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 The first quarter or so of Eaters of the Dead sticks closely to the actual historical document of Ibn Fadlan, and describes his mission from the Caliph of Bagdad to the Bulgars.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

In a minute I’m going to tell about pirates, but there is not any real difference between pirates and wiseguys. One is at sea and the other is in cities. A big part of it is money, and money is just another way of saying freedom. If you have money, you can do pretty much whatever you want to do. (If you do not believe me, look at the people that have it.)

• Title: Pirate Freedom
• Author: Gene Wolfe
• Genre: Historical/Science Fiction
• Year: 2007

Fans of Gene Wolfe know what to expect when they read a new book or short story of his — unreliable narrators, Christian symbolism, elegantly ambiguous and multi-layered stories that reward the attentive reader, and, quite often as not, real adventure. Though it’s the riddles and and mysterious of identity and representation in his work that justly warrant the most attention and devotion from his readers, it is often overlooked that in many books Wolfe achieves narrative and thematic depth while at the same time delivering a gripping and imaginative adventure story — a combination seen in his New Sun, Long Sun, and Short Sun series, The Wizard-Knight duology, the Latro trilogy, and in 2007’s Pirate Freedom. Such adventure often serves to beguile the reader into falling in line with one interpretation of events, when reality may well be another — just part of the tricks and charms of this master storyteller.

For me, Wolfe’s writing has an ineffable quality I can best describe as ‘intriguing;’ in nearly every story of his I always get the sense that there is more left carefully unsaid, most often in the case of one of his famously unreliable narrators who leave out details the careful reader must discover themselves. Pirate Freedom is another first person account, one that’s narrator is perhaps Wolfe’s most seemingly honest — his apparent honesty serving as a startling hook into his story.

For, you see, Father Chris is a priest who was once a pirate captain. A priest living now, in modern times, who once commanded a crew of killers and thieves on the 17th century Spanish Main. Pirate Freedom is his story, and it is also his confession, and immediately it begins with him describing for us an event that he related to a parishioner who came to him for solace. Chris tells of a man who ‘insulted him in a way that would do harm,’ but who fought at his side in the same engagement. When it was over, Chris shook hands with the man before braining him with a handspike. Then he beat the man to death as he lay there on the deck of the ship they has just captured.

Thus we know that this priest is a murderer on page one, and either a time-traveler or a mad man. Needing to tell his whole story, needing to explain how these things could possibly be, Chris relates his childhood experiences, moving from America to a post-Communist Cuba with his father (who is probably, as Chris would say, a wiseguy), receiving his education in a monastery where he learned the languages and mathematics that would later prove very useful to him. While there, cut off from the world, things change subtly — mass is said in Latin, children fidget less and they no longer wear wristwatches. But Chris isn’t happy there, isn’t content to go from his childhood in the Monastery to an adulthood as a priest. He wants to see the world, to live a little.

The world he emerges into as he bids the monastery good-bye is a radically different one, one of horse drawn carts, sailing ships, and a fortified village where modern Havana should be. He is back in time, and doesn’t lose a lot of sleep over the how and why of it (and neither does Wolfe, nor should the reader) — for Chris has lucked into every boy’s dream of adventure, of freedom.

Except it isn’t, and Chris soon encounters the harsh realities of life as a child without family in such a place and time. But he adapts rapidly, finding a berth on a Spanish merchant ship and learning the skills of wind and sail. He travels the Caribbean, and voyages to Spain, and falls in love, and, finally, is taken captive by a pirate captain of his previous acquaintance.

Captain Bram Burt is an English privateer and patriot, and he takes ‘fellow Englishman’ Chris under his wing. But Chris is reluctant to be a pirate, not wanting to be a thief and murderer, as he did not simply throw away his Catholic upbringing as soon as he left the monastery. Wolfe’s refusal to seek any easy way out or skirt the moral realities of this time give this story a particular moral resonance as Chris, not merely the product of a theological education but of out modern sensibilities, seeks to justify his actions. The contrast with the world of the 17th century — and the piratical and colonial fringes of that world at that — isn’t glossed over as Chris must deal with the realities of slavery, violence, and robbery in a realistic way.

