Going Vikingr

Or how I wandered from the Seven Realms into the Northlands.

I grew up reading fantasy. It always seemed to me that most stories could be improved by adding a little magic (or a lot.) So it’s no surprise that, as an author, I’ve gravitated to stories with elements of magic.

For ten years over two series and eight books, I was immersed in the Seven Realms, a classic high fantasy world. Long ago, far away, castles and swordplay, politics, dragons and pirates. I felt at home in this Tolkienesque, Game of Thrones sort of setting. Most of my ancestors had come from the British Isles, the model for Middle Earth and Westeros.

Then I had my DNA tested. There, amid the expected England, Ireland, and Scotland, was Scandinavia.

Scandinavia? What did Scandinavia have to do with me? Hint: no one would mistake me for a shield-maiden. I’d heard that the Vikings were bands of pirates who traveled the world, pillaging, plundering, and slaughtering, then returning with their loot to their homes in the north. Could it be that I descend from pillagers and plunderers?

Cool!

So I set out to learn more about them. It didn’t take long to find out that there are no contemporaneous Viking histories written by the Vikings themselves. Theirs was an oral tradition in the form of sagas, epic poetry written down by skalds in Iceland long after their conversion to Christianity. Otherwise we have accounts from those who were being pillaged, plundered, and slaughtered. One might expect them to be somewhat biased.

Now I know that it’s not surprising that my British forebears carried Norse blood. The Vikings came as raiders, traders, and invaders who eventually controlled large parts of the British Isles, settling permanently in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Traces of the Vikings are still there, from rune-covered pillars to the remains of Viking towns at Dublin, Ireland and York, England. In reading the sagas and texts handed down from the Viking Age, I began to realize just how much Tolkien and George R.R. Martin drew on that literature.

A Viking longship, the Draken Harald Hårfagr, is moored at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. Built in modern-day Denmark, the ship retraced the path of Viking explorer, Leif Eriksson from Norway all the way to North America.

I tried to imagine crossing the stormy Atlantic in such a vessel. What kind of courage or desperation would drive people to take such risks? The key, I believe, is Wyrd, the Viking concept of fate—that a person’s future is determined at birth.  There was no point in petitioning the gods to intervene, because not even the gods could change it (see Ragnarok.) However, magic could be used to predict the future, and shape it to a degree.

The Vikings could not change their fate, but they could choose how to meet it. They were survivors. Their homelands were dealt a hard hand—an unforgiving climate and limited arable land. So they built ships that opened the world to them.

That history appealed to me. All of my stories are about survivors—thieves, pirates, teen warriors, street musicians, vagabonds, hedge witches, and, yes, princesses—who find a way to succeed in the face of impossible challenges—magical and otherwise. History is never made by those who hunker down and suffer. I’m hard on my characters—I often say that you don’t want to be a character in one of my books. But I hope you’ll be willing to step into their world and share their journey for a little while.