Icelandic sagas' grim humor

For our Pandemic-era Books in Dark Times series, RTB spoke in 2020 with Carlo Rotella of Boston College. Rotella is the author of such gems as Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt and most recently has come out with What Can I Get out of This? along with some sparkling related pieces about AI in the classroom.

Carlo is always worth listening to, in dark days... and darker ones, too. He starts by praising sagas, makes a case for stories of disagreeableness and plugs a remarkable book about preaching, deception, and the urge to belong.

• Tacitus, Germania
• Njal’s Saga
• Egil’s Saga
• Prose Edda
• Poetic Edda
• Haldor Laxness, Iceland’s Bell
• Mitch Weiss, Broken Faith
• Lawrence Wright, Going Clear (2013)
• P. G. Wodehouse My Man Jeeves (indeed, 1919)
• The Wizard of Id
• Robert E. Howard, Conan (first appearance 1932)

Read transcript here.

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