Röde Orm Reading Order

Röde Orm (The Long Ships, 1941–45) by Frans G. Bengtsson is the great Swedish Viking novel — a two-volume adventure epic of such infectious exuberance, such narrative momentum, and such comic pleasure in the Viking world that it has been read by every generation of Scandinavians since its publication and is one of the most entertaining historical novels in any language. Red Orm (Röde Orm) is a young Swede from Scania who is captured by Vikings in his youth and spends the next decades as slave, Viking warrior, slave of the Caliph of Córdoba, Christian convert, and finally the owner of his own estate in Scania — living through the reign of Harald Bluetooth, the Christianization of Scandinavia, and the Viking expeditions to Ireland and England. Bengtsson, who was also a celebrated essayist and literary historian, wrote the novel with an extraordinary combination of scholarly knowledge and narrative flair — the world of the late tenth century is precisely rendered, from the political structures of Danish kingship to the economics of the slave trade, from the court of Al-Mansur in Córdoba to the monastery of St. Finnian in Ireland. But the novel's tone is that of the sagas themselves: laconic, matter-of-fact about violence and adventure, deeply interested in the economics and logistics of raiding, and shot through with a dry humor that makes Orm and his companions among the most appealing company in historical fiction.