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I couldn't give 'Vikings' away - I mean, I love these people. And I'm not sure anyone else writing it would necessarily have the same feeling towards the characters that I do.

I think writers from both East and West have long been fascinated by the ancient tales and the opportunity to reinterpret them.

Thanks to the success of Henning Mankell and Peter Hoeg, there wasn't the same stigma attached to writing genre thrillers in Scandinavia as there was in many other cultures. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I have a deep and ongoing love of Iceland, particular the landscape, and when writing 'Burial Rites,' I was constantly trying to see whether I could distill its extraordinary and ineffable qualities into a kind of poetry.

Olafur Eliasson is also one of the most visionary artists I've ever met. He is from Denmark and Iceland, and his focus is nothing less than the entire universe.

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

Throughout the history of Iceland, men have been lost at sea; every family in Iceland is connected to that kind of story.

The Vikings certainly didn't write anything about themselves; it was not a literate, but rather a pagan, culture. So what we get was written later by Christian monks. But there were occasional reportings and recordings of people who had traded usually with the Vikings.

Why are we reading a Shakespeare play or 'Huckleberry Finn?' Well, because these works are great, but they also tell us something about the times in which they were created. Unfortunately, previous eras and dead authors often used language or accepted as normal sentiments that we now find unacceptable.

In winter, the Icelanders told the tales of the brave men of old in their families, and so the tradition was handed on from father to son, the same stories told every winter, till all the particulars became well known.