VIKING LIVES podcast

with Richard Fidler & Kári Gíslason

Explore the great arc of Viking history through a chain of life stories

Richard Fidlerand Kari Gislason on Lindisfarne Island

Broadcaster Richard Fidler and author Kári Gíslason are frankly obsessed with the Vikings. In this new podcast series, Richard and Kári travel the world to unearth the individual stories of these people of extraordinary fierceness, imagination, cruelty and courage. We see their reckless passions and moments of astonishing tenderness, recorded on parchment a thousand years ago.

◊

Viking Lives will follow the great arc of Viking history over four series of ten episodes each, beginning with the first Viking raids and concluding in an Icelandic farmhouse where Kári’s ancestor, the greatest of the saga authors, was murdered in the year 1241. Along the way we'll be joined by guest specialists and authors with their own intimate connections to the Viking world.

◊

This series, several years in the making, begins with Odin, the king of the Norse gods, then moves into the stories of part-legendary figures like Beowulf and Ragnar Lodbrok, then into the lives of Viking women and men who are revealed to us in the full light of history through the sagas, medieval chronicles, and archaeological records. We meet not only monarchs and warlords, but farmers, matriarchs, slaves, mercenaries, poets and ghosts.

◊

Kári and Richard trace the evolution of the Vikings as raiders, traders and settlers, pushing their way into the wider world in search of treasure and adventure, honour and revenge. We follow them as they traverse astonishing distances, across Europe, Russia and Africa, then to Iceland, Greenland and North America.

◊

Richard & Kári have followed the traces of these people, travelling to the island of Lindisfarne where the Viking Age is said to have begun; to the farms and fjords of Iceland; to the grounds of Prague Castle; to a burial site in Oxford; and to Helgafell, the holy mountain where a temple to Thor once stood.

◊