The Long Ships

By -
The Long Ships, by Frans Bengtsson

Folks, this book is fantastic.  Now you know, so you will go out and read it too, right?

This is the life story of Red Orm, who is captured as a teenager and ends up joining a Viking raiding ship as an equal.  So his years of adventure begin, pillaging, fighting, being captured as a slave, working as a bodyguard...Orm travels around the Europe of 1000 AD and even meets up with a few eminent people.  I was happy that he spent quite a bit of time at the court of Harald Bluetooth.  Eventually Orm even travels to Kiev.

The really wonderful thing about this book is that Frans Bengtsson gives an amazing picture of life a thousand years ago, and he does it amazingly convincingly.  As far as I can tell, Bengtsson really understood how Vikings thought.  (Not that I would know, but he sure is good at conveying that impression and I think he knew his stuff.)  The whole time, I felt convinced that people were really like that much of the time.

This is a really violent story, as you might expect.  There is a lot of smiting, and everyone thinks of it as good entertainment, or really funny.  So if you're sensitive about violence you probably shouldn't read this story, but I think it's a good portrait of the world at the time.  There was so much fighting and feasting and drinking, in fact, that I was reminded of a joke some friends had long ago, about the Vikings' favorite song.  It was sung to the Irish Washerwoman tune and simply went

There'll be fighting and feasting and drinking and fighting
And fighting and feasting and drinking and fighting
And fighting and feasting and drinking and fighting
And fighting and feasting and drinking and fighting...

Anyway, this was a really great book.  I highly recommend it.  

Comments

  1. CleoDecember 20, 2013 at 8:54 PM

    This book sounds intriguing. Have you ever read Beorn the Proud? If so, how does this book compare?

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanDecember 20, 2013 at 10:09 PM

    Nope, I do not know that book. Should I read it?

    ReplyDelete
  3. CleoDecember 21, 2013 at 11:19 AM

    It is one of the Bethlehem series books. You can see it here: http://www.bethlehembooks.com/content/beorn-proud

    While I've loved most of the historical fiction from this publisher, Beorn was not my favourite, but I would say, definitely worth a read. Of course, that's my 2 cents; I've heard others have just loved this book.

    Your Long Ships book sounds like it has more mature content than Beorn.

    ReplyDelete
  4. JeanDecember 21, 2013 at 3:23 PM

    Oh, I see. Like Black Fox of Lorne! (I think it was that one.) Maybe someday I'll get to read it. Long Ships is indeed more mature--I'd give it to teens and up. The pillaging includes kidnapping women, for one thing. It's all quite realistic.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more