john ingham
Book BLOOD-EAGLE SAGA
Blood-Eagle Saga stems from John’s lifelong fascination with the Vikings.
They are best known as piratical warriors who terrorised much of Europe for three centuries from the late 8th century, raiding repeatedly along coasts and rivers in their longships.
Equally impressive were their remarkable journeys, with Vikings travelling as far west as Newfoundland and at least as far east as the Caspian Sea. Their epic voyages also ranged from Greenland in the north to the Mediterranean in the south.
Picture of the Author: John Ingham (photo credit Daily Express)
John has visited many Viking sites across Britain, including their settlement at Jarlshof on Shetland and Maeshowe, a Neolithic burial mound on Orkney. It was broken into by a band of 12th century Vikings seeking shelter from a blizzard. They left behind graffiti in the form of runes scratched into the walls by their axes.
He has also travelled to Viking sites across Scandinavia. His favourites are the Oslo Ship Museum and the site of the open air Viking parliament, the Althing, which met beside the continental rift in Iceland. He has also been to Greenland to see the fjords where the Vikings settled.
He has been lucky enough to go out to sea in longships from Roskilde in Denmark and Ålesund in Norway. Those short trips showed him just how tough the Vikings must have been.
As part of a newspaper feature, he had a DNA test and discovered there may be a deeper reason for his interest - he is almost certainly descended from Danish Vikings.
This could explain his love of Viking sagas and early Northern European epic poems such as Beowulf, the Battle of Maldon and Y Gododdin.
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.
At the same time John has long been fascinated by Native Americans and their rich diversity of cultures. On a US trip, he visited the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana, famous for Custer’s Last Stand, and then Wounded Knee in South Dakota where hundreds of Sioux were massacred by the 7th Cavalry.
In Blood-Eagle Saga he brings all these influences together and explores what happens when two proud and formidable warrior cultures - the Vikings and Native Americans - clash.
To enhance the epic feel, he has written it in the style of Beowulf and other early sagas, using his own modern version of Viking verse.
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