Vikings afresh …

… Found in Translation: Conservative Themes in ‘Viking Legacy’The American Spectator. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I snagged my imagination on the Viking Age as a boy, and started reading everything on the subject I could find. Even then I was looking for a theme for a novel I had it in mind to write someday. In time I found it, in Heimskringla, the sagas of the kings of Norway (the most readable history book written in the Middle Ages, by the way). I grew intrigued by a secondary figure in that narrative, a powerful chieftain in southwestern Norway — Erling Skjalgsson of Sola (near present-day Stavanger), who flourished around 1000 AD. Erling appeals right off to the modern reader because we’re told he carried on a sort of self-help program for his slaves. They were all able to earn their freedom in three years at the most, the book says.