The 13th Warrior in the House, with Rogues

You think upon what is to come, and imagine fearsome things that would stop the blood of any man. Do not think ahead, and be cheerful by knowing that no man lives forever.

--Eaters of the Dead, Michael Crichton

The latest episode of the Rogues in the House podcast is out and I'm in the guest seat, talking the 1999 film The 13th Warrior with Matt and Deane.

Listen (and subscribe) here.

I have to say I'm not a huge fan of the film. It has its rousing moments, awesome pre-battle speeches, and a couple epic scenes, but drags in other places. It has a bit of a "talky" introduction, too much telling and not enough showing, though this works better in the 1976 novel on which its based, Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead. The filming was beset with difficulties; Crichton came on for a script rewrite and took over as director, firing John McTiernan—but reportedly was happy with the end result. McTiernan disputes much of this. 

The film was a financial flop but has earned a bit of cult status, especially among fans of sword-and-sorcery. 

I liked the film well enough upon rewatch but remain a bigger fan of the book, which IMO does a better job addressing the theme of the past as a different place.

We have two schools of thought: One is that people are people, and only the times and technology and education, etc. are different. And I do think there is such a thing as a fundamental human nature—that we are social, that we are fundamentally good, curious, etc. 

But a second school says that the past (especially the deep past) was a different country.

As I state at one point in the podcast I think some modern S&S and other writers get this aspect wrong, with characters behaving like a 21st century man or woman would in certain circumstances. And I get it; these are fantasies, so historical verisimilitude is not necessarily the main objective. But if for example you believe that fate is inexorable, that there is a Valhalla awaiting the brave you will behave much differently than Joe Schmoe walking down Broadway in 2024. Death in the Viking Age was not nearly as traumatizing and all-encompassing as it is today. Death in combat was a celebration; young women willingly submitted to ritual execution by an “Angel of Death” to accompany a fallen chieftain on the other side. 

Their general acceptance of death so fully and without remorse, and disdain of fear, explains why the Northmen could go a-Viking, and kill and pillage and take slaves and hold their own lives lightly.

Today we recoil from such behavior but it makes for truly fantastic writing (i.e., displacement from the real).

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the episode.

A few updates and a space Viking

My friend Tom Barber bought a machine that transfers 35mm slides onto his computer, allowing him to convert his artwork to a digital format. “Kind of like going up in the attic on a rainy day and rummaging through old memories,” he described the project. Tom sent me a really cool pic of a Viking in space done when he was first trying to break into the field in the 70s. This is the first time I’ve seen this one. Here’s what he had to say about it:

I don’t remember where I got the idea for the space-Viking, but after I ran away to Arizona, my agent (without telling me) got it on a cover. And for some reason, they decided to reproduce it in black & white. Lost its punch. Ah well…

I will not be going to Karl Edward Wagner Day. It’s for the best of reasons, attending a Parents Weekend at my daughter’s college which happens to fall on the same day. But it doesn’t change the fact that I’m really bummed about this. I mean, it’s KEW fans hanging out in a beer garden. I had hoped to participate on a Kane panel. 

The heavy metal memoir continues apace. I believe I have come to a natural stopping point of the first draft, and feel good about what I’ve written. We’ll see what happens when I read it in the clear light of day. Next will come a heavy revision, making sure it tells a coherent story.

Finally here’s one more Tom sent me, I have seen this one but here’s a full, uncropped version.

Going Viking at DMR Books

No, not looting and plundering Dave Ritzlin's book hoard, but do have a new post up on his blog: A Deep Cut of Adventure: The Saga of Swain the Viking, Vol. 1: Swain’s Vengeance. 

This was a fun read with a lot of viking goodness and other badassery. While writing the review I took a worthwhile detour into the history of Adventure, the magazine in which the Swain stories first appeared back in the 1920s. Some interesting history to that long-running pulp. I recommend checking out the article linked at the bottom.

Skål!

Viking and dark age art, Tom Barber

Some cool images by the great Tom Barber, posted here with his permission.

All painted and sold in the dim past, I am told.

Says Tom, It was Cornwell who introduced me to the shield wall. I painted the warriors long before I encountered him, and the painting became part of the Frank Collection.

The Rhyme of the Viking Path, Robert E. Howard

Art by Tom Barber.

