The Culture House

After eating, Ron was sure not to miss Culture House (þjóðmenningarhúsið) across the street, an impressive museum about Vikings and Iceland’s cultural heritage. There was normally a small fee of Ikr 300, but it was free on Wednesdays, so he had caught a break by waiting until now to see it. He got an English audio-guide to help him explore. It included the originals of some of the Viking sagas, on vellum, in darkened rooms. There were also displays talking about the sagas. Iceland's traditional stories go back to medieval times, which live today in treasured sagas. Ron himself had read some translations of a few sagas about early Norse explorers and found them interesting.
Iceland’s medieval family sagas have often been called the world’s first novels. They’re certainly some of the most imaginative and enduring works of early literature – epic and brutal tales that suddenly flower with words of wisdom, elegy or love. Written down during the late 12th to late 13th centuries, they generally look to earlier times – they’re tales of bloodthirsty disputes, doomed romances and the larger-than-life characters who lived during the Settlement Era like Grettir the Strong and Auður the Deep-Minded. Most were written anonymously, though Egil’s Saga has been attributed to Snorri Sturluson. The sagas provided not just entertainment but a strong sense of cultural heritage, as they were written, over the long desperate centuries of Norwegian and Danish subjugation, when Icelanders had very little else. On winter nights, people would gather in farmhouses for the kvöldvaka (evening vigil).
Creeping into the darkened rooms was also fun. Some rooms included the originals of some of the sagas, written on vellum. A permanent exhibition covered saga history: from a Who’s Who of Norse gods to a fascinating account of Árni Magnússon, who devoted his life to saving Icelandic manuscripts, and died of a broken heart when his Copenhagen library went up in flames.Read more