Professor Neil Price delivers the third of three lectures at Cornell University (part I, part II), focusing on the fundamental role that narrative, storytelling, and dramatization played in the mindset of the Viking Age (8th-11th centuries), occupying a crucial place not only in the cycles of life but particularly in the ritual responses to dying and the dead.

To the right is an excerpt from the Njáls saga in the Möðruvallabók (AM 132 folio 13r) written several centuries after the Viking age, circa 1350.