Reading the Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, vol. 2 (1930-1932), and encountered this poem Howard fired off in a letter to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith, circa May 1930.

Wow.

I followed Asgrim Snorri's son

Around the world and half-way back,

And 'scaped the hate of Galdarthrun

Who sunk our ship off Skagerack.

I lent my sword to Hrothgar then,

His ears were ice, his heart was hard;

He fell with half his weapon-men

To our own kin at Mikligard.

And then for many a weary moon

I labored at the galley's oar

Where men grow maddened by the rune

Of row-locks clacking evermore.

But I survived the reeking rack,

The toil, the whips that burned and gashed,

The spiteful Greeks who scarred my back

And trembled even while they lashed.

They sold me on an Eastern block,

In silver coins their price was paid,

They girt me with a chain and lock -- 

I laughed and they were sore afraid.

I toiled among the olive trees

Until a night of hot desire

Brought sharp the breath of outer seas

And filled my veins with curious fire.

Then I arose and broke my chain, 

And laughed to know that I was free,

And battered out my master's brain

And fled and gained the open sea.

Beneath a copper sun a-drift

I fled the ketch and slaver's dhow, 

Until I saw a sail up-lift

And saw and knew the dragon-prow.

Oh, East of sands and moon-lit gulf,

Your blood is thin, your gods are few; 

You could not break the Northern wolf

And now the wolf has turned on you.

Now fires that light the coast of Spain

Fling shadows on the Moorish strand; 

Masters, your slave has come again, 

With torch and axe in his red hand!

You could not break the Northern wolf, And now the wolf has turned on you might top the list of badass things I've ever read. 

Can't wait to hear the porchlight poetry readings at REH Days.

War of the Gods!

I hadn't read War of the Gods for the better part of 20 years, and a recent re-read confirmed it's a pretty darned good book. My somewhat spoiler-ific review is up on the blog of DMR Books, here.

If you want the TL;DR version of the linked article, Poul Anderson is a damned good writer who channeled the Northern Thing in a way very few authors can. 

2021 in review

The end of the year is a time for reflection, and so here I offer up a look back on a swordly-and-sorcerous 2021.

 

2021 in hindsight felt a lot like 2020. The ongoing and seemingly eternal COVID-19 pandemic is probably the biggest culprit. As I noted in a previous post most of my waking productive hours are consumed by my day job, and ever since our company sent us home to work in March 2020 my days feel very similar, chained to a screen in the basement. Which explains the 22 months or so of relative sameness.

 

From a blogging/writing sword-and-sorcery standpoint I had a fairly busy and productive year. I wrote some original posts here on the blog, and a lot more besides between Tales from the Magician’s Skull and the blog of DMR Books. And, I contributed pieces for The Dark Man journal, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Whetstone. 

 

As always, I wish I had done more.

 

Most popular posts

 

From a page-view only perspective, here were my most popular posts on the Silver Key.

 

What sword-and-sorcery needs, 814 views. Weird because this was very much a throwaway/10 minutes of inspiration/no forethought or planning-type post. Anyways, it picked up a lot of steam on various platforms, some praise, some criticism, and much discussion. Which is what sword-and-sorcery needs.

 

The Dying Earth: A case for sword-and-sorcery, 626 views. This one picked up a lot of traction from the folks over at Goodman Games, as that fine outfit was launching a Dying Earth RPG around this time. Also it seems to be somewhat unique, and mildly controversial. Some don’t think Vance’s The Dying Earth is S&S, and so your mileage may vary.

 

Of Heady Topper and the craft brewery revolution, 402 views. People like good beer? I know I do, and plan to drink my share over the next 10 days. Viva New England IPAs and the craft beer scene.

 

Signs of a (modest) S&S revival, 388 views. Another spur of the moment post, I was seeing a lot of optimistic signs of an ongoing S&S resurgence, led by the new rotoscoped animated film The Spine of Night, and this one got a lot of traffic from Facebook and elsewhere. Make no mistake, S&S is still a very niche and somewhat tenuous subgenre, and apparently anathema to major publishers. But, there is SOMETHING going on, and I hope it continues to gain steam.

 

Sometimes you get lucky: An S&S haul, 349 views. I scored a major win this year when a dude from a Facebook S&S group I’m part of who happened to be local to my home state of Massachusetts announced he was moving across the country, and needed to unload his cache of S&S titles to someone who would appreciate them. Needless to say, I’m that guy. People love book porn and there you have it, the recipe for a popular post. Also, I am grateful that I have a proper home for these books and my growing collection, and can add a newly renovated office/man cave to my 2021 accomplishments.

