From the Sagas we learn of many fantastic people and their incredible adventures, all told with the great craft and gusto of the Skald. What attracts me most about the Northmen is their storytelling. There were no doubt faults on both sides, for in history no one is ever completely in the right.
On the other hand, when the odds were in favour of the English, they treated these Northmen ruthlessly, even flaying them and nailing their skins on church doors, or flinging the ambushed marauders into adder-pits. In some ways they were like children – very dangerous children! To the Franks, English and Irish, they seemed like devils, and prayers were offered up in the churches as a protection against them. They were still pagans when the rest of Europe had long become Christianised. The Northmen were immensely brave and hardy they were also savage and superstitious. In my other books I have tried to describe what Vikings were like, but to explain Viking’s Sunset I must add a little more. After all, the longships of Harald’s time were superb creations, quite capable of the voyages I describe and the questing spirit of the Northmen was as lively in AD 815 as it was in AD 867. I would guess that a cautious scholar like Pytheas would have a pretty good idea, from unrecorded travellers’ yarns, what he was going to find!Īnd so I feel justified in letting Harald Sigurdson anticipate Naddodd by a mere fifty-two years. For instance, we don’t really know when the early Mediterranean travellers first ‘discovered’ Britain – though recorded history tells us that the Greek astronomer Pytheas came here in the fourth century BC. Here I should halt a moment to say that recorded history tells us that Iceland was discovered by one Naddodd in AD 867, and Greenland in AD 985, by Eric Röde who was flying from Norway to escape a charge of manslaughter.īut I have a theory that recorded history, especially of the early voyages, often lags behind actual history.
In this book he is a prosperous farmer, with a family of his own, who sails out from Norway on a voyage of revenge and, almost by accident, reaches Iceland and later the southern tip of Greenland, before setting off again, in Long Snake, to even stranger places … Now, in Viking’s Sunset, Harald is a mature man and the date is AD 815. In Viking’s Dawn, he was a lad of fifteen, voyaging in the longship Nameless to the Hebrides in The Road to Miklagard, he and the giant Grummoch made the long journey down to Constantinople (now known as Istanbul) to join the Palace Guard there.
This is the third and last book about Harald Sigurdson.
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