Ymir’s Corpse Interviews is a Scandinavian Aggression initiative in which Rowdy Geirsson picks the metaphorical cloud-matter of authors and artists who make their own creations based on or inspired by the old lore of the Northlands. This time it is my pleasure to welcome Angus Donald to the fray. Angus Donald is a writer based in the United Kingdom. He is the author of several series of historical fiction books including The Outlaw Chronicles, The Broken Kingdom, Holcroft Blood, and Fire Born, which focuses on pagan Germany and Scandinavia at the dawn of the Viking Age. Before becoming a full-time writer, he worked an eclectic range of jobs including as a fruit picker in Greece, an anthropologist in Indonesia, and a journalist in Hong Kong, India, Afghanistan, and London.
RG: So, Angus, welcome! I’m delighted to have the chance to chat with you a little about your work. We’re going to focus mainly on the Fire Born series here. I recently finished the final volume, Blood of the Bear, and thoroughly enjoyed the entire series. It’s a great, blood-soaked adventure through the early medieval period, and the subject matter and setting are right up my alley. Although the specific setting is actually rather uncommon. So, one of the first things I wanted to ask is: where did the idea for this series come from and why did you choose to focus on the 8th-century Saxon Wars? (For anyone out there who is not familiar with it, Fire Born focuses predominantly on the early stages of the territorial and religious conflict between the Saxons and the Franks prior to the onset of the epoch that we typically refer to today as the Viking Age).
AD: Thank you for inviting me on your website, Rowdy. To answer your question: there were so many great viking novels already out there. That’s the main reason. I wanted to distinguish my Fire Born series from all the other ones. And that led me to make two decisions. Firstly, not to set it in England and therefore not to write about the Great Northern Army or King Alfred bravely battling the Danes. Secondly, to set it just before the Viking Age, in what is called the Vendel Period. The people are the same, the gods are the same, the battle tactics are the same, there are the same levels of technology, etc. An arbitrary line has been drawn in AD 793 (the date of the attack on Lindisfarne Abbey by a band of seaborne Norsemen) and everything after that is viking and everything before is not. But in AD 792, were the people living in Scandinavia and northern Europe any different from vikings? No. Nor, I believe, were they much different in AD 771, a generation before Lindisfarne, when my series opens.
I also became fascinated by Charlemagne’s annexation of Saxony when I was researching this period. It took more than thirty years for the Christian legions of the world’s most powerful warlord to “pacify” the pagan Saxons, which means they must have put up one Hell of a resistance. Considering how disunited and disorganized the Saxons were, compared with Charlemagne’s well-disciplined Frankish troops, the Saxons must have behaved incredibly heroically to hold out for so long. And that really appealed to me. It makes a terrific David-and-Goliath backdrop for the five Fire Born novels.
RG: I definitely agree with that. It’s an epic background context, and one that is basically doomed in the end, which if anything makes it even more “viking.” And while that conflict is present throughout the whole series, two of the books branch out a little beyond it more than the others. The Loki Sword sends your characters to Eastern Europe on a quest inspired by the cursed mythological sword of Tyrfing, and King of the North draws its inspiration from the legendary Battle of Brávellir in what is today Sweden. What drew you to these two particular legends?
AD: The first two books were all about the Franks in Saxony, and Widukind the wily Saxon leader, and I wanted to widen the appeal of the series with the third one and make it a bit more traditionally viking-y. I discussed this with my editor at Canelo (the publisher) and we thought some kind of viking quest story might be fun. I happened to be reading about the great battle between the Huns and the Goths (who later migrated up to Gotland in Sweden) that took place in what is now Hungary in the middle of the 5th century, and discovered a famous sword wielded by the Goth king called Tyrfing. It seemed like a suitable MacGuffin to drive an Eastern European quest. I invented the Loki stuff, and I really enjoyed making up all the mythology around Loki cheating the Dwarvish smiths who created his ”magic” sword and then cursed it.