 

What can we take from this? Talking about sword-and-sorcery sells, as does beer (put both together and you’ve got a great evening of entertainment. I know, I’ve done it). More broadly, “meta” posts about sword-and-sorcery/the state of the subgenre/etc. rather than individual authors or titles seem to resonate, and occasionally gain traction on the likes of Reddit and Twitter, which in turn drive the most page views. Sword-and-sorcery literature as a whole drives most of the traffic to this page. Back when I started the Silver Key in 2007 I was getting an overwhelming amount of traffic from roleplaying blogs, as somehow I got picked up by a few sites devoted to AD&D and the Old School Renaissance (OSR) movement. That largely seems to have died off, as has large volumes of blog traffic in general. I still like blogs and blogging and find it an infinitely superior medium to the ephemeral viral this second/gone in 10 seconds reality of social media. I know there are other options, but I don’t really know what a substack is and can’t be bothered to research it. So, I anticipate continuing here as long as the Blogger platform exists and Google doesn’t yank the plug.

 

A few other noteworthy items to cover.

 

Talking sword-and-sorcery

I was guest on three podcasts/panels in 2021, two of which are available (linked on the right of this blog). The other, an episode for Friends of the Merril Collection, I’m told will be published in the first quarter of 2022. I’m always on edge on these programs (thanks social anxiety) and much more comfortable behind the keyboard, but I love listening to podcasts, and I know they are great vehicles for learning and entertainment. And I’m getting more comfortable with them. I’m glad to be asked, and for the opportunity to step out of my comfort zone. Therein lies personal growth.

 

Achievements

Flame and Crimson won the Atlantean award from the Robert E. Howard Foundation. What an honor this was. I still don’t know who nominated my work but I’m eternally grateful. The plaque with Howard’s engraved visage is hanging on the wall of my sword-and-sorcery bar/mancave. F&C continues to generate very positive reviews and ratings on the likes of Goodreads and Amazon.

 

Vikings and S&S

Although it didn’t garner the most page hits I’m happy with this recent post for DMR Books, (Not) Lost in Translation: The influence of Old Norse Saga and myth on Robert E. Howard and sword-and-sorcery. I made this connection in Flame and Crimson but expanded on it over on DMR. I’m proud of this bit of original scholarship; I have not seen the link between S&S and Old Norse Saga and myth made so forthrightly anywhere else.

 

Reading

My reading slipped a bit from 2020, just 40 books and counting, which means I will finish well short of my goal of 52 books. Anything I offer up would be an excuse, so I’ll just say I want to waste less precious evening hours in 2022 when I could be reading instead. My reading was a mix of old and new, and I’ll post the list before the year is out, but I can say that the best new (to me) sword-and-sorcery author I read this year was Schuyler Hernstrom (his excellent The Eye of Sounnu). My review can be found here on the DMR blog.

 

The future

What will 2022 bring? Who can say. In the near future I will be attending a Whetstone Lantern Hour on Jan. 18 where Whetstone editor Jason Ray Carney and some other S&S fans will be gathering to discuss the first couple chapters of Flame and Crimson. Catch me there, or here on the blog, or at an Iron Maiden or Judas Priest concert near you. I’ll be seeing both bands in 2022, pandemic willing.

 

In summary, thanks for reading, and commenting, and following my meagre work here and elsewhere. I hope you all have an amazing Christmas and New Year.

Old Norse Saga part deux: I missed an opportunity to plug Steve Tompkins

With a few more days of separation from my recent DMR Books blog post, I realize I missed an opportunity to plug this wonderful essay by the late, great Steve Tompkins: An Early, Albeit Pagan, Christmas in the Old North.

Steve's essay is worth reading for many reasons, but I think it sums up well a point I wish I had made better: Old Norse literature has not been mined to death, but rather its surface elements have been too frequently skimmed by subsequent authors. If you want to tap into a rich lode, mine the old, original material. But be wary of the wonders and terrors you will find, or the way they might stir some ancient, ancestral memory.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the likes of Tolkien, Howard, Poul Anderson, Moorcock, and Leiber read the Sagas and the stories of the Elder Edda and Prose Edda and drew inspiration directly from them, rather than second and third-hand re-imaginings.

