þórdís’s feet. But over the years we’ve also seen readings that claim Þórdís as a sympathetic character. For example, in Epic and Romance, W. P. Ker references her ‘passionate agony’ (1957, 197), while Peter Foote regards her as ‘the only character in the story who finds himself or herself in a truly tragic situation, when she has to choose between her husband and brother,’ and concludes that she acts with ‘a high integrity’ (1963, 166; see also, Vésteinn Ólason 1999, 170). Preben Meulengracht Sørensen concludes that the emphasis of the saga narrator is on Þórdís’s doubt ‘and therefore on the conflict of loyalties itself, more than on her character traits’ (1986, 256). Studies by Theodore Andersson (1968) and Anne Holtsmark (1951) stress the fact that Þórdís had seen Gísli kill her suitor in Norway (see also Campbell 1986, 242-43) and that, in this context, her decision to reveal the identity of her killer’s husband ‘can hardly be seen as malice’ (Andersson 1968, 17), for ‘he killed her first love and she remembered it’ (Andersson 1968, 34; see also Clark 2007, 505; Jochens 1995, 11; Myrvoll 2020, 250 and 253-54).

Among these reimaginings in various media, we can see that a number of scholars have attempted to move the discussion of the saga towards a greater recognition of Þórdís’s point of view, and that doing so has long been seen as a kind of interpretive necessity. As early as 1900, a stage play adaptation of The Saga of Gísli was already highlighting women's perspectives in the story. Gísli Súrsson: A Drama, written by Beatrice Helen Barmby, might even give us an early indication of how creative practice can form an analytical response to the saga, one that offers new topics of inquiry that can complement those of traditional scholarly research. The play is sympathetic towards Gísli, describing him as a man with a ‘generous, dutiful heart’ (1900, x), and the ‘gentlest of outlaws’ (xi). However, as Auksė Beatričė Katarskytė has argued (2020), Barmby is equally interested in the relationships the exist between the female characters Auðr (Gísli’s wife) and Ásgerðr (the wife of his brother Þorkell). Katarskytė speculates that one reason Barmby chose this saga to dramatize ‘might have been the saga’s sensitivity towards gender and women’s role in society, not to mention its vivid female characters.’ (2020, 14).

I think the structure of the play supports this view. It begins with a scene taken from the ninth chapter of the original saga, when Auðr and Ásgerðr are cutting out shirts for their husbands and are overheard by Ásgerðr’s husband, Þorkell, confessing to feelings for others. Ásgerðr speaks of her love for Auðr’s brother Vésteinn, who (in Barmby’s play) she calls ‘a better man’ than her husband Þorkell. ‘Blame Fate, not me,’ she implores Auðr: ‘Fate doomed me ever thus / To love him, ever to be sorrowful’ (1943, 2). In The Saga of Gísli, the narrative focus then shifts from the two women to Þorkell, who now declares that a death (his rival’s) must follow. By contrast, in the play, the action stays with Ásgerðr and Auðr, who hear Þorkell’s steps (still without seeing him) and are left to realise that he has overheard them. As a result of the play’s use of their point of view, the exchange between them frames all the events of the play that follow, emphasising the central importance of the relationships between the female characters of the saga.

LB: It’s amazing to see that, over a century ago, Beatrice Helen Barmby addressed this fundamental gap in creative works about Viking Age life. For almost that long, novelists who have been inspired by ‘the whole Northern thing’ (to borrow a phrase attributed to W.H. Auden in Jonas 1966, 24) have almost exclusively written rollicking seafaring adventures, including — but absolutely not limited to — King Olaf’s Kinsman by Charles Watts Whistler (1898), The Men of Ness by Eric Linklater (1932), The Longships by Frans G. Bengtsson (1943), Hrolf Kraki’s Saga by Poul Anderson (1973), Blood Feud by Rosemary Sutcliff (1976), The Sea Road by Margaret Elphinstone (2000), the Vinland Saga series of graphic novels by Makoto Yukimura (2005-present), the Oathsworn series by Robert Low (2007-2012), Bracelet of Bones, Scramasax, and Harald in Byzantium by Kevin Crossley-Holland (2011, 2012 and 2022), the Raven and Rise of Sigurd series by Giles Kristian (2009-2011 and 2014-2017), and the multi-volume The Last Kingdom series by Bernard Cornwell (2004-2020). It’s impossible to overlook the predominance of male authors in this list, and the subject matter of these books also invariably skews masculine: bands of Viking Age warriors led by a young man seeking vengeance for the death of, usually, his impressive father, sail the seas in quite familiar ‘hero’s journey’ adventure plots. Without exaggeration or hyperbole, I can attest that most of these stories feature one flat female primary character: the shieldmaiden/love interest for the intrepid protagonist.

