Great Moments from the Icelandic Sagas

books:


	• Odinn's Child: The Heroes of the North Live On (Viking Trilogy) Tim Severin Macmillan UK, 2005 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Definitely worth reading

This book was very good. Before even finishing it, I ordered the second two books. The first part is about Thorgils, who is writing the story, living in Greenland/Vinland. This part is by far the most interesting to me. I really enjoyed the way "true" history was written in an interesting way!!! Names and places are all real. I don't want to write too much about the book because I really enjoyed reading it without knowing a thing about it. Definitely recommended!

Odinn's Child Delivers as promised.

Tim Severin is an acute student of History. This knowledge is readily apparent in this first book of the Viking trilogy Odinn's Child. The verse keeps you hooked from line one until you froth at the mouth swearing that book two hasn't already arrived. I own and have read all three. They are perfect. If you love historical fiction. If you have a little heathen in you. Do yourself a favor and order Tim's books.

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Simply Amazing

Wow. I loved this book. I can't wait to read the rest of the trilogy. I won't go into detail like some already have, but I will say I was in awe by page 20. Tim's style is easy going and fun. I felt like a friend was telling me a story over some brew. If you are a fan or a believer in the Old Ways, you won't be sorry with this one.

Great Moments from the Icelandic Sagas

Tim Severin has cobbled together great scenes from Norse saga history to construct a novel which takes his fictionalized protagonist, Thorgils Leifsson (illegitimate and somewhat mysterious son of Leif Eiriksson, according to Erik the Red's Saga), from his earliest days as a babe in Orkney and Iceland to childhood in Greenland and Vinland and then back to the European world in the last days of the Viking era.

From carefully selected and fleshed out scenes from Eyrbyggja Saga, when the mysterious, uncanny and somewhat overbearing Thorgunna comes to live briefly among the Icelanders, to the various North American expeditions described in the two extant Vinland sagas (Eirik the Red's Saga and the Tale of the Greenlanders), Severin manages to insert young Thorgils into a series of big moments in viking history. We follow him back to Iceland, where he insinuates himself into the final legal battle in the escalating feuds of Njal's Saga, and then takes up with the shrewd Icelandic chieftain, Snorri the Priest, and gets to participate in one of Snorri's famous escapades when he cleans out a nest of local vikings by force of arms (recounted in Eyrbyggja Saga). Then our hero, Thorgils, hooks up once more with Kari Solmundarsson from Njal's Saga. Kari is the sole survivor of the attack which burned Njal and his wife, along with their sons, daughter, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren to death in Njal's farmhouse. Kari, who alone escaped the carnage in the black smoke of the flames, swears vengeance on the burners and Thorgils gets to go along and witness some of the famous viking's feats of arms as Kari pursues his single minded objective. Then it's on to the Battle of Clontarf, from the Orkneyinga Saga, as King Sigtrygg Silkybeard, Norse king of Dublin, casts his lot in war against Brian Boru, High King of the Irish in yet another famous viking moment. Along the way, Thorgils manages to cross paths, albeit briefly, with the infamous Grettir the Strong from Grettir's Saga who is, of course, Iceland's most renowned and admired fugitive, the hero cum anti-hero par excellence.

If you know the sagas, there are few surprises here though Severin does a nice job of fleshing out details and patching the disparate episodes together in a convincing narrative skein. Unlike Severin, of course, the saga writers were famously sparing with words and Severin makes up for that with lovingly layered on detail all his own. To make it all hang together Severin must naturally make some choices and so he changes the details here and there to suit his story. Fredyis' famous killings in Vinland, for instance, are altered slightly though Severin provides a very plausible description of how these come about.

He also chooses to accept the reference in Erik the Red's Saga to Thorgils' presence in Iceland "a year before" the Frodriver Marvels, thereby equating the Thorgunna identified as Thorgils' mother, Leif's summer paramour in the Hebrides, with the Thorgunna who came to Iceland a few years later and was supposedly responsible for the hauntings remembered in the Frodriver Marvels described in Eyrbyggja Saga. That the Thorgunna of Frodriver fame is apparently a much older woman than a young man like Leif might have been attracted to, and is not mentioned as having a son, Thorgils, in Eyrbyggja Saga, is disregarded as Severin sticks with this somewhat questionable reference in Erik the Red's Saga. Still, he makes his decision convincing by suggesting this Thorgunna might have been something of a nymphomaniac with the hots for a still green-behind-the-ears Leif Eriksson.

Overall, Severin does a more than creditable job and his writing is solid, though I thought the story started falling apart after Clontarf when our hero finds himself on the loose in Ireland for a number of years. The Irish episodes felt too didactic to me, even compared to the episodes lifted from the sagas. Indeed, in the end the story is little more than a series of these famous saga events strung together through the artifice of an old Norse monk who has written it all down as a personal memoir, while hiding out in a Christian monastery, and afterwards secreting his private manuscript among the official ones in the scriptorium. Well, it's an interesting notion and it provides a credible basis for the story's otherwise remarkable coincidences and very un-saga like voice.

Overall I liked this one though I found it slow going in places, particularly in the final third of the tale, and could often predict what was coming as one great saga scene was telegraphed into the next. If you are not that familiar with the sagas and you like Norse tales, this one is probably a good choice.

Here are a few other relatively recent novels that partake of the saga tradition and its motifs:

Saga: A Novel Of Medieval Iceland
The King of Vinland's Saga (this one's mine)
The Greenlanders
Two Ravens

SWM

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Slow to give birth

A little slow and at time tedious, but none-the-less a reasonably good read. Since I purchased all three books in the trilogy, I am hopefull Kings Man moves a bit faster. I'll let you know.

reviews: page 1, 2

In 1001, the young child, Thorgils Leiffson, son of Leif the Lucky and Thorgunna, arrives on the shores of Greenland to be brought up by a young woman?Gudrid. Thorgils is a rootless character of quicksilver intelligence and adaptability. He has inherited his mother?s ability of second sight, and his mentors teach him the ancient ways and warn him of the invasion of the ?White Christ? into the land of the ?Old Gods.? Guided by a restless quest for adventure and the wanderlust of his favored god, Odinn, Thorgils? fortunes will take him into worlds of unimaginable danger and discovery.

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