The Long Ships, Frans Bengtsson

6 stars

First Sentence: Many restless men rowed north from Skania with Bue and Vagn, and found ill fortune at Jörunfjord; others marched with Styrbjörn to Uppsala and died there with him.

Thoughts: Michael Chabon wants you to know that this book is really good. I wasn’t sure if I could trust his opinion when I first read his introduction because I had recently read half of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay before flinging it away with great disdain.* However, I decided to give his recommendation a chance, and you know what? He was right. The Long Ships is really good.

It’s set in the late 900s – early 1000s in southern Sweden and Denmark (which at the time was all Denmark). As you might have guessed, it’s about Vikings which means it’s totally in my wheelhouse. I love a good Viking story and this is a great Viking story. We begin with the restless men going a-viking in the summer to get a good haul of gold and silver before coming home to a winter of drinking and fathering children on their wives. One of these men is Toste who has many sons, among them Are and Orm. Are is a man’s man which means he’s Toste’s favorite. They go off to Ireland together to indulge in traditional father-son activities like raiding monasteries. Orm, on the other hand, is his mother Asa’s favorite. She keeps him home to watch over the farm and give him a healthy (ha!) case of hypochondria. Orm, unsurprisingly, does not want to stay home.

Eventually his chance to leave arrives in the form of a group of men on a sheep-raid. Orm comes running to defend the flocks and ends up killing one of the men before getting knocked out. The raiders load Orm on their ships and, when he wakes up, informs him that since they’re down a rower and he’s proven himself a good fighter he can join them on their Irish raids. Orm gladly accepts. Then they find a man drowning in the North Sea. They rescue him and he tells his story. He’s a Spanish Jew named Solomon who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. He wants to get revenge on his captors, the Northmen want lots of gold and silver, so they join forces and sail off to Spain.

They land in Spain, get revenge for Solomon, and then get captured themselves. After spending several years as galley-slaves, the Northmen end up working for Al-Mansur**. Eventually they get homesick and, after helping Al-Mansur capture a Christian church, swipe the largest bell and set off for home. They end up on an island off the coast of Ireland where they learn what’s happened in the decade they’ve been away. Namely that Brian Boru runs Ireland now and ran the Vikings out.

So they leave the bell and head back to Denmark where Orm has his second great adventure: winning the hand of the King’s daughter. He does it by means of a magnificent gold necklace he got in Spain and a fight over that necklace at the Yuletide feast. As he recovered from his wounds, he fell in love with Ylva, one of Harald’s daughters, and she with him. Unfortunately Harald dies shortly after and his sons start fighting over the kingdom. Ylva ends up in England where Orm finds and marries her after he fought in the Battle of Maldon. He also became a Christian because it was the 990s and that’s what you did back then. Also, Christ gave him better luck than the other gods. Northmen were nothing if not pragmatic.

The third great adventure is Staying At Home. It’s more thrilling than it sounds because Orm had to win the friendship of his neighbors (only one of whom he had to throw down a well). Soon he became a wealthy landowner and father of four children, twin girls and two boys. With the help of two fast-talking Irish acrobats, he convinced most of his neighbors to be baptized. Then the “crazy magister” arrived. He was a priest who was cursed to commit three great sins. He had already committed two of them (courtesy of some wayward women he met down south) and was off to sell himself into slavery among the unconverted Swedes before he committed the third. The third sin was also sexual in nature with an amuse-bouche of murder and blasphemy.

The fourth great adventure involves Orm’s older brother Are. (Remember Are? It’s a story about Are.) Turns out that while Orm was haring about in Spain and settling down in southern Sweden, Are had been one of the Varangian Guard in Constantinople. He got married and had a son that he was constantly disappointed in. Then the son made some bad decisions involving women he should have relations with, and they ended up running up the Volga with a load of gold and silver. Are had to leave his wealth behind when they were caught. His son was killed and he had his eyes and tongue cut out. Fortunately he knew how to write, so he was able to tell Orm his sad tale and, more importantly, the location of the Bulgar gold before he died. Orm immediately got his best men together to reclaim the gold. And so the adventure begins…

As you can see, this is an action-packed story full of thrills, even the staying-at-home bit in the third section. It will immerse you in the world of tenth-century Scandinavia and all of its joys and hardships. But even more it will introduce you to one of the best collection of characters in all literature: Orm, Ylva, Toke Gray-Gullson (my personal favorite), Father Willibald, the Crazy Magister, the Irish Masters, and Viking celebrity Olaf Summerbird. You may recognize the last from his other name, Olaf the Peacock.

Read this book. Read it now!

*It was an utterly predictable gay tragedy.

**This would be the same Al-Mansur that Almanzo Wilder’s name was derived from.