The legendary battle of Brávellir is said to have taken place around AD 770 in Sweden, which is around the time that I had set my stories, so I felt I had to include it in the Fire Born series. I first heard of it in another historical novelist’s book—A Sacred Storm by Theodore Brun—a brilliant read. Theo is a friend and didn’t mind when I said I was going to write about the same battle. It’s a classic viking tale of tragic heroism and noble slaughter, about an ageing king called Harald Wartooth seeking a glorious death in battle rather than shameful death in his bed.
RG: The vikings did always have the best nicknames. That book is a lot of fun, and I remember being especially drawn to the geography of its setting. One of the two main characters in your series has a memorable nickname of his own, too: Bloodhand. Of course, you know I’m talking about Bjarki, who is a berserker. We don’t really know a whole lot about how one became a berserker in the murky pagan past, so this is an area that strikes me as allowing for a greater deal of creative freedom than, say, the locations and dates of certain battles and the leaders of the armies. And the solution you came up with was great. So that said, how did you come up with and settle on the notion of the Fyr Skola?
AD: I had wanted to write about berserkers for a long time. I’m fascinated with them, with their quasi-religious nature, their almost god-like status in viking society. Odin’s men, they were called, and one of the sagas says they could not be harmed by either iron or fire. I had a minor berserker-like experience myself when I was about 19. I was play-fighting with a friend, wrestling, just messing around. At the time we were both very fit and strong. He was losing the play-fight and he bit me. And I was so outraged by this breach of the rules that I completely lost my temper, and found myself smashing his head against the concrete floor. It was a genuine red-mist episode. Luckily, I didn’t do my friend too much damage, I was pulled off by spectators before he was badly injured. But it gave me a tiny taste of what it might be like to go berserk in battle. I think that innate capacity for superhuman rage is in many, if not all men. I don’t know about women, but you hear stories of women lifting cars off their injured babies in extremis. I think it is a fascinating mental state that has not been researched nearly enough.
Once I had decided the series was to be about berserkers, I set about thinking how berserkers might be “created.” You would need to have talent-spotters, I surmised, and somewhere to train the young warriors, test and evaluate them, and help bring out their full berserker potential. So the Fyr Skola (“Fire School”) was born. I gave it a serious religious edge because it seemed to me that this was a matter of gods and spirits and fervent belief. I was also aware that most berserkers—called Fire Born in my books because of a ritual in which they are reborn by passing through a burning ship—would not be expected to live long. So, there is a suggestion that someone choosing to become a berserker is offering himself as a sacrifice to the gods of war. They would have a short life but would earn much glory. That is very viking!
RG: Nothing quite like the allure of Valhalla! In the first book, readers get to experience Bjarki’s own rite of passage through the Fyr Skola. I don’t think it is giving too much away to say that this is when he first encounters his gandr, or bear spirit. Your portrayal of his interactions with her are quite vivid, both in his transformation when she takes control and his internal conversations with her. I’ve read that your time as an anthropologist in Indonesia included the study of rituals wherein certain individuals claimed to be possessed by a spirit. How did that experience shape your portrayal of these scenes in the series? Was there anything that you felt applied especially well across time and space to early medieval Europe and/or anything that didn’t and that you thus needed to alter or leave out to fit the books’ context?
AD: In my books, when someone goes berserk, the spirit of a bear (or wolf or wild boar) comes into them and gives them what seems like superhuman strength and speed. They are also apparently impervious to pain. I got this idea from the sagas but I also heard of something very similar in Southeast Asia, when I was a student anthropologist doing field work in Indonesia in the 1980s. In Malay culture there is a condition called running amok—we have the same word in English now from colonial days—when a person goes completely crazy and starts killing everyone around them. The Malays say that the amok person has been inhabited by the savage spirit of a tiger. The only thing to do is to kill that person before he does too much damage.