Quoting Steve's piece:

Despite his occasional fallibility with regard to Robert E. Howard, and his near-lifelong wrongheadedness about J. R. R. Tolkien, Michael Moorcock is an extremely perceptive writer, and I don’t believe he’s ever said anything more insightful than this:

To this day I advise people who want to write fantastic fiction for a living to stop reading generic fantasy and to go back to the roots of the genre as deeply as possible, the way anyone might who takes his craft seriously. One avoids becoming a Tolkien clone precisely by returning to the same roots that inspired The Lord of the Rings.

I know thoughtful people who are convinced that “the Northern thing” has been done to death in popular culture. With the best of intentions they urge the fantasy genre, on the page and on the screen, to turn to other climes and other cultures, retiring a stripmined, ransacked iconography wherein the very aurora borealis might now seem as tawdry and insincere as a neon come-on. Christopher Tolkien’s presentation of The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise is not only a fascinating foreshadowing of The History of Middle-earth but a reminder that no matter how many meretricious and mercenary versions of the Ancient North’s mythology have been in our face, for many of us those gods and heroes and dooms, to the extent that the original texts preserve them, are also in our blood.

 

(Not) Lost in Translation: The Influence of Old Norse Saga and Myth on Robert E. Howard and Sword-and-Sorcery

My latest essay has been published on the fine blog of DMR Books. Check it out here.

Norse Saga was hard to access back in the day for obvious reasons (you had to be able to read old Icelandic). But that changed with the first English translations in the late 1700s/early 1800s. By the late 1800s they were pretty widely available, and by the early 20th century many casual readers were encountering them in the likes of the popular Everyman's Library.

Robert E. Howard read them early, and late, in his life, and they influenced his fiction. The Sagas also influenced all of the great names in sword-and-sorcery, including Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Poul Anderson, and others. This essay is my attempt to shed some more light on how that all happened.

Whetstone #4 is available (free sword-and-sorcery!), plus Viking Adventures

Free sword-and-sorcery, you say?

Whetstone, a new amateur digital magazine devoted to short works (2,500 words maximum) of sword-and-sorcery, yesterday published issue no. 4. You can download it here, free of charge.

Managing editor Jason Ray Carney asked me pen a short introduction, and I was happy to do so. While I'm behind on my reading of issues 1-3, I wholeheartedly support this effort, and I've derived hours of enjoyment on the Whetstone Discord group. I was glad to kick off the issue and the TOC looks great.

Time to do some reading.

While I'm on the subject of new(ish) sword-and-sorcery(ish), I recently finished Viking Adventures by DMR Books. While it got off to a bit of a slow start, this volume gained serious steam, and I positively could not put down the closing tale, "Vengeance" by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur. This is easily one of the darkest (near black), most intense tales of revenge I've ever read. I was floored to learn it was published nearly a century ago in 1925. It is as dark as the darkest Grimdark fiction, and while the prose is not modern it's highly readable, and beautiful in places.

Henry Kuttner's "Ragnarok" was a magnificent closing note, a fine poem about the twilight of the Northern gods. There are some other great entries in the volume too.

In short, I recommend Viking Adventures. Then again I'll read about anything with a Viking on the cover.

Sword-and-sorcery news and happenings

Some news, happenings and noteworthy occurrences heard on the sword-and-sorcery trail.

DMR Books to publish Viking Adventures in August. Just take my money. Although I've read a fair bit of Viking historicals and Viking flavored fantasy, I'm not familiar with these tales which makes it all the better. In particular I'm looking forward to reading "The Trader and the Vikings." With works like The Broken Sword and Hrolf Kraki's Saga, Poul Anderson does the Northern Thing as well as any author past or present. And damn, that cover (see right). Speaking of DMR you can now pick up Flame and Crimson at that fine publisher.

If you like Conan the Barbarian (1982), this 2 1/2 hour+ video by The Critical Drinker (how fun is that name?) and guest Andre Einherjar is worth the watch. This is an incredibly in-depth, informed, interesting, and just plain fun and compelling listen, with lots of interesting asides on Milius, Dino DeLaurentiis, the riddle of steel, the train wreck that was Conan the Destroyer, and more. I realize a lot of Howard fans don't like CtB, mainly because Schwarzenegger's Conan is not REH's Conan, but these guys make a compelling case that it's a work of surprising depth, and exceptional artistry and quality. I happen to agree.

