His journey deep into Scandinavia will furnish him with plenty of material for his writings, but will also require him to use the sword as freely as the pen – and will challenge everything he thought possible.Ĭrichton’s story is based on one thought-provoking ‘what if’, which I won’t give away here because it’ll spoil your own dawning sense of realisation (unless, of course, you read the afterword first, because that spells it out). The hero chooses twelve warriors to accompany him to fight this threat from the ‘black mist’, one of whom is the frankly unwilling Ibn Fadlan. This young man tells the story of King Rothgar, whose hall at Hurot is cursed with a great evil, and begs for aid from Buliwyf. He is one of two claimants to the throne of the local chieftain, who is mortally ill, but his struggle for the succession ends abruptly with the arrival of a messenger from the north. He and his company travel steadily northwards, through the lands of the Oghuz Turks, and on to the banks of the Volga, where Crichton departs from his source and Ibn Fadlan encounters a Norse warrior named Buliwyf. The young Ibn Fadlan is sent from Baghdad on a diplomatic mission to the King of the Saqaliba (literally ‘Slavs’, referring to a kingdom on the Volga). Adopting Ibn Fadlan’s own detached prose style, Crichton adds new episodes to the traveller’s tale – blurring the lines where the original text ends and his own fantasy begins, and setting out a tantalising tale of heroes striving against a dark, mist-borne evil which threatens a king’s mighty hall. Indeed, the first three chapters are largely copied from the absolutely authentic Ibn Fadlan text edited by Richard Frye. I broke my usual rule and read the afterword first, and this helped enormously. Crichton frames his tale as a new edition of the writings of Ibn Fadlan, the 10th-century Arab traveller who really did travel among the Scandinavian peoples of the Rus’. This is one case where it’s important to know what you’re getting into, because you can appreciate what Crichton’s doing much more easily if you know his intentions. They’ve responded with low ratings and that’s a shame, because this novel is a daring blend of fact and fiction: a pseudo-intellectual sleight of hand which playfully offers a historical ‘source’ for the greatest of Western medieval legends: Beowulf. A quick glance at online reviews shows that some readers have been (legitimately) baffled to find themselves, instead, reading a pastiche of an academic text edition, complete with introduction, footnotes and bibliography. Both title and cover suggest this is a gruesome horror story. We all know not to judge books by their covers (even if we still do it), and this is a very good example of why it can be dangerous to do so.

Michael crichton vikings