I believe this is a similar mental mechanism to going berserk. But instead of being possessed by a tiger, the viking berserker was possessed by the spirit (gandr in my books) of a bear. I actually witnessed spirit possessions several times during temple ceremonies in Bali. I remember watching a pair of old Balinese ladies—twins of 80-plus—hobbling on to the central area of the temple, and then as the music and religion got to them, they were transformed into lithe male striplings: the Hindu hero Arjuna, a warrior prince. I watched as these old ladies became Arjuna, strutting like panthers across the floor, posing heroically, sneering, stepping up to other men, as if to challenge them to a fight. It was extraordinary. And when the ceremony was over, they collapsed back into being harmless grannies. Possession is real, and it is often combined with religion. I have never been to the Bible Belt in America but I understand it is far from uncommon there for folks to speak in tongues, or be totally possessed by the Holy Spirit.
RG: I’ve heard of those instances, too, at least of the ones in the American Bible Belt, but have never witnessed such a thing myself. It’s wild to think it still happens in parts of the world today. And gets me thinking about different places in general. You cover a lot of European geographic territory in the Fire Born series. Were you able to visit any of the significant places depicted in the books while researching them? I’m curious about your thoughts on how evocative any vestiges of the past are (or aren’t) at this point in time at any of the key sites where the action unfolded.
AD: I was unfortunately unable to visit any of the places in the books. Financial constraints mostly, and time. And when I was writing the first two books, it was during the Covid period when travel was very difficult. However, I do have a great picture of the real-life location of the Fyr Skola, on the top of a weird plateau jutting out of the Diemel Valley. This was possibly the site of the Irminsul, the enormous sacred tree of Saxon paganism (equivalent to the Yggdrasil in Norse mythology) in whose mighty shade the rituals of the Fyr Skola are enacted. If you can’t physically get to a place you are writing about, you can do a lot with the internet and your own imagination.
RG: Much agreed, we are lucky to have the tools available to us now that we have. And speaking of traveling and travelers, one of your characters in the Fire Born series does quite a lot of that himself. So something I’ve wondered since I first started reading the series is: what percentage of Valtyr’s DNA would you say is comprised of Odin? (Again, for anyone out there not familiar with the books, Valtyr is a lonesome, wandering one-eyed wise man who drinks heavily).
AD: There are numerous encounters with Odin in viking mythology, and I wondered how many of these encounters were actually just people meeting wandering one-eyed geezers. So Valtyr was a sort of personal joke. I deliberately made him seem like Odin, even though he wasn’t a god. Actually, he is more like Gandalf, I think. A wise mentor figure who propels the heroes on their adventures. The original idea for the Fire Born books was to write a ”low” fantasy series. The berserkers would be invincible; Valtyr would really be Odin in disguise. This was long before I had found a publisher. When Canelo read an early draft of The Last Berserker, they said they would only publish it if it was historical fiction, so I took out all the fantastical elements—there weren’t that many changes, to be honest —and made Valtyr a wise traveler rather than a Norse god. In a parallel universe, there exists a Fire Born fantasy series.
RG: Well, it’s not your only series, whether in this universe or others. If I have it right, you started with The Outlaw Chronicles, which revolves around a gangster-like Robin Hood in medieval England. And I know that The Broken Kingdom is about King Arthur. So what is the process like for you working with several series? Do you mix it up and work on more than one thing at once, or do you plow through a single subject/book/series at a time like a rekkr into the enemy lines?
AD: I can’t multi-task. I have to do a job till it’s done. So, if I am writing a particular novel—a new Robin Hood, say, or another King Arthur—I don’t work on any of my other projects until I have a first draft, or until I have finished the edit or whatever—unless I absolutely have to! Actually, sometimes I find my editor is asking me for a blurb for the back of a different book, or wants to wrangle over a future cover. And sometimes you have to do marketing/publicity for a series that isn’t on your to-do list. But most of the time I stick rigidly to one project at a time.
RG: And you actually have a new series in the works, too—right? Can you tell us a little more about that?
