Episode 34b – The Saga of Gunnar of Keldugnup (chapters 6-11)

When last we left you, Gunnar had just killed a troll woman and a seemingly intelligent bear in an unknown frozen land (check out Jacob’s great illustration of this and more of his work on his Instagram page). The troll woman’s sister seemed kind enough and even warned Gunnar that there were more trolls about. In this episode, we find out how Gunnar does against a family of trolls and what kind of impression he makes on Fala’s father. From there, we’ll follow Gunnar to the court of Hákon Sigurðarson, the Jarl of Lade (Hlaðir). We’ve met Hákon before in the Saga of Finnbogi the Mighty. Things go pretty much the same for Gunnar the Fool of Keldugnup as they did for Finnbogi. Whether he survives the encounter or not, this saga’s coming to a close pretty quickly. Listen and find out if Gunnar can impress the jarl with his wrestling skills or if he succumbs to the jarl’s ill-temper. This is a strange but fun one.

Music Credits

Intro Music – “Prelude and Action” by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4236-prelude-and-action
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Outro Music – “Stormfront” by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4421-stormfront
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

One thought on “Episode 34b – The Saga of Gunnar of Keldugnup (chapters 6-11)

  1. The “vinkona” question is a tricky one, because we would need the medieval perspective to answer it.
    In modern Icelandic it is simply “lady friend” or “female friend” although less neutral and more endearing, like “bff”.

    But we only have to go back a couple of centuries, to the romantic period, to find the use of “vinkona” or “vinur” (male friend) with obvious romantic connotations, especially in romantic poetry.
    How these words were used 700 years ago I´m not sure, but in Guðrúnarkviða the word “málvinur” is what Guðrún uses for her husband Sigurð.

    Liked by 1 person

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s