Tag: fantasy

A New Year & New Books

Winter in southern Andalucía can get chilly, but this year, finally, we are having a normal winter with rain, which after so many years of drought is something to celebrate.  After the long Spanish Christmas, I’m back at my desk, working on the third book in my new historical fantasy series for Penmore Press, Doomsong. 

‘Doomsong’ sounds a bit melodramatic, but it was the name of a sword in the ancient Norse Volsung Saga. Sigmund the Volsung pulled a sword named Gram (Anger), Doomsong and Truth-teller from the Barnstock Oak; the only person to do so.
Nowadays, this is classified as fantasy, but it comes from tales told around communal fires in the days of long-ago. Somewhere, there is truth in it. Just as somewhere there is truth in the tales of King Arthur and Excalibur. Perhaps they were meant as a warning against life’s perils, or human frailty. The stories in my new series, however, are grounded on early-medieval events.

NEW RELEASE: The Doomsong Voyage by J.G. Harlond – PENMORE PRESS

I have come to writing historical fantasy rather late in my writing career, but I’ve been reading it for a good while. I’m talking here about books by Guy Gavriel Kay, and G.R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, which rests on a surprising amount of real history.

Kay’s stories are about real people in an imaginary version of Western Europe and include elements of real history. The Lions of Al-Rassan is in the fantasy genre, but it’s one of the best books on Spanish history I have ever read. Kay captures the power politics, racial and religious struggles of Moorish Spain so well through his characters that I lived every word – sensing that this is what it must have been like for real people. This, for me, is where historical fiction and fantasy come together, offering insight into the past. It’s also a liberating and fun way to write a story.

I wrote the first book (of what is to become a series) The Doomsong Sword, after preparing material for a  Norse myths and legends project for a big publisher. They subsequently cancelled the project and I moved on to write more school textbooks. Sometime later, however, I returned to the Volsung Saga and began writing my version of the Sigurd, the Dragonslayer story.

The idea for  The Doomsong Voyage, came after reviewing a non-fiction Viking history, Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price (Basic Books, 2020). Price has a flesh and blood approach to  history, showing how people lived, what they believed, how and where they traded.
I spend time in Sweden visiting family every year so it isn’t hard for me to imagine those dark days, and they were dark because the eruption of a volcano covered the land with ash and blocked out the sun, making life even more difficult than it already was and bringing in Fimbulwinter – a never-ending winter. This is partly what forced early-medieval Scandinavians to find a new home on fertile land elsewhere.
Starting from this, I began the story of a young man named Finn, who sets sail on a Baltic trading knarr to find a pirate named Ice-heart in the Middle Sea. The pirate is a clan leader, who has the knowledge and force of personality required to persuade his people to leave all they know and cross the ocean to find a better life. He is not called Ice-heart without reason, though – to say more would be a spoiler. Finn is accompanied  by a very strange girl with amber eyes, who is always nearby in moments of danger.

Having lived on the Mediterranean coast in Italy and Spain for more than half my life, I was familiar with how the Vikings raided and traded as far as the Levant. This fictional voyage also includes a version of Al-Andalus. My Independent state of Barbalus was the result of a weekend in the hill-top town of Vejer de la Frontera and staying in an old house with a patio like this.

The Doomsong Voyage is under-pinned with documented history and includes an important current issue, the effects of a climate catastrophe. There is good deal of magic in the story, of course, but in those supposedly Dark Ages people believed in magic, shape-shifting, enchantments and curses, and the inexplicable power of the Aesir gods.

The next story is taking me back home to North Devon in the British West Country. I grew up on a Viking battlefield and I used to pass a monument at Bloody Corner in Northam almost ever day. The monument says:

“Stop Stranger Stop,
Near this spot lies buried
King Hubba the Dane,
who was slayed in a bloody retreat,
by King Alfred the Great”

Historians dispute precisely who fought whom and when, and I cannot believe King Alfred himself was involved, but there were at least two battles fought on the narrow stretch of land between Northam and Appledore between the 9th and 11th centuries. Whether Hubba (Ubbe) really did lead 33 dragonships into the estuary, as stated in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, I do not know, but it makes for a good story . . . Work-in-progress.

You can find the Doomsong stories (ebook or paperback) in most online stores via these universal links:

The Doomsong Sword 
The Doomsong Voyage

Some other very good reading: Jean Gill’s Midwinter Dragon series .

‘an epic medieval saga of the last Vikings, set in windswept Orkney’

If you also enjoy literary historical fiction take a look at Kristin Gleeson’s books about early medieval Ireland: In Praise of the Bees

 

What makes a very good book?

 

5 star reviews are all very well but what makes a good book a very good book?

I have read, studied, taught and written about a wide range of fiction in my life. There is, however, only one criterion that makes a good book a very good book in my opinion – that it is memorable.