As for me, I've got an essay on C.L. Moore that will definitely see the light of day as Swords & Shadows has met its funding goals, ensuring that this special sword-and-sorcery themed issue of Sexy Fantastic magazine will be published. I'm also working on a review of Fred Blosser's The Annotated Guide to Robert E. Howard's Weird Fantasy for The Dark Man journal (spoiler alert: It's good).

The Long Ships, Frans Bengtsson (or, what a year was 1954)

I have this very edition.

I’m not sure what was in the water in 1954, but can we have a little bit more of that, please?

That fabled year saw the publication of none other than:

• The first volume of the greatest work of high fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
• Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword, arguably the finest book-length example of sword-and-sorcery/heroic fantasy
• The complete English language translation of Frans Bengtsson’s The Long Ships, one of the finest examples of historical fiction I have encountered.

Not a bad year (he says, with typical tongue-in-cheek Viking understatement).

To be fair, Bengtsson’s novel was first published in the early 1940s in a two volume set, but in Swedish, the author’s native tongue. Book one (The Long Ships contains four short books) was published in the United States in 1942 under the title Red Orm. But 1954 was the first time the complete book was made available to an English-speaking audience.

The Long Ships is quite simply terrific in almost every way. It’s a highly readable page turner, with adventure packed onto almost every page. It’s studded with good humor and some laugh-out-loud funny moments and exchanges, even in the midst of some pretty grim events. And it is the distillation of the Northern Thing. The Long Ships channels the old Icelandic Sagas into a modern style, while keeping some of the cadence of the language and literary conventions of this old story-style and preserving the spirit of that heroic age. The Sagas were known for their deadpan delivery of heroic deeds, nasty misadventures, and terrible tragedies that would leave us moderns standing slack-jawed in awe, horror, or incomprehensibility, and The Long Ships likewise delivers. For example: “The year ended without the smallest sign having appeared in the sky, and there ensued a period of calm in the border country. Relations with the Smalanders continued to be peaceful, and there were no local incidents worth mentioning, apart from the usual murders at feasts and weddings, and a few men burned in their houses as the result of neighborly disputes.”

Now, my neighbor sometimes lets his leaves sit on his lawn a little too long for my liking, and these sometimes blow onto my greensward. But I don’t burn his house down (with him in it) out of retribution. But I do live in a very different age (for which I thank God—mostly. An occasional murder at a feast would be nice).

A review of Tom Shippey’s Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings

The man, the myth... Tom Shippey

As a Professor Emeritus of Saint Louis University, Tom Shippey understands the current trends shaping historical research, far more than I. For example, I did not know that historians have been re-interpreting the record to paint Vikings as well, less Viking-y. Less savage, more tame. Less raid-y, more farmer-y and trade-y. Many of the corny old myths surrounding Vikings—horned helmets and drinking wine from skulls of their enemies and the like—have rightfully been reframed as romantic sentiment rather than historical reality, but I didn’t realize the extent to which this re-evaluation of the Viking character was working overtime in the halls of academia.

Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings (2018, Reaktion Books) is Shippey’s semi-bombastic rebuttal to the revisionists and whitewashers. It’s not that Vikings weren’t also great traders, or slowly shifted from raiders and slave-takers to land-owners and eventually settlers, but Saga literature and even the archeological record paints a picture of savagery and warrior ethos that can’t be so easily explained away.

“Academics have laboured to create a comfort-zone in which Vikings can be massaged into respectability,” Shippey writes. “But the Vikings and the Viking mindset deserve respect and understanding in their own terms—while no one benefits from staying inside their comfort zone, not even academics. This book accordingly offers a guiding hand into a somewhat, but in the end not-so-very, alien world. Disturbing though it may be.”

Shippey lays out these uncomfortable facts in entertaining style in Laughing Shall I Die. This book takes a close look at the old Norse poems and sagas, and uses them to create a psychological portrait of the Viking mindset. But it also goes a step further: It interprets the findings from archeology and recent excavations to lend these literary interpretations tangible and physical reinforcement. For example, Shippey describes the discovery of two recent Viking Age mass graves in England, one on the grounds of St. John’s College, Oxford, the other on the Dorset Ridgeway. Both were organized mass executions, the latter the single largest context of multiple decapitations from the period. Fearsome stuff.

