Help offset server costs by donating. This is totally optional. Any overages will go to library fines or new books.
Travel Light 4 - Micklegard
Numerous authors have dealt with the interactions between northerners (especially Vikings) and Micklegard (Byzantium) - for example I just finished reading Henry Treece's Viking trilogy in which the main character spends time there. Why the fascination with this? (and with the chain of river portages north from there back to Scandinavia). Is it just the contrast in cultures forced to meet and work together but with such different assumptions about life and society?
Comments
Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road also does, though in that case the main characters are not Vikings, but Franks, if I recall. I’m not convinced there’s a fascination with the subject (more a fascination with dragons, I would say, or even bears, or the Brits in India), but I can see why it might be interesting to people as basically the most exotic extension of Norse culture and a way to mash up two different ‘memes’ for lack of a better word - the north and the orient.
I can't comment much on this as it's not a topic I know much about.
Well, for me it echoed Poul Anderson's epic Last Viking trilogy, about Harold Hardrede's amazing life moving from Norway to the Kievan Rus and then to Byzantium - Micklegard - back to Kiev, and finally taking the throne of a Scandinavian empire and dying at Stamford Bridge in England, trying to wrest the crown from Harald Godwinsson in 1066. The exploits of the Vikings in Russia and Byzantium were little known in the West at the time, unlike their westward explorations, raids, and conquests, which included Normandy, from which William the Conquerer also invaded England that same year. I find it all fascinating.