AD: I have a new Mongol series coming out at the end of August. The first book is called Templar Traitor and it is based on the true story of a mysterious Englishman who fought for Genghis Khan. He was captured outside Vienna in 1241, riding with a squad of Mongol scouts. The knights of Christendom were astonished to discover that he was a former Templar and that he had been riding with the Mongols for twenty years. The Mongol Knight series will tell his extraordinary story, which I based on the letters that his interrogator, Father Ivo of Narbonne, sent back to his boss, the Bishop of Bordeaux. It’s an almost unbelievable story—but true.
RG: I don’t like to use this word too much because I think it’s been watered down in the present day to the point of not meaning what it used to, but that is, in fact, amazing. I’ve never heard about that before, though I’ll be the first to admit that the farther we get from northern Europe, the less knowledgeable I am about history. Is there a lot of material you can draw upon in those letters, or are you finding yourself needing to fill in many blanks with imagination? And how many books do you anticipate in this series?
AD: I had to use a ton of imagination. We know very little about Robert, except that he was an Englishman, a Templar, an educated man who spoke a lot of languages, and that he was at Acre in the Holy Land in 1218 during the Fifth Crusade. He was seen again in 1241 at Pest the the court of King Bela of Hungary. He was then an ambassador from the Mongol horde and demanded the Hungarians surrender to them. He was captured outside the walls of Vienna by the knights of Frederick, Duke of Austria, who accused him of being a traitor to Christendom. The rest I had to make up. But, luckily, a good deal is known about the Mongol campaigns between 1218 and 1241 in Persia, China, and so on. I suspect that Robert played a full part in them, and gained Genghis Khan’s trust. After all, he was a Mongol ambassador by his fifties. That is the trick to writing good historical fiction. You find a suitable hero and place him or her in real history, doing real things with real people, which, very often, is a lot stranger than fiction.
I’m not certain how long this series will be but I am thinking in terms of a trilogy at the moment. If Templar Traitor really took off, I could probably add extra novels—maybe writing as many as five in total. Twenty years fighting for the Mongols is a long time to cover. A lot of campaigns.
RG: Yeah, quite an undertaking—both for you to cover, and obviously for the people who lived it! It sounds like an excellent premise though, and one that covers uncharted territory in the world of historical fiction. But getting back to Fire Born—simply to end on an appropriately viking-esque note for a viking-esque website: the author’s notes at the end of Blood of the Bear state that we’ve seen the last of Bjarki and his shieldmaiden sister, Tor Hildarsdottir, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine that one of the new characters introduced in that book could carry the torch forward if you ever wanted to return to that world. Do you think you ever will?
AD: I don’t know. I don’t want to give too much away, if you haven’t read Blood of the Bear, the final Fire Born novel, but I am pondering bringing back some of the characters in a new series. I really like Tor and she is only in her twenties at the end of Blood of the Bear, so . . . maybe. It depends on whether there is the appetite for more berserker books. We will see. The truth is that I have a huge amount on my plate at the moment. I have to write Templar Assassin, the second book in the Mongol series by October, and another Robin Hood by early next year. I also have to continue the King Arthur saga, at some point. I have another project looming too, a fantasy series, but I can’t talk about that at the moment. Too many books to write, too little time, that’s my problem. But I might possibly return to the Fire Born universe in a year or two.
RG: Lastly, just a question for fun. Being as Charlemagne and Widukind are the two historical figures who loom largest in the Fire Born series, if you could go back in time and meet and feast with either one and his cohorts, who would you choose and why?
AD: I think Widukind. He had, I believe, great powers of charm. He always spoke really well and I can easily image sitting in a fire-lit hall, sipping a foaming mug of ale with a belly full of roast pork and listening to Widukind of Westphalia exhort us to draw swords in defense of his realm.
RG: And I imagine the ambience of his hall might have been a little more relaxed and fun, too! Anyway, thanks so much taking the time to chat with me about your work, and best of luck with the new Mongol Knight series!
AD: Thank you, Rowdy. It’s been a pleasure chatting to you. Good luck with your own writing!
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Unless otherwise noted, the images associated with this interview are all courtesy of Angus Donald
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