Halls of Valhalla, Judas Priest

This one is worth a listen (he says, in understated fashion):

Fierce is the gale
From the north sea
We drink and rejoice from the chalice
Holding the course
Through long nights and days
The ice and the hail bear no malice
Tow the line
Keep it fine
Every man seeks this end

Valhalla - you are calling


I had forgotten how good this one was, until I hit upon it during a Youtube search while getting under the bench press today. I was able to hit another rep on my top set at 320 (x8 reps), right as the intro kicks into high gear at around the 40 second mark. See if it won't do the same for you.

Redeemer of Souls (2014) seems relatively forgotten after the more smashing success of Firepower (2018). While I do admit the latter is a better all-around album, Redeemer has a few monster tracks, including "Dragonaut," "Redeemer of Souls," "Sword of Damocles," "Battle Cry" and of course, "Valhalla." It was Priest's first album without the great K.K. Downing, who decided to retire and get into the business of opening a country club, but Richie Faulkner (The Falcon!) reinvigorated the band, and Halford proved he still had a lot left on the fastball. See the 4:28 mark.

I saw Priest play in support of this album in 2014 at the Tsongas Arena in Lowell MA, and got to meet three of the band members back stage. That story is too long and too good to be told here so shall wait for another day.

I have a confirmed fetish for anything Viking and this song definitely gets me ... aroused. I think Poul Anderson would have approved of it. Hell I think Ragnar Lodbrok would have drank mead from the skulls of his enemies with this one as the soundtrack.

COVID-19 diaries and Haggard’s The Wanderer’s Necklace

Yes my work desk is a bar. First world problem.

It has been an interesting last couple weeks living in the shadow of COVID-19. My company gave us the order to start working from home on Friday March 13, and save for a brief run into the office to grab my computer monitor and a couple power cords I’ve complied with that order.

This is a picture of my home office. Not a bad place to work, save for the fact that my basement is unheated. It’s quite nice for three seasons and blessedly cool in the summer, but the winter can be a challenge. It’s a lot warmer down here than the typical New England winter clime but a fair bit colder than most folks set their thermostat. With a heavy flannel shirt and often a winter hat, I’m good. I’ll supplement with a space heater as needed.

The biggest challenge I have faced is the loss of gym access. I have been a regular with the weights for my entire adult life. The timing of COVID-19 couldn’t have been worse. Back in December long before I knew of the coming pandemic I made the commitment to finally buy a home gym—rack, barbell, bench, weights. My plan was to sell off a bunch of old toys on Ebay, which have been sitting in boxed storage for decades but had some value (as it turns out, about $1,600 all said and done). I was about 90% done selling everything off and getting set to place an order when the virus hit.
If you’ve tried ordering anything from Rogue Fitness you’ll understand my pain. They are completely overwhelmed with backlogged orders. I placed my order for gym equipment on Tuesday, March 17 and it hasn’t budged. I’m doing the best I can with bodyweight exercises but it just ain’t the same as heavy iron.

Happily I have been making good progress on an H. Rider Haggard novel, The Wanderer’s Necklace (1914). This one is a classic romance in the old, pre-corrupted sense of the word. Olaf is an eighth-century Northman who is betrayed by his beautiful bride-to-be Iduna the Fair, resulting in bloody conflict. Olaf revolts against the bloodthirsty Pagan gods of the North and flees to Byzantium, where he rises in the ranks of the Byzantine Empress Irene, becoming a general in personal bodyguard. More romance ensues.

Prior to his betrayal Olaf had robbed a tomb at Iduna’s request, taking from the well-preserved corpse a fabled necklace and heavy bronze sword. The necklace is a prize beyond measure but also has a rumored curse that it will bring woe to its wearer. Thus far it has brought considerable ruin to Olaf and his circle of acquaintances. We’ll see in the next 200 pages or so the full extent of its curse.
The opening 100 pages alone have made this novel worth reading. Haggard is a skilled writer and his work describing a polar bear hunt is extraordinarily taut and well-done, fraught with ominous signs of danger and an eventual whirlwind of violence. Olaf is a reasonably well-drawn character and the plot moves apace. As a fan of “The Northern Thing” I was disappointed when the action switched from Jutland to Byzantium, but so far this one is highly recommended.

