Reading List:
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Poul Anderson: Hrolf Kraki's Saga. (With an introduction by the late lamented Lin
Carter, who did more for the readers of this sort of thing as an editor and discoverer than he ever did as a novelist in his own right -- God bless! We miss you.) Carter persuaded Anderson, a well-known science-fiction writer but also a fantacist,
to write this book during the heydey of that great Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series
movement in the early 1970s. Hrolf Kraki, who lived about a hundred years later than the Walsings (Siegfried, et al.), was the epic hero king of Denmark, but very little survives of his story except references in other sagas -- that is where the habit of bards of comparing the current subject to another famous one comes in very handy. Anyway,
he wrote this novel, and very well researched it as far as possible, and it's a damn good one that captures the spirit of the northlands.
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Michael Crichton: Eaters of the Dead. Yes, the Jurassic Park person. Amazingly
good -- the adventures of Ibn Fadlan, from Bagdad, north of the Baltic. Trolls (Neanderthals) and
other great stuff. A retelling of the Beowulf story. This takes place in the year 922, but is really a timeless story. It's one of his few
books that was never made into a movie, but deserves more than any to be one -- but without
any major Hollywood stars or fancy special effects. [Sept 1999 -- well now it is a movie, "The
13th Warrior" and a very good one...]
- Dorothy Dunnett: King Hereafter. The true story of Macbeth, a
much-maligned personage. Awesome book, but heavy going. Emphasises the Norse element. This Macbeth is actually Thorfinn, Earl of Orkney (a theory which has been
posited, although not generally accepted); it works well enough in this carefully
researched and thought-out book for you to suspend disbelief, although one would
prefer the good old Thane of Cawdor and the witches.
- William Morris translation of the Volsunga Saga: The Icelandic version. Terse and crisp -- the whole story in less than 150 pages. You can't do better than this, unless you want embellishment.
- Parke Godwin: The Tower of Beowulf: This ubiquitous author (he has done King
Arthur, St. Patrick, and Robin Hood among others) wrote this excellent version of the Beowulf story, set
in its actual location in Jutland (Denmark), which is why it is on this web page, not the Saxon one. The
epic poem, while exciting enough in the original, lacks any characterization such as we would insist on in any modern story. Godwin provides it by devising a Freudian background for Beowulf (tyrannical father
who had considered him a coward, hence the hero compensates by being maniacally heroic), a world-view conflict between the early Christian attitude to fate and the traditional Teutonic one, and most interesting, a motive for the ogres Grendel and his mother Sigyn (unnamed and unexplained in the poem), making her
the daughter of the god Loki and a giantess, and Grendel the son of Shild, who founded the Danish dynasty. Grendel considers himself the rightful owner of Heorot and Hrothgar a usurper. Hmm. Very well
done. (The second part of the book, as with the epic, concerns the aging Beowulf's final fight with a
dragon. This is good too and should be compared with the similar story of Siegfried and the Rheingold.)
E-mail: grobius@sprynet.com
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