The one-eyed Odin with his ravens Hugin and Munin: detail from the Icelandic Manuscript SÁM 66. Courtesy Arni Magnusson Institute, Reykjavik/Wikipedia
The one-eyed Odin with his ravens Hugin and Munin: detail from the Icelandic Manuscript SÁM 66. Courtesy Arni Magnusson Institute, Reykjavik/Wikipedia
Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
The collection of stories known as the Icelandic sagas are foundational works of Icelandic culture that are still widely read in the country today. Predating the Christianisation of Iceland in 1000 CE, these tales intermingle history, Norse paganism, and a morality steeped in warrior traditions and the northerly island’s rugged, barren terrain. In this performance and lecture, Kári Gíslason, a professor of creative writing and literary studies at Queensland University of Technology, evokes the sagas’ roots in oral storytelling as he melds his own story with that of the saga character Disa, whose tale of exile, love, murder and loyalty captivated Gíslason’s imagination as a young student and, in doing so, altered the trajectory of his life.
Video by the State Library of Queensland
video
Design and fashion
A ceramicist puts her own bawdy spin on the folk language of pottery
14 minutes
video
Animals and humans
Villagers struggle to keep their beloved, endangered ape population afloat
19 minutes
video
Art
Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement
15 minutes
video
Language and linguistics
Why Susan listens to recordings of herself speaking a language she no longer remembers
5 minutes
video
Ethics
Plato saw little value in privacy. How do his ideas hold up in the information age?
5 minutes
video
Information and communication
‘Astonished and somewhat terrified’ – Victorians’ reactions to the phonograph
36 minutes
video
Engineering
From simple motors to levitating trains – how design shapes innovation
23 minutes
video
Home
How an artist transformed a dilapidated hunting lodge into a house made of dreams
8 minutes
video
Animals and humans
Are zoos and natural history museums born of a desire to understand, or to control?
57 minutes