On a personal note, as a former literature student, I especially appreciated being able to experience The Battle of Maldon first hand. Born really did his homework and presented the lives of the principle characters very accurately and gave the reader a window into how things may really have been in those times. Characters and events from the time period appear here and there and and an extra richness to events. But what really made this book so interesting was all of the history that the author has woven in with his fictional storyline. The storyline itself is very entertaining and moves along a good pace while still giving the reader time to settle in between exciting portions and really get to know the characters. I will read them as i need to see what happens when our hero faces his former lover, and i have not read any story about the Vikings landing in America. So far, there are at least 2 more books in the Norseman Chronicles. It was refreshing to read a Viking novel that was not about Danes - before this book I thought all Vikings were Danes. Would I recommend this book? Yes, I would. The characters seemed well described to me and, having read all the Bernard Cornwell Viking books, it is good to find that books between good authors are consistant. With red hair, a Gaelic given name (Euan) and a Viking sirname (Thomson) I have to identify with a people who could have been my ancesters. Because of my absence from the book at times I found the detail of boat building a bit long, although interesting. I liked the period-accurate settings of the story and characters.

A little hesitant because commitments meant that it took about 3 weeks to read - a long time for a book of this size and I had to think about where I was at each time I opened it. He fights his way to wealth and in an epic battle, defending his king against overwhelming odds, he finds that it was not destiny, but betrayal that sent him into banishment thirteen years earlier. However, destiny strikes, forcing him to flee from Greenland to Ireland to England to Norway without her. Halldorr believes his life is his to command when Freydis, the fierce, fire-haired enchantress, at last desires to be his wife.

He became bodyguard to a king, brutally fighting in monumental battles - Maldon and Swoldr - to be handed down for centuries in skaldic verse.īecause of a blood-oath made years before the murder of his father, Halldorr was adopted by an exile, Greenland's discoverer, Erik the Red.

Instead, he found himself exiled, resigned to a life of raiding, killing for plunder and survival. The Norseman is the first volume of the vividly-detailed historical chronicles of Halldorr, an orphan whose entire desire was to lay beside both a warm hearth and a plump wife, but fate had another thread to spin.

Norseman's Oath by Jason Born