An intriguing premise: On his way to conquer England by way of York in 1066, King Harald Hardrada of Norway secretly buried a great treasure in a ruined Saxon church. Some time later, the church was rebuilt without the treasure being discovered. Only now, in the post-Christian present when the church is falling down again, a priest accidentally finds the secret vault where the treasure lies. Once he informs the authorities, his church becomes the target, first of ordinary thieves, and then of right-wing, racist political extremists. So a Norwegian agent is assigned to infiltrate the conspiracy and sabotage it.

Hardrada’s Hoard could have been a pretty entertaining book. And I enjoyed it enough to finish it. But overall I found it unsatisfactory, for a couple reasons.

First of all, the numerous historical misrepresentations. The authors clearly did some research in preparing this book – their image of the Vikings is better, for instance, than that of the History Channel series – but they make a lot of pretty serious mistakes. They think Vikings used two-handed swords. They tell us with straight faces that King Harald’s queen and two daughters died in battle with him at Stamford Bridge (in fact the queen, a delicate Russian princess, stayed home in Norway with the girls). They tell us there was a spell of cold climate in Scandinavia during the Viking Age (the precise opposite of the truth). They seem to think Harald and his men were heathen (they were Christian). They think the 1950s Kirk Douglas movie popularized the idea of winged helmets for Vikings (the image goes back much further, and there are no winged helmets in that movie). They think Vikings sported Norman hair styles.

My second problem is that the sex scenes are far more explicit than called for.

And last but not least, the final resolution is both improbable and unsatisfactory.

Didn’t work for me.

This sounded like fun. A crossover of two very popular and very different fiction series.

It’s well known that Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was a genuine British intelligence agent during World War II.

It’s probably less well known, but hardly a secret, that J. R. R. Tolkien, creator of The Lord of the Rings, was offered a book deal in Germany previous to World War II, on the condition that he sign a statement to the effect that he had no Jewish blood. He turned the offer down in a letter which is a masterpiece of elegant dismissiveness.

So what if Tolkien had not sent a letter? What if he had actually gone to Berlin on a secret espionage job, assigned to him by the agent Ian Fleming?

That’s the premise of No Dawn for Men. Lots of possibilities here. How would Fleming and Tolkien have gotten along? What would they have said to each other, thought of each other?

Alas, this book does little to illuminate those questions. There is one scene where the two authors talk a bit about their basic values, but it doesn’t really lead anywhere. Fleming and Tolkien follow essentially separate paths through the story, Fleming acting like Bond and Tolkien like… oh, Bilbo Baggins perhaps, though a bit wiser, in a narrative with supernatural elements. He’s even given genuine underground-dwelling dwarves to travel with, which does not add to the credibility of the story.

The two plot threads occupy the page space like oil and water. The whole thing didn’t work very well, in my opinion.

Not awful, but nothing to seek out.