Odinn's Child: The Heroes of the North Live On (Viking Trilogy) (No. 1) [Unabridged] [Paperback]

Tim Severin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2005 | Series: Viking Trilogy (Book 1)

In 1001, the young child, Thorgils Leiffson, son of Leif the Lucky and Thorgunna, arrives on the shores of Greenland to be brought up by a young woman—Gudrid. Thorgils is a rootless character of quicksilver intelligence and adaptability. He has inherited his mother’s ability of second sight, and his mentors teach him the ancient ways and warn him of the invasion of the “White Christ” into the land of the “Old Gods.” Guided by a restless quest for adventure and the wanderlust of his favored god, Odinn, Thorgils’ fortunes will take him into worlds of unimaginable danger and discovery.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Severin offers the first installment in a projected trilogy. Thorgils, son of Norse chieftain Leif the Lucky and fey Celtic noblewoman Thorgunna, is shipped to Greenland and brought up by a series of tutors who school him in the traditional customs and religion of the Vikings. Gifted with the second sight he inherited from his mother, Thorgils struggles to fulfill his destiny in a world torn asunder by feuding factions and the introduction of Christianity into a pagan culture. Stretching back and forth across the Old World and new frontiers, this fantastical historical adventure serves up a satisfying blend of action, intrigue, and suspense. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

“this fantastical historical adventure serves up a satisfying blend of action, intrigue, and suspense.” -- Booklist

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Macmillan UK; 1ST edition (September 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330426737
• ISBN-13: 978-0330426732
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #60,954 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Moments from the Icelandic Sagas, July 16, 2007

By 

Stuart W. Mirsky "swm" (New York, USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Odinn's Child: The Heroes of the North Live On (Viking Trilogy) (No. 1) (Paperback)

Tim Severin has cobbled together great scenes from Norse saga history to construct a novel which takes his fictionalized protagonist, Thorgils Leifsson (illegitimate and somewhat mysterious son of Leif Eiriksson, according to Erik the Red's Saga), from his earliest days as a babe in Orkney and Iceland to childhood in Greenland and Vinland and then back to the European world in the last days of the Viking era.

From carefully selected and fleshed out scenes from Eyrbyggja Saga, when the mysterious, uncanny and somewhat overbearing Thorgunna comes to live briefly among the Icelanders, to the various North American expeditions described in the two extant Vinland sagas (Eirik the Red's Saga and the Tale of the Greenlanders), Severin manages to insert young Thorgils into a series of big moments in viking history. We follow him back to Iceland, where he insinuates himself into the final legal battle in the escalating feuds of Njal's Saga, and then takes up with the shrewd Icelandic chieftain, Snorri the Priest, and gets to participate in one of Snorri's famous escapades when he cleans out a nest of local vikings by force of arms (recounted in Eyrbyggja Saga). Then our hero, Thorgils, hooks up once more with Kari Solmundarsson from Njal's Saga. Kari is the sole survivor of the attack which burned Njal and his wife, along with their sons, daughter, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren to death in Njal's farmhouse. Kari, who alone escaped the carnage in the black smoke of the flames, swears vengeance on the burners and Thorgils gets to go along and witness some of the famous viking's feats of arms as Kari pursues his single minded objective. Then it's on to the Battle of Clontarf, from the Orkneyinga Saga, as King Sigtrygg Silkybeard, Norse king of Dublin, casts his lot in war against Brian Boru, High King of the Irish in yet another famous viking moment. Along the way, Thorgils manages to cross paths, albeit briefly, with the infamous Grettir the Strong from Grettir's Saga who is, of course, Iceland's most renowned and admired fugitive, the hero cum anti-hero par excellence.

If you know the sagas, there are few surprises here though Severin does a nice job of fleshing out details and patching the disparate episodes together in a convincing narrative skein. Unlike Severin, of course, the saga writers were famously sparing with words and Severin makes up for that with lovingly layered on detail all his own. To make it all hang together Severin must naturally make some choices and so he changes the details here and there to suit his story. Fredyis' famous killings in Vinland, for instance, are altered slightly though Severin provides a very plausible description of how these come about.

He also chooses to accept the reference in Erik the Red's Saga to Thorgils' presence in Iceland "a year before" the Frodriver Marvels, thereby equating the Thorgunna identified as Thorgils' mother, Leif's summer paramour in the Hebrides, with the Thorgunna who came to Iceland a few years later and was supposedly responsible for the hauntings remembered in the Frodriver Marvels described in Eyrbyggja Saga. That the Thorgunna of Frodriver fame is apparently a much older woman than a young man like Leif might have been attracted to, and is not mentioned as having a son, Thorgils, in Eyrbyggja Saga, is disregarded as Severin sticks with this somewhat questionable reference in Erik the Red's Saga. Still, he makes his decision convincing by suggesting this Thorgunna might have been something of a nymphomaniac with the hots for a still green-behind-the-ears Leif Eriksson.

Overall, Severin does a more than creditable job and his writing is solid, though I thought the story started falling apart after Clontarf when our hero finds himself on the loose in Ireland for a number of years. The Irish episodes felt too didactic to me, even compared to the episodes lifted from the sagas. Indeed, in the end the story is little more than a series of these famous saga events strung together through the artifice of an old Norse monk who has written it all down as a personal memoir, while hiding out in a Christian monastery, and afterwards secreting his private manuscript among the official ones in the scriptorium. Well, it's an interesting notion and it provides a credible basis for the story's otherwise remarkable coincidences and very un-saga like voice.

Overall I liked this one though I found it slow going in places, particularly in the final third of the tale, and could often predict what was coming as one great saga scene was telegraphed into the next. If you are not that familiar with the sagas and you like Norse tales, this one is probably a good choice.

Here are a few other relatively recent novels that partake of the saga tradition and its motifs:

Saga: A Novel Of Medieval Iceland

The Greenlanders

Two Ravens

SWM

author of The King of Vinland's Saga

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A must read for Heathens, August 30, 2005

By 

Frodhi Harson (Midgard) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Odinn's Child: The Heroes of the North Live On (Viking Trilogy) (No. 1) (Paperback)

A strong first fiction effort from an established history writer.

Tim Severin's historical accuracy is excellent in this novel which follows the exploits of the historical Thorgils, an illegitimate son of Erik the Red. His travels take him from Greenland and Vinland to Iceland and eventually Ireland, tracing his childhood and later teen years through the world depicted in the Icelandic Sagas.

Thorgils, devoted to Odinn, holds to his Heathen faith though a period which finds the world around him rapidly becoming Christianized. As a modern Heathen there is much in this tale which resonates deeply with me and leaves me wondering if the author himself might not be Heathen.

Strongly plotted and vividly described, I found Severin's style in this volume to be more suited to jouranlism than fiction, which is why I gave it four starts rather than five. Happily the second volume of this planned trilogy does not warrant the same criticism. Though many of the secondary characters are somewhat flat, Thorgils himself is complex and well developed.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing and also accurate, July 26, 2005

By 

Frimann Stefansson "mannistef" (Akureyri, Iceland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Odinn's Child: The Heroes of the North Live On (Viking Trilogy) (No. 1) (Paperback)

This surely was a great read and was even better since I am an Icelander. He manages to make a very good historical novel by weaving many events and characters from the Sagas together.

I happen to know quite a bit about the history of the time and Severin has obviously done his research very well. I think around 90% of characters and events are supposed to have actually happened according to the Icelandic Sagas. Of course it is not clear how much of the Sagas is true but probably most of them.

I highly reccommend this book and can't wait for the rest!