The saga theatre

I am proud to announce that this evening, I solved a problem, with the help of David, Koleen's husband.

Vikingaheimar has a component called The Sage Theatre. It is set inside a Norse style long hall, and features a mannequin of a monk and an old story teller. The story teller knows about the voyages of Leif Eiriksson and others to North America, around the year 1000, and he is telling the monk all about them (shortened to 5 stories, 2 minutes in length each). At the Smithsonian, we created a lightboard with the characters from the Vinland sagas--Bjarni Herjolfsson and Leif and the skraelings--and these characters light up whenever the story teller mentions them. It makes up one wall of the long house.

Well, late Saturday afternoon, the staff told me that the amplifier for the speaker in the theatre had stopped working. This was a bit unfortunate, since of course the mannequins standing there with the lighted figures behind them does not make a whole lot of sense without the audio. This morning, I went and picked up the amplifier, and tried to take it to a shop here in Keflavik to fix it. They said I would have to take it somewhere else. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I should ask Koleen's husband to take a look at it. Brought it over to their house late this afternoon, and at 9:30, got a call from David that he had found the problem--a blown fuse--and replaced it. So we scurried down to the museum tonight to see if that did the trick, if the sound system would now work. Yeppa leppers, it did! The saga theatre now has sound again.

I will eventually need to get a new speaker, and a new amplifier, since the current set up is not in stereo. Only channel A is working, not channel B. Plus the Saga Theatre was originally only in English, and I would obviously like to get it redone into Icelandic for the audience here. Also the pause between stories is maybe too long. So, more to be done, but I am really rather happy with the day's work.

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