No doubt in response to this gender dynamic, there has been a notable shift in both the point of view and authorship of Viking Age novels: more and more books written by women about Old Norse women are being published. At present, however, the strongest trend in this subgenre of historical fiction is to err on the side of fantasy and mythology — for plots, characterisations and settings — rather than retelling the lives of ‘real’ early medieval people. These works tend to draw on Old Norse myths (as presented in the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda) and typically reimagine the lives of supernatural female figures like goddesses, giants, magic-wielders, and Valkyries. For instance, The Witch’s Heart by Genevieve Gornichec (2021) gives readers a more personal view of Angrboða, a jötunn and the trickster-god Loki’s lover in the Edda, who is best known for giving birth to three monsters — one of whom is Hel, the half-necrotic ruler of the realm of the dead (also called Hel), who becomes the viewpoint character and narrator of The Monstrous Child by Francesca Simon (2016). Another of Loki’s partners — his wife, Sigyn — takes centre stage in Cat Rector’s The Goddess of Nothing at All (2021), while two of the most famous legendary women from Völsunga saga, Guðrún Gjúkadóttir and Brynhildr, are recast as protagonists in Valkyrie by Kate Heartfield (2023). There is power in these retellings: each of them changes the tune of the original material by giving women the microphone, so to speak, in telling these stories (in fact, half of these examples are first-person narratives), and in embracing the fantastical, they avoid any perceived pitfalls of historicity, of getting the ‘facts’ wrong.

We see fewer authors attempting ‘straightforward’ historical fiction. One exception is Linnea Hartsuyker’s Golden Wolf trilogy (2017-2019), which splits the third-person narrative between Ragnvald of More (c.830-890) and his sister Svanhild, and another is, of course, your own novel, Kári. This type of historical narrative requires well-informed speculation, a willingness to consider what’s being said in the medieval material and, more importantly, what isn’t, and to ‘gloss over lacunae in the primary texts, as well as in the formal theories developed to explicate them’ (Falk 2015, 4). It also demands we make well-researched and reasonable leaps between what is presumed to have happened and what could have. To connect the dots without expecting — or indeed ever really intending — to reach a single, definitive conclusion. Instead, our retellings of saga women’s stories are open-ended contributions to an ongoing conversation between the past and the present, the ‘known’ and the not-yet-known, which both traditional scholars and creative writers are having.

Much like us, Oren Falk argues that ‘the porous nature of the boundary between scholarly analysis and popular retelling should itself be leveraged as a source of understanding’ (2015, 5) — but how do we put this into practice? The Sorrow Stone is an excellent example of an extended, deeply engaged, and important reinterpretation of Þórdís not just as a literary figure, but as a complicated person who exists in the dynamic world depicted in the sagas. Your expert understanding of character, plot, worldbuilding — not to mention human nature — allows us to see Þórdís both as she is in Gísla saga and as so much more than that. Your Þórdís introduces new readers to the complexities of life as a woman in Viking Age Iceland and, simultaneously, invites saga scholars to reflect on and reconsider her experiences and motivations in the source material in valuable ways.

In terms of my own practice, I want to come back to a word you’ve just used to describe Gísla saga: it’s best known, you’ve accurately stated, as Gísli’s biography. My thinking and approach to retelling the lives of thirteen saga women in Viking Women: Life and Lore (2023) has been influenced by historical fiction, but it was also greatly informed by life writing scholarship, particularly speculative biography. As I crafted each woman’s story for a non-specialist audience, I consciously — and constantly — found myself treading carefully. Whether they were verifiably ‘real’ people whose existence is attested in written records beyond the sagas or, as is likely the case for slaves and bondswomen like Þorgerðr brák, representations of an undocumented class of women in early medieval Iceland, these characters are all historically and culturally significant. It was (and is) imperative that I re-present these women’s stories as true to the spirit of the sagas as possible: that is, as biographies that draw on documented evidence (e.g., literary, archaeological, archival materials), my own expertise as an academic who has studied the sagas for twenty years, and my experience as a creative writer. But if, as Donna Lee Brien has argued, ‘biography remains … largely understood by readers as telling straightforward, factual, historically accurate life stories’ (2015, 3) then where do my retellings fit? How can I write from these women’s points of view, using the closest of close third-person perspectives, revealing their innermost thoughts, worries, and aspirations, while weaving each account together with the strongest of non-fictional threads?

