Dr. Thorir Jonsson Hraundal is Founder and Director of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Iceland since 2015 where he did a post -doctorate research project entitled Eastern Vikings in Arabic sources. He is widely published with many papers and contributions including “Vikings in Arabic Sources”, which is forthcoming in the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Viking World, “Rus” forthcoming in the Encyclopedia Iranica and “Ibn Fadlan on the middle Volga”, in Proceedings from the conference ‘Ibn Fadlan and the Great Unwashed’, held in Oxford, March 2016.