Award-winning travel writer Nicholas Jubber journeys across Europe, exploring the great epic poems and how they have a startling resonance in contemporary times. Reaching back to the era remembered as ‘the Age of Migration’, Jubber explores how attitudes to population movement, borders, kin relations, sex, class and political structures are dramatised in the ancient and medieval epics. From Homer’s Odyssey through the devastating conflict of the French Song of Roland and the German Nibelungenlied, to the great Viking sagas such as Beowulf and the Icelandic Njal’s Saga, these are timeless tales about human nature, but also windows into other societies, with different emphases on matters of honour, kinship, fundamentalism and fate. He talks to the great storyteller Daniel Morden.
