Spotlight on . . . The Loki Sword
This week I am turning a notional spotlight on the third book in my Fire Born Viking series – The Loki Sword. The first two Fire Born books were about the war between the pagan Saxons and the Christian Franks, under the rule of a man who would later become Charlemagne. But since I had wanted this to be a Viking series, I felt I should write a more traditional Viking story for Book 3. The Loki Sword is it.
I came up with the idea of a quest for “magical” sword after reading an essay by Christopher Tolkien (son of the great JRR, and an academic star in his own right) on the Hervarar Saga*, which covers the legendary 4th-century battle between the Goth and the Huns somewhere on the great Hungarian plain. Indeed, a good deal of my plot is lifted from that saga. There is a “magic” sword owned by a long-dead great king, a magnificent last stand, and all sorts of other Dark Age heroics that appealed to me.
I should explain briefly now why I use quotes around the word “magic”. I studied the subject as an anthropologist in Bali the 1980s and still find it fascinating but I don’t remotely believe it to be effective or “true” – there I go with the quotes again. In my novels the characters often believe in magic, and other supernatural things, and they are very real for them – for example, they believe that a berserker is someone possessed by the wild spirit of a bear, which gives him/her magical, supernatural strength.
So I present these things as “real” in the books, while always having a rational 21st-century explanation up my sleeve. In my novel, the Loki Sword, once owned by King Angantyr of the Goths, is cursed, and anyone who wields it is victorious but also doomed to die at the moment of his triumph. And while I don’t want to give spoilers to those of you who haven’t yet read the book, the curse comes true but also . . . um, doesn’t. Just read the whole book, OK? Likewise, the “supernatural” strength of the berserker is just massive quantities of adrenaline triggered by deep religious belief. I was thinking when I wrote about my berserkers of stories of modern people who take the terrifying illegal drug Angel Dust and who display impossible strength – punching right through car windscreens and so on in their drug-fuelled madness.
So, anyway, my novel is a traditional quest story. My heroes Bjarki and Tor are induced to go off to Central Europe in search of a magical sword that was wielded by the Norse god Loki. There are set-backs and triumphs, battles and betrayals, a bit of romance and plenty of twists and turns in the plot, and a rather unexpected ending. I hope you will check the story out and see for yourself.
At the moment, The Loki Sword (Fire Born 3) is just £3.99 on Amazon for the eBook (also available in the audio version and as a paperback).
*Christopher Tolkein’s essay an be found in the University College London Saga-Book of the Viking Society (Vol. XIV, 1953-57)