Associate Professor of English Chris Abram is interested in the literary cultures of early medieval northern Europe, especially Anglo-Saxon England and Viking-Age and later Norway and Iceland. His work often deals with the region’s transition from paganism to Christianity and its impact on literary production.
“I’m interested in how things started,” he says. “A really important part of that is how people became Christian. But in order to find out what kind of Christians they became, we have to know what sort of people they were before.”
In this video, Abram discusses the large body of manuscripts found in Scandinavia written in Old Norse and what the stories within can tell us about pre-Christian culture across northern Europe.
Originally published by Arts and Letters at al.nd.edu on March 26, 2013.