Recommendations
Books Like Röde Orm (The Long Ships) by Frans G. Bengtsson
Viking historical fiction, Norse saga adaptations, and adventure novels of the early medieval world
If Röde Orm (The Long Ships) captivated you with Red Orm's career from Viking captive to returning Norse hero and Bengtsson's laconic, saga-like narration, these eight works share its exuberant approach to the medieval world, its pleasure in adventure and violence, and its comic sympathy for men who live by their strength and their luck.
- 1
Buy on AmazonNjáls saga
by Anonymous
The greatest of the Icelandic sagas — the fifty-year blood feud in Iceland, told with the same laconic saga style Bengtsson emulates; reading it gives The Long Ships its literary ancestors.
- 2
Buy on AmazonEaters of the Dead
by Michael Crichton
Crichton's retelling of Beowulf as witnessed by an Arab ambassador Ahmad ibn Fadlan — a direct descendant of The Long Ships in its fusion of historical detail, comedy, and Viking adventure.
- 3
Buy on AmazonThe Hammer and the Cross
by Harry Harrison
A Viking historical adventure in the Norse world — Shef, a slave-boy who rises through the Viking world by his intelligence, in a novel that matches Bengtsson's combination of action and historical vividness.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Last Kingdom
by Bernard Cornwell
Cornwell's Saxon Stories series (beginning with The Last Kingdom) — Uhtred of Bebbanburg's career between Danes and Saxons in ninth-century England shares The Long Ships' laconic tone and historical world.
- 5
Buy on AmazonKristin Lavransdatter
by Sigrid Undset
The great Norwegian medieval novel — where Bengtsson's medieval world is Viking adventure, Undset's is domestic and spiritual; together they give the full range of medieval Scandinavian fiction.
- 6
Buy on AmazonThe Pillars of the Earth
by Ken Follett
Medieval historical fiction of a different kind — the building of a cathedral in twelfth-century England rather than Viking raiding, but the same historical vividness and the same sense of a pre-modern world fully inhabited.
- 7
Buy on AmazonBeowulf
by Anonymous
The Old English poem that Crichton adapted and that forms the mythological horizon of The Long Ships' world — Beowulf's world of mead-halls, monsters, and warrior loyalty is the Norse world Orm inhabits.
- 8
Buy on AmazonGrowth of the Soil
by Knut Hamsun
Hamsun's Nobel-winning pastoral — the descendants of Bengtsson's Vikings settled into farmers; the same Norwegian landscape across ten centuries of Scandinavian history.
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