Australian scholars Donna Lee Brien and Kiera Lindsay have done extensive work navigating the nebulous lines between fact, informed conjecture, and outright invention in biographical-historical writing and, in so doing, have done much to distinguish speculative biography as its own genre. Both scholars acknowledge the speculative elements (the assumptions, suppositions, and conflation of various materials) in traditional biographies, but Brien explains that ‘openly “speculative” biographers go further’ by ‘unabashedly proclaim[ing] the central role of authorial interpretation … in the process of creating their biographical narratives’ (2015, 3), while Lindsay also emphasises how speculative biography

consciously employs literary devices such as narrative, metaphor and plot and licenses speculation and imagination in ways that traditional history cannot. Authors embrace a spirit of ‘resourceful reinvention’ that allows them to not only write about pasts that might otherwise be difficult, even impossible to recount, but to do so in ways that involved interiority. (2020, 253)

In writing these speculative biographies about a wide range of women from the sagas — young, old, rich, poor, powerful, and powerless — I become an interlocutor bridging the gap between the Viking Age and the present. As I express in the introduction to Viking Women itself, taking this approach allows me to move ‘between well-trampled history and untouched literary ground’ and in the process, ‘illuminate history with humanity’ (Hannett 2023, 7).

Allow me to illustrate this with a brief example. When conceptualising the content and structure of my book, my aim was to retell stories of everyday women of all ages and from all walks of life. I wanted — and still want — to understand what daily existence could have been like for average people in this period, even though the saga narratives are, by and large, preoccupied with the more elite classes. This is no doubt why Melkorka — a concubine/slave who is later revealed to be Irish royalty — gets so much airtime in Laxdæla saga. For a medieval Icelandic audience, the attraction of Melkorka’s story wouldn’t have been her depiction as the chieftain Höskuldr’s thrall, but rather the appealing role she plays in legitimising the male characters’ aristocratic ancestry: after all, the reputation of her impressive and beloved-by-all son, Óláfr pá (‘the peacock’) shines more brightly because his mother is a princess. Yet even though Melkorka appears at length in several chapters of the saga (as opposed to another thrall, Þorgerðr brák, whose story occupies a grand total of eleven lines in Egils saga) her experiences are filtered through Höskuldr’s perspective. We know nothing of her before he purchases her from a Rūs merchant (read: slave trader) on the isle of Brännö in southern Sweden, and once she’s in Iceland we can only interpret her feelings based on what she says (or, in her case, doesn’t say — Melkorka pretends to be mute for many years, which is a genius powerplay for someone with no real power) and how she behaves. As someone interested in (1) elucidating the ubiquity of Viking Age slavery in the sagas and in reality for a wide readership, and (2) understanding how a young woman like Melkorka became part of that Rūs trader’s inventory in the first place, my job was to make logical connections between the literary and archaeological sources, and then to ‘resourcefully reinvent’ undocumented parts of her life in my retelling.

