Dan Snow (32:48)
Ever wondered what it feels like to be a gladiator facing a roaring crowd and potential death in the coliseum? Find out on the Ancients podcast from History hit twice a week. Join me Tristan Hughes, as I hear exciting new research about people living thousands of years ago, from the Babylonians to the Celts to the Romans. And visit the ancient sites which reveal who and just how amazing our distant ancestors were. That's the Ancients from History hit. Hey folks, you have to excuse me getting a bit sort of romantic here, but it really. Iceland does feel like the real life Asgard. I'm walking across this landscape. It feels like you're in the footsteps of the old Norse gods, certainly in the footsteps of the Vikings. It is just so dramatic. I'm now in a sort of river valley. This beautiful rivers streaming past me. The sun is flashing off it, little ripples caused by the wind. Big lake up ahead of me. And in the distance, well, I'm surrounded by this bowl of volcanic hills. Bare black craggy slopes, jagged peaks. Imagine the Platonic ideal form of a perfect pyramidal mountain. That's what I'm seeing all around me now. And then in the distance I'm also seeing smoke, white smoke at various places pouring into the sky. And those are fissures. That's where the geothermally heated water is just rising to the surface and sending plumes of steam up into the sky. It's like nowhere else in the world. And Iceland's beautiful wherever you go, frankly. But this is a very special corner of it because I've driven out of Reykjavik about an hour north of it and I'm in Thingvellir National Park. This is a place that the original settlers chose to be the beating heart really of this new territory that they'd settled. And they didn't know about it, but they've chosen very wisely because this is actually a geologically highly significant place. I am standing in the mid Atlantic rift. I am between two tectonic plates. I'm looking at two tectonic plates. And as a result this is a place of enormous seismic activity. There's an earthquake actually in Iceland every single day. And if I look to my right, I've got this sheer wall of volcanic cliff that is the edge of the North American plate. I could reach and touch it now. And if I look over there to the east, I can see the edge of the Eurasian plate. So this is where the two great plates. This is where the two great chunks of the Earth's crust meet. And it is here, just incredibly appropriately, given that these people had no idea about seismology in the Earth's crust, that the Viking settlers chose to be their meeting place. This is the site of the Atheling. This is where the chiefs of those first Viking settlements came together to discuss their issues, to try and resolve conflict, to talk rather than fight. Behaviour that we perhaps don't associate with the Vikings. But we need to look beyond those myths and realize that they practiced a very interesting form of politics, of conflict resolution. And it wasn't just the chiefs that came here. They were the most important, to be fair. But it was every free male Icelandic settler could come here and participate in some way in the political process. Process. As a result. This is not easy for a Brit to say, folks, but as a result, the Atheling really is one of, if not the oldest national parliament in the world. It's just great. They met every single summer here. They came here for two weeks at the very height of summer, during midsummer. So I'm sure there's a bit of a festival vibe as well. I'm sure it's fun. And they created new laws, they settled the disputes. I think they do some business. I'm sure lots of marriages were arranged and even a couple of elopements took place. And so this place where tectonic plates created friction and heat and smoke and fire, was also a place of calm, of collaboration, of cooperation. We know about the Atheling from the Book of Settlements, but also from the sagas. They were collected and written down in 13th and 14th centuries, and they were the stories of the. The chiefs and their families and their stories of battles and hardships, but also magic and gods and star cross lovers, all the good stuff. And they were passed down from generation to generation orally, until they were written down. Storytelling spans all sorts of cultures right across human history, right across the world. But there's something very special about that Icelandic oral tradition. And here they are known as the Icelandic sagas. So this is one of the famous sagas?
