The Saga-Sites of Iceland - A 21st-Century Pilgrimage

The short documentary Memories of Old Awake looks at how the medieval Icelandic saga Gísla saga Súrssonar still resonates in the Icelandic landscape in which this dramatic story is set, 1,000 years after the events described in the saga are said to have taken place. Gísla saga was one of 30 sagas that scholar Emily Lethbridge read “in situ” across Iceland over the course of 2011.

In her lecture, Lethbridge will talk about her experiences as a “ 21st -century saga pilgrim”  and some of the ways that her “saga fieldwork” was inspired by, converged with, and diverged from, William Gershom Collingwood's late 19th-century explorations of the medieval Icelandic sagas and their physical settings.