In many ways, this involved narrative reverse-engineering (i.e., knowing the story’s end point and plotting it backwards) bolstered by traditional research methods. I scoured the sagas for hints of Melkorka’s past and for comparable depictions of other concubines; referred to Landnámabók and the Irish Annals for details about the men in her life (since, so often, we can only trace women’s movements by following those of the men with whom they’re associated); plundered museum archives for evidence of Viking Age slavery and consulted numerous scholarly articles about indicative artefacts (e.g. iron collars and manacles), including dates and locations of their discoveries; examined trade routes between the British Isles and Scandinavia; studied population genetic analyses, which ‘reveal a large excess of Norse male over female lineages in Iceland and the Faroes, suggesting that the early male Norse settlers brought with them Gaelic women’ (Krzewińska, et al. 2015); and delved into the history of Viking Age Dublin, given its significance as a booming hub of the slave trade. All of this, and more, informed the series of ‘if, then…’ questions I posited before filling in the blanks with credible possibilities and details from Laxdæla saga. Crafting the early part of Melkorka’s life proved trickiest. In conceptualising and presenting her story, I couldn’t ignore that she was Irish royalty before she was a thrall — but none of my research explained how a person of her high status might believably wind up as an Icelandic chieftain’s concubine. Why didn’t her father, king Mýrkjartan, intervene? Wouldn’t he rather arrange a strategic marriage than have his daughter sold as a sex slave? Was Melkorka a member of her father’s household at all, or had she been fostered elsewhere? Is that how she disappeared without Mýrkjartan’s immediate notice? And why was there no attempt to retrieve her — or was there? There’s no historical or archaeological evidence of Melkorka’s childhood, and I was bound by the ‘facts’ of her existence in Ireland as presented in Laxdæla saga: she had a nurse back home who missed her, and king Mýrkjartan lived long enough to eventually acknowledge her son, Óláfr, as his legitimate grandson (as we discover when young Óláfr sails there to meet and impress him). My task, then, was to make Melkorka’s removal and lifelong absence from Ireland feasible, given these constraints, while also (and always) imagining these experiences from her point of view and writing them in a close third-person perspective. I take readers into the backstreets of Dublin and dramatise Melkorka’s capture, defilement, and transport from Ireland to a prominent market on an island off the coast of Sweden, where I depict her being sold in a Rūs slave trader’s tent (alongside many other women). I convey realistic human behaviour in such fraught circumstances (the trader’s practical avarice; Höskuldr, the buyer’s, willingness to pay three times the usual price for this beautiful and, importantly, apparently mute treasure; Melkorka’s self-preserving numbness now that the terror of being abducted has simmered into shocked detachment). I continue to do so throughout Melkorka’s life, demonstrating the inevitable friction when Höskuldr brings her home to Iceland, where his wife, Jorunn, must suddenly make room for a younger woman in their marriage…. And so on. The result of answering these ‘what if’ questions is a speculative biography of Melkorka as an affluent girl in Dublin, and a spoil of war, and a valuable piece of human chattel, and a chieftain’s concubine, and a mother with aspirations for her son, and, more than anything, a woman with a memory as strong as her will. Throughout her retelling, I draw on my short story writing toolkit, presenting a tale with a ‘single effect,’ a small cast of characters, a limited viewpoint, great ‘hooks’ and open endings, intentionally allowing breathing space for new connections to be made between the scenes I’ve created and the research that informs them. This approach makes room for a different type of knowledge about Viking Age slavery, one which draws attention to the human impact and experience of this practice by taking a series of small, measured, speculative steps beyond what is ‘known,’ into what is possible.


KG: I have always been fascinated by Melkorka and her place in Laxdæla saga. I feel she could have an entire novel dedicated to her life, leading perhaps to that particularly touching moment when we discover that she is not mute, as she pretends to the Icelanders around her, but has in fact been teaching her son Óláfr to speak in her own language. And that, if she didn't have a child, she might never have revealed that she could speak.

The story that I have written, about the life of Þórdís Súrsdóttir in The Saga of Gísli, emerged from the kinds of questions you mention, ones you cannot not engage with in a modern novel, which after all brings with it the expectation that you will seek out the characters' inner lives: their desires and hopes, loves, frustrations, grief. My method to do so was to trust in the narrative itself, or rather the imaginative act of inhabiting the narrative from Þórdís's point of view and from there to see what questions emerged.

To do so, I developed a chronology of events that was based on a close reading of the original texts, but also attempted to place Þórdís at its centre. I put more emphasis than the original work on Þórdís’s experiences when she was girl with two younger brothers growing up in Surnadal in Norway. This meant also expanding the Norwegian section of the story to show her as a young woman falling in love for the first time, an affair that is forbidden by her family, even though her suitor Bárðr is a friend of her middle brother, Þorkell. When the youngest brother Gísli kills her suitor, Þórdís has no choice but to remain at home. Þórdís has lost her lover, one of her brothers has left the family, and now she knows she might lose her own life, too. The Sorrow Stone portrays Þórdís’s position as she waits for the attack to come, thereby centering the impact of the dispute around her perspective.

When the attack comes, it is in the form of a ‘burning in,’ in which Þórdís and her family are trapped inside while the attackers set light to their farmhouse. But the family escapes, and the middle brother Þorkell returns. United once more, the siblings make a passage abroad to Haukadalr in the Westfjords of Iceland. This is a crucial moment in Þórdís’s story, for she is given the chance to begin again, and the novel needs to show how she manages it. She needs her brothers’ support in order to succeed in Iceland, for she is unmarried and young and has no property of her own. My novel depicts her seeking to set aside her memory of what has happened in Norway as she directs her mind towards finding a husband. But, as importantly, the novel reveals her desire to be on close terms with the other women in the valley, including her brothers’ wives, Auðr and Ásgerðr. That is, it imagines her relationships with all the characters of the saga, not just with her brothers.

