Alaric Hall delivers Beck lectures on Icelandic Culture

In mid-September Alaric Hall gave a series of public lectures on Icelandic culture at the University of Victoria in Canada

September 16th-20th saw Alaric Hall giving the autumn Beck lectures: a series of three lectures at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, endowed by Richard and Margaret Beck for the study of Icelandic literature and culture.

The series focused on the relatively little studied but increasingly popular romance-sagas composed in Iceland around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Alaric discussed what they and other fourteenth-century Icelandic literature can tell us about multilingualism in medieval Scandinavia, and the divergence of Icelandic from Norwegian; examined elves in Icelandic belief and culture in both the past and the present; and explored how Bjarni Harðarson's recent satire on the Icelandic financial crisis, Sigurðar saga fóts, makes use of medieval sagas, and helps us find ways to respond to the world financial crisis.

Podcasts of the lectures will appear online at http://web.uvic.ca/~becktrus/guest_lects.php’sort=seqEng. You can also read more about Sigurðar saga fóts in Alaric's blog.