Work continues apace on The Baldur Game. I think I’m nearing the end of my initial drafts. Once I’ve finished this current red-pen revision, I plan to give it one more personal read-through, and then send it to some readers for comments. After that, I expect to do one more revision, and then move into the publication process. So I think that light up ahead may be the end of the tunnel, not just phosphors in my eye.
The tough part about nailing a large construction together is that you find out where you measured wrong. An intriguing little irregularity has appeared. I think I can describe it in vague enough terms not to spoil it for you.
If you read King of Rogaland (and of course you have. You haven’t left a review yet, though, have you? Not that I want to nag…), you may recall the wedding of Ragnhild Erlingsdatter (my hero’s daughter) to Thorberg Arnesson, a son of an important Norwegian family.
Okay, so I set that up. Thorberg will play a major role in The Baldur Game. So far, so good.
But in the saga accounts of the events I’m describing now, there’s another character named Vigleik Arnesson. He doesn’t actually appear on stage in my narrative, but an action he performs has important consequences. And I’ve been trying to figure out who this Vigleik Arnesson was. Snorri Sturlusson never tells us. One would imagine he was a brother to Thorberg, but I’ve seen several lists of those brothers, and Vigleik never appears.
I searched extensively online, not only in English-language but in Norwegian search engines. I found one notation on a Norwegian site that said Vigleik Arnesson was Erling’s nephew. But I couldn’t find out how that connection worked. Who were his parents?
Here’s where my scholarly sins caught up with me. In actual history, I learned at last, two of Erling’s daughters were married to Arnesson brothers – one to Thorberg (as I chronicled), but another to his older brother Arne. Vigleik was this Arne’s son. I had missed the Arne Arnesson connection completely. And the circumstances I set up in King of Rogaland left no room for that marriage. It has to have happened before the Thorberg-Ragnhild wedding, for various reasons, but I made it clear that (in my book) there’d been no previous alliances.
Now if I were Stephen Hunter, this would be no problem. He simply ignores any contradictions that pop up between various volumes of his Earl Swagger series. But I can’t do that. If you find contradictions in my Erling books (no doubt there are some), they’re due to sheer inadvertence. So I have to work this problem out in terms of my fictional world.
I think what I’ll have to do is wrest Vigleik from the bosom of his true family, and give him some other kind of pedigree. Perhaps I’ll marry his mother to some other Arne from some other family. It’s not that uncommon a name. I’m thinking about it.
When a man undertakes to write an epic, he takes on a vainglorious, hubristic task. He will make radical mistakes, demanding radical remedies.
All for about three paragraphs in the final book.