In this re-shaping of events, Þórdís emerges as a resilient person who has been hurt and is apprehensive about a new life, but is realistic in her outlook towards her brothers. Perhaps not so unlike Melkorka. She is not enslaved, but nor is she in a position to leave her brothers, and so the relationship is complicated, consisting of grief, resentment, as well as a degree of mutual dependency. I puzzled over how she might have still remembered her brothers as boys, when her position as the eldest gave her a degree of power, and perhaps a basis for re-establishing trust now. But recognising and exploring the new opportunities in Þórdís’s life, is, at this point in the story, an artistic necessity, for, if Þórdís does not feel that she can re-build her life and family relationships, her narrative sinks into despair, a trajectory in which the events to follow in Iceland are merely a grim playing out of what happened in Norway.

With this artistic necessity in mind, the novel portrays Þórdís falling in love again. Through a new relationship and new friendships, she expresses new desires and hopes, that is, as distinct from her relationship with her siblings. The Sorrow Stone depicts early interactions between Þórdís and her brothers’ wives, Auðr and Ásgerðr, as well as her meeting and falling for Þórgrímr, a chieftain from the Snæfellsnes peninsula, in whom she finds not only a match but also a way of leaving Haukadalr and her brothers. I show Þórdís wanting her brothers to be happy and settled in their marriages and needing to build her own life with her husband. As such, the novel now develops quite differently from the saga, so that the point of view can remain with Þórdís. In The Saga of Gísli, the narrative moves with Gísli and his wife Auðr to the new farm; in The Sorrow Stone, the action stays with her at the first. In particular, we see her attempts to understand why her husband is intent on living in Haukadalr, even though he has his own farm elsewhere.

One day, the news of a disagreement at Hóll makes it across the valley. It appears that the middle brother, Þorkell, has overheard his wife and sister-in-law Auðr talking about their past loves. He learns that his wife was once in love with another man. But it struck me that, for Þórdís, there is another, even more troubling insight. The overheard conversation also reveals that her husband, Þórgrímr, was involved with Auðr. That is, she has just learnt that she may have a rival who lives in the valley and who is married to her brother, Gísli. In the saga, the emphasis is on Þorkell’s jealousy and response. But my novel is about Þórdís: the more important question is whether this information about past affections changes her understanding of her husband? That is, in my view, where the narrative of her story needs to go next, for her marriage has become the focal point of her life in Iceland. As a result, The Sorrow Stone begins a line of questioning that has not, I believe, featured in the critical literature, but one that is impossible not to pursue given the developments and point of view in the novel. Is Þórdís as jealous as Þorkell, and desperate to leave the valley in order to get her husband away from Auðr?

In response to these questions, the story of The Sorrow Stone now sharpens to become one about how Þórdís can save the new life she has worked so hard to create. As such, her relationship with Auðr, though not mentioned in the saga, is at the heart of her experiences. Through the story, the novel suggests that their relationship is a central part of the conflict that follows, and that leads to the deaths of all the principal male characters. When, as part of this dispute, Gísli murders her husband Þórgrímr, an attack made while the couple are asleep in their room, Þórdís does not see the killer. But, later, when she learns that Gísli was responsible, and had come into her room in the dark and stabbed Þórgrímr while he lay next to her, she is overwhelmed by anger, and tells her husband’s brother, Bǫrkr, who the killer is.

Doing so has led to Þórdís being seen by many as a woman who ‘betrayed’ her brother, and in this way contravened her duty to remain loyal to her blood ties. It has made her the villain of the story, whereas in fact her life was much more complex than can be defined by either loyalty or disloyalty to Gísli. I think The Sorrow Stone shows that the burning questions in her life were about others as well: her husband, the family she wanted to make with him, and the people of his past that seemed to retain an influence in his life. The other women in the valley. The possibility that he was still in love with someone else. In the difficult world of the Icelandic Middle Ages, her brother Gísli was one of her problems, but of course her life consisted of much more than her relationship with him.