Memorable because it has a brilliant plot, or an important or fascinating theme, that it has convincing characters you care for and fear for, and/or that it is beautifully written. There are other criteria of course, but whatever they are, and regardless of genre, the ultimate effect is that the book stays with you.

As the years go by one may forget a character’s name or even (shamefully) the author’s name, but the effect of the novel remains; that reading it was a joy. Perhaps, initially, you struggled with the early chapters, then the story touched your heart. Whichever, the experience of reading this particular book and how it affected you has made it quite simply memorable.

So it is with the books I’m recommending for The best factual fantasy books for coming-of-age Viking stories (shepherd.com)

As I was recently visiting family in northern Sweden, and I’m currently working on the next book in The Doomsong Sword series, I created a list of Norse fact and fantasy that has influenced me. Some titles I’m sure you know, but there are also new books here that are well worth the reading for different reasons.  

 

“You write what you read . . .”

I recently heard a comment that an author writes what he or she reads. This is possibly true, but herein lies something of a dilemma for modern fiction authors, because these days, to be successful – it is said – one is supposed to choose a genre and stick to it. To become a ‘popular author’ one is advised to write a whole series in a specific genre.

But if we write what we read, how many of us only read one genre? And even if we do, within any category there are all sorts of sub-genres. Up to now my books can all be classified as historical fiction, but they include various types of crime, international espionage, Vatican intrigue and financial skulduggery, swash-buckling pirate scenes and stately royal scandals, and recently, a World War II murder mystery based on the highly secret British Resistance movement set in a Cornish village. And now, to add to this motley list I have to add ‘fantasy’ because it is based on part of the ancient Norse Volsung Saga and includes a shape-shifting, evil-minded dragon. So as you can see, my own reading and research has ranged pretty far and wide. I only wish it had dawned on me to put it all in a series and call it something like a Game of Thrones.

Setting aside the genre dilemma, I will confess to trying to write some of what I have read. This might explain how and why, after ten years as a full-time fiction author, I came to finish (I’d been writing it on and off for years) The Doomsong Sword, which began life as part of a school series on traditional tales – a project that was cancelled during the financial crisis.

I loved, and still enjoy high fantasy with dragons and arch-mages and shape-shifters. As a child, I gobbled up all manner of classic tales and folklore from Narcissus and Theseus to The Little Fool Ivan and the Knights of the Round Table. Later, as a student I dabbled in the academic side of traditional tales and read the Russian folklore analyst, Vladimir Propp. I devoured Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, and then enjoyed it all over again reading it to my own children. Throughout the years of this type of reading, I suppose I have been most influenced by the blurred text where history meets magic: T.E. White’s Once and Future King, Tolkein’s use of Norse tales, and Beowulf, especially Heaney’s translation.

I can’t say all this consciously inspired me to re-write The Doomsong Sword as a novel, but I was motivated in part by the desire to create a meaningful story out of an old tale for a new generation – my newborn grandson in particular. Davor, the reluctant hero in the story, is an ordinary boy in an extra-ordinary situation: he is lazy and dreams up wild stories to get out of doing his chores. But then he begins to live one, and it is a story more fantastical than he has ever concocted. He not only has to survive alone in the cold Dark Age North with only a wolf-cub for company, but confront all manner of dreadful and frankly outrageous situations, such as finding himself in the home of a three-headed troll and evading the vicious Dwarf, Andvari, under a waterfall. The sword in the title is named ‘Anger, Doomsong and Truth-teller’ in the saga and I had huge fun writing this into my story, although the manuscript went through many, many drafts before it felt right. Weaving bits of Norse mythology into the basic Sigurd, the Dragonslayer legend to create something new – a coming-of-age story that has meaning for a 21st century reader – was not easy. Nevertheless, as soon as I’ve finished the third book in my wily Ludo da Portovenere (17th century) trilogy I’ll be back in the old, cold North to write the ‘Doomsong’ sequel.

This brings me back to being accepted as an author writing in different genres. ‘Genre’ is a convenient concept for online retailers and librarians, but many fiction authors bring elements from a whole range of genres into their new works. The joy of creative writing surely stems from the joy of having been taken into other worlds by other authors; living in past epochs, walking in another person’s shoes in numerous, different types of book. Yes – we probably do write what we read. This is also why children need to read all manner of stories – and daydream. They need to imagine other lives, experience, albeit vicariously, other people’s cultures and world views so that they are better prepared for some of the odd, difficult and perhaps even dangerous things that may befall them in the future. All-powerful dragons and three-headed trolls come in many guises, especially nowadays.

This post first appeared on Tony Riches’ blog on 25th April, 2017, The Writing Desk: http://tonyriches.blogspot.com.es

*Image of Odin and the sword named Gram (Anger), Doomsong and Truth-teller from the Volsung Saga is the woodcut ‘Sigmund’s Swert’ by Johannes Gehrts, 1889.





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