This is not a book review. It’s a rant about a book; a book you’ll never read because it’s written in Norwegian and is not (as far as I know) available in this country. (If you’re reading this in Europe—never mind. You don’t want to read it either.)

Several copies of this little paperback were sent, for some reason yet unclear, to our Viking group, and distributed, in spite of the fact that only a few of us could read them. I won’t give the title or author, because I don’t want to torpedo somebody who was kind enough to send free books. And I’m about to say some unkind things.

The book is in fact a Romance, so I suppose I ought to judge it by a lower standard (how’s that for condescension?). I didn’t recognize it as a Romance at first because the cover features a (rather poor) picture of a woman in Viking clothes swinging a sword, rather than some guy who looks like Fabio with no shirt on.

The story concerns a young Viking woman who exasperates her family because her great love in life is swordplay, which she practices with her best friend, a male slave. Eventually she agrees to marry a man she’s never met, in return for her slave friend’s freedom. Once married, she finds her new husband (here’s a surprise) insensitive and boorish. She falls in love with his younger brother, but of course they cannot be together. Eventually everything is resolved (to the author’s satisfaction, at least) in a bloody and rather unconvincing climax.

At first I was impressed by the author’s research. This impression quickly faded. She had clearly done only a quick-and-dirty job of studying Viking life. I was relieved that she didn’t try to make me believe (as some people sometimes do) that Viking women routinely trained as warriors and served in armies on something like an equal footing. In this book, it’s clear that the heroine is an aberration, and her family isn’t very happy about her hobby.

But the author seems not to know that Viking slaves were required to keep their hair short. She doesn’t know that children were almost never named after living relatives. She thinks Vikings fought samurai-style, shieldless and two-handed (this doesn’t work, as a few minutes playing with a replica would have shown her. The grips aren’t made that way). And she thinks they practiced with sharp blades (I doubt it—it’s a dangerous use for an expensive possession).

But what burned me most was how she “resolved” the story. The girl finally is united with the man she really loves—there’s a sex scene, of course—but then she doesn’t do what any sane woman would do. She doesn’t marry the guy. No, she goes off to set up a household of her own, to exercise her freedom. Because personal autonomy is more important than love and children and all that trivial stuff.

Maybe that’s how they do Romances in Europe nowadays. It would be consistent with their cultural ethic. Personal satisfaction is derived from casual sex and the pursuit of a career. Certainly not from having children.

Once upon a time, life was about families and children, to the extent that families arranged marriages in such a way as to maximize the production of children (who were the standing army and welfare system of the extended family).

Eventually, the True Love model won out. It was no longer about the wider family, but about the individuals’ happiness. But children were still seen as a part of that happiness.

Today, we’re seeing True Love being replaced by sex without involvement, and children are seen as only a nuisance. And this is why Europe is dying, and will shortly be replaced by a culture that still adheres to the original model. A model that works a whole lot better, in pragmatic terms.