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Immortal Vikings of Legend Return
NORTHLANDERS 20: Sven the Immortal Written by Brian Wood? Illustrated by Davide Gianfelice? Colors by Dan McCaig Cover by Massimo Carnevale? Published by Vertigo Twelve issues, quite a few years, and...
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Swiftly goes the swordplay: Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword
The Broken Sword was first published in 1954, the same year as the original publication of The Fellowship of the Ring, so it’s a pre-Tolkien fantasy, and certainly a pre-fantasy boom fantasy. Lin...
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A Trip to Greenland and a Dream of Vikings: Nevil Shute’s An Old Captivity
I first read this book when I was much too young for it and it made a huge impression on me. I had no idea at the time that the book wasn’t contemporary it was published in 1940, and I would have...
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The Mad Gods’ Last Lament: Lord of Slaughter by M. D. Lachlan
How to start talking about Lord of Slaughter? Well, we’ve been here before, of course: this savage, century-spanning saga of mad gods tormenting mortal men has played out again and again through...
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Seven Norse Myths We Wouldn’t Have Without Snorri
We think of Norse mythology as ancient and anonymous. But in fact, most of the stories we know about Odin, Thor, Loki, and the other gods of Scandinavia were written by the 13th-century Icelandic...
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Seven Norse Myths We Wouldn’t Have Without Snorri: Part II
It was Neil Gaiman who convinced me. Reading American Gods, I was delighted to see the character Mr. Wednesday echoing Snorri Sturluson, the 13th-century Icelandic writer whose biography forms the...
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Seven Norse Myths We Wouldn’t Have Without Snorri: Part III
Where did poetry come from? According to Snorri, it is the gift of Odin—but Snorri’s tale of the honey-mead that turns all drinkers into poets is dismissed by modern critics as “one of his more...
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Snorri the Skald: Song of the Vikings
I was interested when I heard there was a book coming out about Snorri Sturluson. As a roleplaying geek, knowing about Norse mythology is obligatory, but while I knew the name Snorri Sturluson in...
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Seven Norse Myths We Wouldn’t Have Without Snorri: Part IV
Imagine you are a 40-year-old poet who wants to impress a 14-year-old king. You want to get him excited about Viking poetry—which happens to be your specialty—and land yourself the job of King’s...
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Seven Norse Myths We Wouldn’t Have Without Snorri: Part V
Norse myths have been very popular with fantasy and science fiction writers. Why? I think it’s because of Snorri’s special touch—the wry and sarcastic humor that infuse his tales. In 2005, for...
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The Illustration Master Class Produces New Art for Game of Thrones, Neil...
Each year just under 100 students (of all ages and all abilities) and a dozen instructors meet up at Amherst College for a week in June to attend the Illustration Master Class. With 12 hours of active...
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Joe Abercrombie Announces a New Trilogy of Books Coming in 2014
Dark (and darkly humorous) fantasy author Joe Abercrombie, Harper Voyager, and HarperCollins Children’s Books have announced that they will release a new trilogy from the author, aimed at younger...
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British Vikings Announce Ragnarok is Coming on February 22nd
So…do you have any plans for February 22nd? You might want to cancel because apparently, it’ll be Ragnarok outside. Last week a proxy for the Norse god Heimdallr (Heimdall in the Marvel-verse) sounded...
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Happy Ragnarok! Time to Choose a Side
Loki here, wishing you a very fine last morning the world will ever see! The heavy sleepers among you may have missed things, but, as prophesied, when dawn broke on this lovely 22nd of February 2014,...
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Well Met, Worshipers of Odin! Iceland is Building the First New Norse Temple...
For the first time since Viking days, Iceland is building a temple dedicated to the Norse gods! The temple, which will be dedicated to Odin, Frigg, and Thor, will be circular and will overlook...
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Viking Warrior Women: Did ‘Shieldmaidens’ Like Lagertha Really Exist?
As archaeologists, we’ve spent over thirty years studying warrior women from a variety of cultures around the world, and, we have to tell you, shieldmaidens pose a problem. Stories of Viking warrior...
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Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the...
In the early 1800’s, on a Hebridean beach in Scotland, the sea exposed an ancient treasure cache: 93 chessmen carved from walrus ivory. Norse netsuke, each face individual, each full of quirks, the...
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From Fighting to Writing
In this ongoing series, we ask SF/F authors to describe a specialty in their lives that has nothing (or very little) to do with writing. Join us as we discover what draws authors to their various...
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Is The Norseman The Worst Viking Movie Ever Made?
Goals are a good thing. They give us something to strive for, something to try to achieve. Maybe you want to become a millionaire. Or you want to climb a mountain. Or not quite get gored by a bull in...
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Northmen
From Finland to Newfoundland and Jelling to Jerusalem, follow in the wake of the Vikings—a transformative story of a people that begins with paganism and ends in Christendom. In AD 800, the...
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Medieval Matters: The 13th Warrior and Language Barriers
I remember excitedly sitting down in the theater to watch The 13th Warrior when it came out in 1999. As a medievalist I get pumped about most big-budget quasi-medieval films (and, yes, a lot of...
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Five Amazing Women Warriors of the Middle Ages
So I watched Batman v Superman. You don’t need a medievalist wandering through your digital space just to pile on with the many things that went wrong with the film, so instead let me say this: In a...
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Vikings and Bad Life Choices: The Half-Drowned King by Linnea Hartsuyker
The Half-Drowned King, Linnea Hartsuyker’s debut novel from HarperCollins, is neither fantasy nor science fiction. Well, it might edge its way into fantasy, if one counts a single drowning vision as a...
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Beowulf on the Big Screen: Good, Bad, and Even Worse
I don’t want to make you jealous or anything, but at least once a year I get to teach Beowulf. I know, I know. You probably skimmed it once in some first-year literature survey class and you didn’t...
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Pathfinder: White Savior Nonsense, Viking Edition
A few weeks ago I ranked my personal top-five Beowulf films, and among them was Outlander, a semi-obscure 2008 alien-meets-Beowulf film starring Jim Caviezel. It ranked #3 not because I think it’s a...
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Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Alfred the Great, and Viking History
A couple years ago on this site I “reviewed” Assassin’s Creed: Origins, which takes place in Cleopatra’s Egypt, the same world in which I set my first historical fantasy novel: it wasn’t a gameplay...
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