From the Introduction: The Land of Ice and Fire This playset is based on the Icelandic Sagas, written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from stories passed down the generations about brave men, mostly living in the years between 850 and 1050, who went abroad in search of fortune as Vikings and who, at the same time, built in Iceland a unique system of democratic self-government based on assemblies of free men. The players will take the roles of proud farmers, ambitious chieftains, desperate slaves, powerful priests, great poets, dangerous warlocks, and murderous Vikings, embroiled in the many inter-family feuds.