Quite a good book, and very brutal at times.
Tells the story of a Norwegian Norse 13 year old who sees his father tortured to death, then taken as a trell.
His first days on the boat as a slave he sees the neighbor girl raped, then they cut out her tung, so she can't tell her kin where she is as she is sold into slavery.
Then another slave, a Dane boy who is sickly and can't row the longship anymore is simply put over the side of the ship and has his head cut off with a dull knife.
And that's just the first 10 pages.
Besides the story about a boy who becomes a warrior, it's a road trip book and a description of the Norse World. Quite a few pages are devoted to making bows, and shipbuilding gets very much detail.
It's written from a first-person perspective that does lead to some strange happenings, the boy's father was a well-traveled man and apparently knew almost everything about the European world from leaders far away from Norway and the finer details of politics on the British Isles. And this boy of 13 apparently remembers everything his father has told him over the years. So he is a bit superhuman in his knowledge.
On the other side, he is very flawed and human when it comes to other things, his fare has gotten the better of him several times.
I'm about 150 pages into the book, which is about 500 pages. And I'm enjoying it a lot. I normally don't read fiction.
The author is involved in Viking living history.
The book is available in Norwegian, Danish, Bulgarian and Dutch so far, With German and Russian Editions coming out this year.
Hopefully, he'll find an English translator for the book too.
