Viking Lives

Kári and Richard present the strange tale of Amleth the Mad: the Danish prince whose uncle murders his father and then marries his mother in unseemly haste.   Amleth, alone and in great danger, pretends to be mad until he can figure out how to take his revenge.   This was the original story that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and formed the basis of the recent film The Northman’, with Alexander Skarsgard.

Richard and Kári dig up the remains of a Viking king named Yngvar. Yngvar was long thought to have been a figure of legend. But in 2008, a ship-grave was excavated on a Baltic island that was dated to the year 750 AD. Inside the ship were the remains of 34 wounded warriors and their mysterious leader, who was found with a gilded sword and a chess piece lodged in his mouth.  

Kári and Richard plunge into the tale of Beowulf, the legendary Norseman who sets out to kill a murderous creature named Grendel, and then must face an even more dangerous monster: Grendel’s mother.

Richard and Kári delve into the semi-mythic tale of the Viking heroine Gudrun the Vengeful, and her destruction of Attila the Hun.

Kári and Richard go to Oxford to speak with Professor Carolyne Larrington on the mythic origins of Odin, the doomed chieftain of the Norse gods, who makes a sacrifice of himself to himself in the pursuit of wisdom.

Introducing a new podcast by Richard Fidler and Kári Gislason, in which they travel to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne in England where Viking plunderers stepped ashore in 793 AD, generating a shockwave that rippled across Christian Europe.

The great arc of Viking history told through a chain of life stories, presented by broadcaster Richard Fidler and author Kári Gíslason.