LB: You mentioned that your retelling ‘had to be quite different from the saga in order to stay with Þórdís,’ and, in my view, this demonstrates one of the most crucial points about what we’re both doing when revisiting and revising these stories in historical fiction and/or speculative biographies. Neither of us is interested in changing what’s essential about the sagas, presenting implausible or fantastical plots as somehow ‘correct’ or superior to the originals, but rather in redirecting their narrative foci to see what new possibilities lie hidden within or behind the existing (and beloved) storylines. In other words, we shift the monumental boulder of the Íslendingasögur, just a few inches, to see what lies beneath. We can make use of the sagas’ laconic narrative style and general lack of interiority in our own works, which interpret and articulate in greater detail what hasn’t been overtly said in the source material. For instance, when retelling Bera’s story — a woman best known for bearing Egill Skallagrímsson — a single line from Chapter 31 not only inflected my characterisation of her; it also forever changed my understanding of her behaviour in this saga and, by extension, mother-son relationships in general in the sagas.

Before introducing Egill and his golden-boy older brother, the narrator simply states, ‘Skallagrim and Bera had many children, but the first ones all died.’ This is Egils saga, so of course the narrative focus remains on him — but what if, I asked myself, we remember that Bera is more than a name inked in a thirteenth-century manuscript, more than a supporting actor in the drama of her son’s life, and instead stop for a moment to unpack the years of emotional and physical trauma this series of miscarriages, infant and/or toddler deaths might have had on her? How many losses did it take to break her? To toughen her skin? To make her callous around her children when, at last, they survived into childhood? To modern readers, Bera’s interactions with young Egill can seem harsh and strangely cold — for example, she approves of her seven-year-old son driving an axe into another boy’s head — whereas his childless foster-mother, Þorgerðr brák, coddles him, teaches him songs, and dotes on him. Is Bera’s emotional distance a symptom of exhaustion? Apathy? Fear? What if she loves — and loses — yet another child? Perhaps it’s better to keep him at arm’s length. Perhaps it’s best to encourage Egill to be ‘a true Viking’ (as she does in Chapter 40), since he’s bound to die anyway…. All of these questions led me back to the saga corpus, where it proved impossible to read depictions of motherhood as I had before digging deeper into Bera’s story.

Whenever traditional researchers endeavour to fill a gap in existing knowledge, they pore over what’s currently known to find chinks in arguments, seeking areas for further discussion that might be cracked open thanks to the innovative and often orthogonal angles of their insights. For saga scholars and creative writers like us, storytelling is our interrogative crowbar. We use it to carefully pry open gaps in early medieval literature and history, allowing new light to shine on the subject matter. My hope is that, in doing so, we invite new readings of — and, indeed, new readers to — this fascinating period and its peoples.

KG: The knowledge claims of creative writing are often contingent ones, and re-telling these stories is a method of raising new questions rather than offering definitive interpretations. For me, one of the joys of re-imagining the sagas lies with the unexpected narratives that emerge, storylines that relate the sagas to contemporary topics that, over time, have developed alongside their place as works of historical and cultural significance. The Íslendingasögur we've discussed are not always clear-cut in their meaning or intention: a sympathetic way of reading them may be one that is also, by its very nature, touched with uncertainty. In the case of re-imagining The Saga of Gísli, the main question that emerged for me was whether earlier criticism of the work had paid enough attention to Þórdís's relationships with characters other than Gísli, especially in her marriage and in how she got along with the other women in the valley where she lived. Þórgrímr and Auðr had once been lovers, and, after they come into Þórdís’s life, they continue to make decisions that dramatically affect each other: Þórgrímr takes part in the killing of Auðr’s brother, Vésteinn, and Auðr is married to Þórgrímr’s killer. That is, her husband murders her former lover. Though the saga does not emphasise these aspects of the story, re-imagining it with Þórdís at its centre allows us to see their impact on her more clearly.

More broadly, I think we can anticipate that creative practice as a method of reading and interpreting the sagas can only lead to more new questions. I believe a creative practice-led approach to Old Norse-Icelandic studies will function most effectively if it is undertaken as an addition to the interdisciplinary approaches that have long comprised the field; both of us have been very conscious of the scholarly debates that have preceded our creative responses. The Saga of Gísli, as is the case with the works you have mentioned, has already attracted significant attention for its depiction of Viking Age society, family relations in medieval Scandinavia, religious change, and as a depository of Gísli’s poetry. But, among a rich constellation of approaches, creative practice can offer different but complementary interpretations, which connect close reading and traditional scholarly fields with the embodied activity of making art. When one undertakes a creative response that privileges a different point of view, the story develops in a way that makes it possible to see the lives and experiences of the characters of the Icelandic sagas more clearly.