It’s a woman’s world
In a world turned upside down by Covid-19, we have retreated into our homes, taking sanitising measures and wondering what the future holds. An intriguing historical parallel for our current situation can be found in medieval Icelandic sagas, which show how infectious disease affected the households of Iceland and Greenland in the late Viking Age, when they became Christian a millennium ago.
In , the arrival in Iceland of a boatload of people from Ireland, the Hebrides and Norway is followed by illness and death. The first to die, a vigorous Hebridean woman called Þorgunna, instructs that her bedding should be burnedand Recently arrived in Greenland from Iceland, Guðríðr marries the son of Eirik the Red. Infectious disease arrives at the remote farm they share with another couple, carrying off a large number of people. Eerie happenings occur as the dead begin to haunt the living.
