Eaters of the Dead (review)

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Then, with a curdling scream to wake the dead, Buliwyf leapt up, and in his arms he swung the giant sword Runding, which sang like a sizzling flame as it cut the air. And his warriors leapt up with him, and all joined the battle. The shouts of the men mingled with the pig-grunts and the odors of the black mist, and there was terror and confusion and great wracking and rending of the Hurot Hall.

• Title: Eaters of the Dead
• Author: Michael Crichton
• Genre: Historical Adventure/ Mythological Fantasy
• Year:1976

Beowulf is perhaps something most of us in the anglophone world have read in school — having gotten a hold of a good translation taught by an enthusiastic teacher if we were lucky or, more likely, puzzling through pieces of an overwrought Victorian rendering given by an instructor that didn’t know the first thing about the history of the period or the traditions the story represented. That’s the only reason someone could possibly think Beowulf, an epic verse that is at once the beginning of English literature and a precedent for every monster movie and cinema hero you’ve ever seen, could be boring. For anyone that has not yet experienced the joy of a good translation of Beowulf, I recommend Seamus Heaney’s vibrant translation.

But why all this about Beowulf, before I’ve even mentioned Eaters of the Dead? Well, ideally, you’ll have read Beowulf or be familiar with its story before you read this book, because Eaters of the Dead is an extended riff on Beowulf — essentially offering another account of events that served to inspire the saga. Taking the actual 10th Century account of Arab diplomat Ahmad Ibn Fadlan as his jumping-off point, Michael Crichton takes the story of that very real historical personage into the uncharted territory of fiction. Eaters of the Dead is Ibn Fadlan’s account of his journey to the North Lands, and his witnessing of a conflict between heroes and monsters.

The real Ibn Fadlan did encounter Norsemen (Rus) on the banks of the Volga, and leaves us an account of their appearance, demeanor, and funeral customs. The first quarter or so of Eaters of the Dead sticks closely to the actual historical document of Ibn Fadlan, and describes his mission from the Caliph of Bagdad to the Bulgars. In it, Ibn Fadlan journeys through Central Asia around the Black Sea and encounters all manner of Turkic peoples, commenting on their customs and folkways. But soon Crichton veers into his story, maintaining Ibn Fadlan’s voice and peculiarities of style and observation in a seamless and appealing way.

Which is one of the chief reasons this novel works so well, and is so much fun. From the introduction to the footnotes to the appendix, Crichton weaves the historical and the fictional together in such a convincing way that it serves as the perfect framing mechanism for a fantastical story. Eaters of the Dead thus becomes a pseudo-history, so convincing in places that Crichton himself remarked he once wasted a whole day in the library trying to track down one of his footnoted references — only to come to the conclusion he must have forgotten he invented it. (Crichton does want to make sure we aren’t taken in completely, however, and ladles plenty of clues throughout his references — such as the listing of the Necronomicon amongst his secondary sources.)

All this would be incidental if the novel failed to deliver on its promise of adventure, but Eaters of the Dead is true to its source material and to the aesthetic of the Norse sagas in that it puts entertainment first. This is no surprise to those who have read Crichton’s other wildly popular thrillers, but it may be unexpected to those taken in by Ibn Fadlan’s travelogue styling and the faux-historiographical trappings of the book.

Those who have seen the film version of Eaters of the Dead, The 13th Warrior, will already be familiar with the story. Ibn Fadlan is essentially forced by a band of Norsemen to accompany them on a quest to rid a King of an ancient evil. He journeys north in their company, their 13th companion as demanded by a soothsayer’s augury, and gradually learns more about his fellows as well as the threat they face. In Hurot, a beautiful but beset hall in an isolated part of Sweden, Ibn Fadlan gets his first taste of just what sort of creatures his band is up against.

For readers of Beowulf, the parallels become obvious — indeed, that is half the fun of Crichton’s thought experiment to create a ‘historical’ account that could have generated the saga. Thus we have Buliwyf, the hero and leader of the company, and other recognizable names such as those of King Rothgar and his great hall of Hurot (Hrothgar and Heorot, respectively), and events such as the attack on the hall, the taking of Grendel’s arm, and the slaying of the creature’s mother. But using this armature Crichton has told his own story, added his own speculative element that would explain why the cannibalistic mist monsters — for in this account they are not one monster but a race — would be so alien and terrifying to the Norse.

And this science fiction element is the other clever conceit of the novel, but a spoiler for those few of you who have not seen the film. Taking everything together, Eaters of the Dead emerges as more than the sum of its parts, from a relatively short and straightforward action-adventure we also get a story with speculative elements, and a faux-historical metafiction that plays with the idea of the real and unreal. The bottom line is, if you are a fan of Beowulf, or of other modern retellings such as John Gardner’s Grendel, Eaters of the Dead is an immensely enjoyable novel.

• Eaters of the Dead at Amazon
• Michael Crichton’s homepage