Zebra sword-and-sorcery...

It’s fascinating to me that Zebra Books retroactively claimed The Wanderer’s Necklace as sword-and-sorcery. Certainly all of the hallmarks are there: The book has some light fantastic elements grounded in a setting that is firmly historical, Olaf is an outsider and a fierce warrior when roused, etc. Plenty of action and reasonable amounts of swordplay. Haggard frames the book with a reincarnation device, as the unnamed “editor” is modern writer recalling a previous life when he once was Olaf and lived a life of adventure. Any fan of S&S will enjoy this one, methinks.

Stay healthy all, and I hope you're enjoying some good
reading of your own.

Haakon: The Golden Ax, a review

No man could defeat him.
No woman could resist him.

Alas, I had high hopes for this one, being a sucker for all things Viking fantasy (is this a subgenre? If not, time to coin one. Broad-and-battleaxe? Skald-and-shieldwall? Leave your suggestion below). It sounded great. From the back cover:

Warrior, leader, lover, conqueror… HAAKON.

OUT OF A VIOLENT AGE, when longships and broadswords rule the earth, comes the mightiest Viking warrior of them all—Haakon the Dark.

I'm in.

Haakon started out with a bang, a desperate ship-to-ship battle in the North sea. This was the best sequence in the book. I don’t know if there was anything quite like these old longboat battles, with crews of desperate Vikings leaping over the rails and murdering each other, with drownings and maimings and mayhem miles from shore.

A spear drove down toward Haakon. His shield rose to meet it. The spearhead pierced the leather-covered wood, nearly skewering Haakon as it flashed by his ear. He swung the shield, and the shaft of the embedded spear lashed through the ranks of the enemy. A man screamed and clapped his hand to his face, where jaw and cheek and one eye were bloody wreckage. One of Haakon’s men closed in and struck with an ax. The man’s screams died as his head lolled on his shoulders. The thud of the falling body was lost in the swelling uproar of clashing weapons and cries of panting men.

Outrageous that these wild combats actually occurred. Not a bad start.

After the initial carnage the battle scenes are not as well-depicted or as plentiful as I’d hoped. I guess I’ve been spoiled by the likes of Bernard Cornwell, who does the desperate, fear and sweat drenched press of shield wall combat better than anyone. Author Eric Neilson’s prose is workmanlike.

Haakon flags terribly in its second half, once Haakon returns home to Norway with his booty and the willing English maid Rosamund under his arm. Like Arnold in Conan the Destroyer, my prevailing thought plowing through interminable dialogue and dickering was, “enough talk!” There’s too much Haakon lounging around his deceased father’s steading, pondering whether to launch a pre-emptive strike on Ivar Egbertsson who has designs on his lands and his lady. Politics and perception stays Haakon’s hand, but he’s forced to take action when Ivar’s men steal his beloved Rosamund.

Haakon could almost be classified as sword-and-sorcery, with its action-oriented central hero, gritty historical setting, and light touches of magic, which possess a bit of the weird unpredictability that makes for good S&S fiction. But the feel isn’t quite right to me. I’d place it in the category of historical fantasy. Haakon the Good was a historical figure and served as king of Norway circa 920-961, but nothing in the first book bears any resemblance to the events of his life.

Spoiler alert: Haakon culminates with the rescue of Haakon’s beloved Rosamund following a pitched final battle and the promise of more adventure in Book 2: The Viking’s Revenge. I may read it yet, sucker as I am this kind of fiction. But overall Haakon: The Golden Ax is sadly well outside the rarefied air occupied by the likes of The Broken Sword, Hrolf Kraki’s Saga, and Eric Brighteyes. 

Perhaps worth a read if you enjoy the Northern Thing.

A Brick-and-Mortar Bookstore Score

Brick and mortar bookstores are as rare as hen’s teeth these days, it seems, and that’s a shame. I enjoy the instantaneous convenience and enormous selection of Amazon and Abebooks, but there’s something about musty old bookstores that online shopping cannot replace. The tactile sensation of picking up books, the joy of utterly unexpected finds, and the atmosphere of a shop devoted to reading and book-selling, are experiences that online delivery mechanisms cannot replicate.

