Credit Austin Macauley Publishers
blood-eagle
saga
Journalist John Ingham's debut novel.
Throughout there is one burning question: who will be the victim of the Vikings’ favourite execution – The Blood-Eagle?
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The name of the skald in Blood-Eagle Saga, Snorri, is a tribute to the 13th century Icelandic poet Snorri Sturluson who is the source for much of what we know today about Norse mythology.
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Blood-Eagle Saga TRANSPORTS YOU more than 1,000 years to a world of warfare.
Inspired by the Norse sagas, it opens in midwinter in the snowbound longhouse of a Viking warlord, Sven Ravenfeeder. A stranger, a white-haired skald from Iceland called Snorri, seeks refuge and offers to pay his way by recounting a saga while his hosts swill ale and mead around the fire.
Sven greets Snorri warmly - but drops a noose around his neck and tells him: “If we like your story, you will live...”
So Snorri skalds for his life and weaves word spells to take the drunken warriors to a world of brutality and betrayal, courage and cowardice.
He leads them across the Atlantic where rival Viking gangs clash in battle with another warrior culture, the Native Americans.
At the core of the story is what defines warlords and warriors or, as Snorri puts it in a riddle:
“When is man not a man
“But still a man?
“When is a man a man
“But not a man?”
Throughout there is one other burning question that sends Sven and his men into a frenzy – who will be the victim of the Vikings’ favourite execution – The Blood-Eagle?
