Photo by

Jón Trausti Sigurðarsson

Best-selling novelist and creator of the Game of Thrones empire George R.R. Martin has continued a charm offensive on Iceland this week. In addition to giving a public talk at the Iceland Noir festival, and posing for pictures with our own journalists in front of our office door, the author taped an interview with Egill Helgason for the book show Kiljan.

“When I was in college… I took a course in Scandinavian history, and it included a section about Iceland, and I read some of the books about the origins, the Eddas and the sagas. People coming and killing each other. It was fascinating stuff,” the author told Egill in an interview excerpt that has already been posted on RÚV.

We can report that the author appears to be in good health while he waited for us to photograph him, for all of you waiting on The Winds of Winter to be completed.

Grapevine contributor Grayson Del Faro has published a book called The Sagas and Shit, available at the Grapevine store, which confirms that a summary of “people coming and killing each other” is not an inaccurate account of the sagas.