Our ancestors survived eleven centuries of Arctic darkness with nothing but candlelight, and still found time to write the sagas. What did they know that we’ve forgotten?

Icelanders get as little as three to four hours of daylight at the height of winter, and yet the medieval settlers who first endured that darkness left behind one of Europe’s great literary inheritances. In The Winter Book, novelist Vilborg Davidsdottir sets out to understand how they managed it, ranging through the Sagas of Icelanders, eddic poetry and folk belief to trace how a small nation on the edge of the habitable world turned the season of darkness into a season of story.

Along the way, readers meet the gods and grotesques of the Norse Otherworld, from Odin and Freyja to Yule Lads, mound-dwellers and Grýla the Winter Hag, alongside the Celtic tales carried west by the captive women who became Iceland’s foremothers. Vilborg threads her own family’s rural memories through the history and explores why Icelanders, against all latitude and logic, report some of the lowest rates of seasonal depression in the world. Part cultural history, part personal essay, The Winter Book offers readers everywhere a new
way to think about their own darkest months.