Yesterday I found a wonderful bookstore that reminded me of the unique advantages and pleasures of the real over the virtual: Mansfield’s Books and More in Tilton, New Hampshire. Tilton is a town I had driven through numerous times without a cause to stop, outside of filling a gas tank and the like. But yesterday while playing chauffer on a back-to-school shopping trip with my wife and kids I caught a glimpse of a storefront window in Tilton center that I had previously overlooked. In a brief glance I took in a display of hardcover books in the front window and a few cartons of paperbacks placed outside with a sign indicating a sidewalk sale. My attention piqued, I managed to free myself from the clutches of clothes and shoe shopping with little difficulty and quickly backtracked to Mansfield’s.

Mansfield’s occupies what appears to be a former office building. The main room has a fireplace in one wall with a few overstuffed chairs. A narrow hallway at the back opens up on left and right to six rooms that were presumably individual offices at one time. Most of these smaller rooms were still hung with old, ornate doors with frosted glass panes and other such details, though one clearly served as a small kitchen at one point, complete with a sink. Each room—the main room in the front and the half-dozen at the back—was overflowing, floor to ceiling, with used books, as well as a scattering of other items (the “More” refers to some old movie posters, knickknacks, and used DVDs and CDs).

To read the rest of this post, visit the Black Gate website. 

Six Sought Adventure: A Half-Dozen Swords And Sorcery Short Stories Worth Your Summer Reading Time

I’ve always enjoyed fantasy fiction in the short form. In an age when a typical series stretches seven-plus doorstopper sized volumes without the guarantee of an actual ending, it’s refreshing to take a quick dip into the pool of the fantastic rather than committing to a read akin to a trans-Atlantic journey in the age of sail.

 If you are new to the heroic fantasy/swords and sorcery genres the following six stories are fine stepping stones for further exploration, at least in my opinion. I’ve deliberately chosen stories written by authors not named Howard or Leiber; REH and Fritz are the best these genres have ever produced but there’s already plenty of ink spilled about them. I obviously have nothing but praise for “Worms of the Earth” or “Bazaar of the Bizarre” but I’m sure most of Black Gate's readers have very likely already read these stories, so I present these six instead.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

The Dragon Lord by David Drake, a review

Some twenty years before TheWarlord Chronicles, a grim and gritty take on the Arthurian mythos by historical fiction author Bernard Cornwell, David Drake’s The Dragon Lord (1978) covered the same war-torn ground, employing a similar historical Dark Ages realism in the telling. Imagine Arthur as a power-hungry, petulant warlord with a clubbed foot; Launcelot as a hulking Roman Gaul, arrogant and bullying; and Merlin a half-crazed sorcerer barely in control of his own overestimated powers of magic, and you have the basic flavor of Drake’s debut novel.

Cornwell’s trilogy is a good deal superior to Drake’s effort, as the latter is marred by flaws perhaps forgivable of a first time novelist, including a choppy, uneven narrative and an abrupt, rather unsatisfying ending. But The Dragon Lord has a curious power of its own, perhaps because it manages to successfully straddle both the historical fiction and fantasy genres; it feels something like the Northern-inspired novels of Poul Anderson. If you like that stuff, you’ll probably like The Dragon Lord.

The Children of Odin by Padraic Colum, a review

In his “Introduction to The Elder Edda” (from The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun), J.R.R. Tolkien writes of the broad, multi-general appeal of Old Norse poetry:

It remains true, all the same, that even robbed of their peculiar and excellent form, and their own tongue whose shape and peculiarities are intimately connected with the atmosphere and ideas of the poems themselves, they have a power; moving many even in school or pre-school days in filtered forms of translation and childish adaptation to a desire for more acquaintance.

In other words, you don’t have to be able to read Old Norse in its native tongue to enjoy the myths and legends of Odin and Loki and Thor, of the war of the Giants and Aesir and Vanir, and of Ragnarok and the ending of the world. The characters and stories have a power all their own, regardless of the language in which they’re told or the particular form they take, be it alliterative verse or child-accessible plain narration. Which is why I derive such great pleasure in owning and reading Padraic Colum’s The Children of Odin.

Published in November 1920, The Children of Odin would have been available to Tolkien (1892-1973) and perhaps he too read and enjoyed Colum’s work. One wonders what he would have made of the volume. It certainly meets his criteria of being possessed of a heady northern power, even while remaining accessible to younger readers.