How to unleash your inner berserker
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a Viking berserker? I have. These semi-legendary warriors have been in the corner of my consciousness since I was a child. They were ferocious, fearless, careless of their own lives – and all other warriors respected and feared them. Berserkers did not live very long – nor did they wish to. They were a distillation of all the best Norse warrior virtues – courage, strength, battle-skill and contempt for death. They fought for glory in war in this life and a place in Valhalla in the next, where they would feast and drink, and boast and fight with the greatest heroes the world has ever known, and sit in eternal fame in the mead-hall of their god Odin, the All-Father himself.
We can all picture the image of glory-hungry berserker, charging into battle half-naked, frothing at the mouth, whirling an axe over his head like a lunatic. Someone a bit like Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian (pictured above). But what would it actually be like? I mean, did they lift weights like modern-day bodybuilders to get those muscles? What did they eat? What did they wear? Who trained them? Where did they come from? How did you know if you were a berserker? What if you thought you might be a berserker but, actually, it turned out you weren’t? What if you tried very, very hard to become a berserker and failed? What then? Do you just shrug and look round at your mates and say, “Um, sorry guys.”
I asked myself all these questions and many more and then started researching berserkers in Viking literature and history. I figured out that Norse religion must play a big part in their make-up – they were referred to in one of the sagas as Odin’s men, who could not be hurt by fire or iron. And while I was reading about them I was reminded of my time as a student anthropologist in Indonesia, when I was studying religion in 20th-century Bali. I had see people in religious trances walking on burning coals; and behaving with uncharacteristic strength and vigour. I wondered if something similar was going on with Viking Age berserkers.
They have this phenomenon in Malay culture called running “amok”, in which a man (almost always a man) goes completely crazy and starts attacking his neighbours. The Malays say that this kind of person has been possessed by the spirit of a tiger, and must be killed to prevent them doing more damage. Berserkers, I read, were possessed by the spirit of a bear, or a wild boar and sometimes of a wolf, like this Ulfhednar pictured below, and dressed in their skins for battle.
And after putting all these bits and pieces together, both historical and cultural, I sat down and wrote a novel. It was called The Last Berserker. And it did rather well. So over the next few years, I wrote four more, which became the successful Fire Born series, culminating in the final one Blood of the Bear, which came out last year. The Fire Born series is about two extraordinary characters: a young man called Bjarki Bloodhand and a girl called Tor Hildarsdottir who both desperately want to become berserkers. This five-book Viking series follows their bloody adventures in northern Europe in the time of Charlemagne. I don’t want to give away any spoilers but this is the blurb from the back of The Last Berserker to give you an idea of the story:
Two pagan fighters
771AD, Northern Europe. Bjarki Bloodhand and Tor Hildarsdottir are journeying south into Saxony. Their destination is the Irminsul, the One Tree that links the Nine Worlds of the Middle-Realm. In this most holy place, they hope to learn how to summon their animal spirits so they can enter the ranks of the legendary berserkir: the elite frenzied fighters of the North.
One Christian king
Karolus, newly crowned King of the Franks, has a thorn in his side: the warlike Saxons on his borders who shun the teachings of the Church, blasphemously continuing to worship their pagan gods.
An epic battle for the soul of the North
The West’s greatest warlord vows to stamp out his neighbours’ superstitions and bring the light of the True Faith to the Northmen – at the point of a sword. It will fall to Bjarki, Tor and the men and women of Saxony to resist him in a struggle for the fate of all Europe.
I guess the theme of the Fire Born series is how to unleash your inner berserker. And if you want to know how (and if) Bjarki and Tor managed to do that, you will need to read the books. All five are now available from Amazon, as eBooks, paperbacks and audio books, but I should tell you that The Last Berserker is now at a special price of just £1.99 for the eBook.
In other news . . .
Since the end of the Fire Born, I have been working on a new Mongol series, which kicked off a just few weeks ago with Templar Traitor: the Englishman who fought for Genghis Khan. This novel is based on a fascinating true story about a Templar knight who was discovered riding with the Mongol horde in 1241. And I am working on book two of the series, Templar Assassin, right now. It should be out next summer.
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