Nothing to review tonight. It’s a rich moment in my reading life – just enjoyed a new Dean Koontz (reviewed the other day), then I revisited Travis McGee (review yesterday) and now I’m on a new Greg Hurwitz Orphan X novel. Times to savor.

The video above is about the church/royal residence at Avaldsnes, on Karmøy island in Norway. I’ve talked about it often before. My great-grandfather was baptized in the church with the tower (though the tower wasn’t there at the time – it had to be restored in the 1920s). I have ancestors in that graveyard.

The first time I visited, in the 1990s, the relative who was showing Dad and me around told us they’d done some archaeological excavation south of the church, and discovered a secret tunnel. They were looking forward to further discoveries.

It wasn’t until 2017 that government funding made serious excavation possible. What the archaeologists discovered amazed them. An entire royal hall had once existed south of the church (as reconstructed in the video).

What amazes me is that we’re dealing with a forgotten palace here. How do you forget a palace? It’s easy to understand how a palace could fall down after a while. But I find it harder to comprehend it being forgotten entirely. Not only was it lost from the written record, but not so much as a legend survived.

Anyway, I think recreations like this are fun. Avaldsnes (under its old name, Augvaldsness) features heavily in the Erling book I’m writing, King of Rogaland. Also in the previous book, The Elder King, come to think of it. But that’s before the stone buildings existed.