There was a time when I made it a point of honor to finish every book of fiction I started. As I’ve aged I’ve grown more surly and impatient, and nowadays if a book bores or offends me, I toss it away. Life’s too short. I’ve got stuff I need to read.

So I’m going to do a new thing here. I’m going to post a biased review of a book to which I may not have given a fair chance.

I’d had Tim Severin’s Viking trilogy recommended to me, and I do try to keep up, to some degree, with my competition in the Viking novels field. I looked forward to the book. Severin is the author of The Brendan Voyage, an account of his own Atlantic voyage in a leather coracle, in emulation of St. Brendan, a book I read, enjoyed, and profited from.

But I got up to page 74 of Viking: Odinn’s Child and just couldn’t take it any further. There were two reasons, stylistic and ideological. I’ll start with the stylistic, so that anyone who doesn’t care about my religious views can just read this part and drop the review, as I dropped the book.

I think Odinn’s Child has sold well, so maybe I’m the only one who was irritated by the style. Although colorful and exciting events are described, I found Severin’s storytelling tedious. It was as if he were copying the bad old translations of the sagas, using a lot of Latin words and completely missing the brisk, Germanic, saga style. I kept stopping as I read and saying, “This doesn’t sound like a story told by a Viking. It sounds like a book written by a modern person.” (To be fair, Severin explains this. In the story frame, we are told that the manuscript was written in Latin, in a monastery.)

But it didn’t feel right to me.

I’m probably the only one who cares about that. Most people can’t tell the difference. But I think they feel the difference, when you actually try to write like a Norseman.

And can’t somebody make a joke now and then? Why are Viking books so solemn? These were not solemn people. Only me and Frans Gunnar Bengtsson seem to know this.

Which leads to another problem—the narrator’s attitudes were too modern. Which leads to my ideological objections.

To judge by Severin’s narrative, the heathens of the Viking Age were hard-headed pragmatists with an almost scientific, skeptical world-view, pretty much like modern Europeans. Christians, on the other hand, were timid souls, frightened of the dark, burdened by crippling superstitions.

In my view, that is not only wrong, but almost precisely the opposite of the truth.

It was heathens who were afraid of the dark. Heathens who had to watch out for a thousand inconsistent superstitions and taboos, and who had to placate the gods—and the spirits, and the trolls and the elves—whenever they thought they might have accidentally offended them.

Christians, to the contrary, though certainly superstitious, had the big issues covered. They believed in a universe ruled by love (the heathens had no such assurance). Their taboos were pretty well codified and generally understood.

I read somewhere that one of the old Roman historians (I don’t think it was Tacitus, though you’d think he’d be the one) reported of one Germanic tribe, “Their greatest fear is that the sky will fall.”

Modern people tend to have a romanticized idea of what it’s really like to be a heathen. Talk to a Christian from Africa, and ask him whether animism or Christianity is a happier way to live.

The thing that irritated me most was Severin’s treatment of the historical character, Gudrid the Far-Traveled, one of the great women of the Norse world. She traveled to America and to Rome, and ended her days as the respected abbess of a nunnery in Iceland. The narrator, who is Gudrid’s foster-son, adores her, but goes on and on about how she wasted her gifts (gifts in witchcraft) by throwing her life away to Christ.

That irked me. I felt it was condescending, not only to Christians, but to Gudrid herself. It was at that point that I gave up on the book.

I know, I write with a religious agenda too. But Father Aillil never despises the heathens, as Thorgils, the hero here, despises Christians.

In the part I read, several characters and incidents occur which relate closely to events in my novel, West Oversea. I can’t take issue with Severin’s research. He may, in fact, have done a better job than I did. I’m pretty sure he spent more time in Iceland.

But he doesn’t know everything. He thinks ships generally sailed up Eriksfjord in Greenland, right to Leif Eriksson’s home. My reading indicates that captains would avoid that, because the prevailing winds would force them to tack when leaving, and there isn’t much room in Eriksfjord to tack (also there’s a fair amount of floating ice).

I’m sure I made mistakes too.

I know I made one buying this book.