Chris is reluctant to be dragged into this world, despite excelling at his first prize command (a captured slave ship), and he refuses Burt’s offer to serve as one of his captains. Burt takes pity on him, and drops him off in Hispaniola, where Chris falls in with Frenchmen hunting the wild cattle there and becomes a buccaneer. But the buccaneers are driven from that place by the Spanish, and they steal a Spanish warship and raise the black flag and soon Chris finds himself right back in the position he refused the first time — only this time embracing it fully.

More adventure follows, as do further glimpses into the contemporary life of Father Chris, soon-to-be parish priest and youth counselor — a contemporary life that raises yet more questions of the timeline of the book’s events. And questions of character identity are, of course (this being Wolfe), also present — though not nearly to the extent of many of Wolfe’s more challenging stories. But Pirate Freedom remains primarily a historical adventure, though one with a compelling moral compass and a Wolfian flare for raising questions.

And make no mistake, this is satisfying purely as a historical novel. Like the Latro series, Pirate Freedom is an excellently realized portrait of its time and place. Wolfe’s engineer’s mind is in evidence in the concrete details of life on and off a vessel in the Age of Sail, and I found the nautical lexicon of sails and rigs and hulls and masts and all the rest more accessible and easily understood than other novels exploring this period. Perhaps because Wolfe’s narrator is himself explaining these things to an audience as once as ignorant as he was, or perhaps because Wolfe just knows his stuff and is that good of a writer, but I found every glimpse of material life in this novel completely and fascinatingly authentic. Pirate Freedom is one of  Wolfe’s most accessible books, perhaps alongside another historical novel of his, The Devil in a Forest, and certainly one that could best serve as an introduction to his work for fans of historical adventure.

But it isn’t until the very end of the novel that we really discover the implications of what we are reading, when what Father Chris is planing becomes apparent. Without ruining the twist, I’ll just say that it raises anew every issue of confession and redemption swimming around in the rough seas of Pirate Freedom — and about the our own willingness to excuse the inexcusable.

• Pirate Freedom at Amazon
• Lupine Nuncio — a Gene Wolfe fan site

As in a daze Cormac turned his steed and rode back across the trampled field. His horse’s hoofs splashed in lakes of blood and clanged against the helmets of dead men. Across the valley the shout of victory was thundering. Yet all seemed shadowy and strange. A shape was striding across the torn corpses and Cormac was dully aware that is was Bran. The Gael swung from his horse and fronted the king. Bran was weaponless and gory; blood trickled from gashes on brow, breast and limb; what armor he had worn was clean hacked away and a cut had shorn half-way through his iron crown. But the red jewel still gleamed unblemished like a star of slaughter.

• Title: Bran Mak Morn: The Last King
• Author: Robert E. Howard
• Genre: Dark Fantasy/Historical Adventure
• Year: 2005 (1928-32)

Conan is more famous than his creator, Robert E. Howard. Most readers approach Howard through the lens of Conan, as is only natural, and tend to look at his other heroes in terms of Conan — digging for those elements that later make their way into the stories of the Hyborian age. Kull is perhaps the most famous ancestor of Conan for, after all, it was a Kull story that was later modified to become the first Conan tale, ‘The Phoenix on the Sword.’ But all of Howard’s creations are different, as he was too good a writer to spin the same yarn twice, and all of them are informed by the age in which they find themselves. Bran Mak Morn, last King of a dying race, is a hero that Howard spent less words on than Solomon Kane, or Kull, or certainly Conan, but he was also perhaps Howard’s most personal creation.

This review is of Bran Mak Morn: The Last King from Del Rey, part of a new series that collects Howard’s tales and publishes them in their original form and chronology, with a wealth of accompanying notes, essays, and unfinished ephemera. Perhaps not all of this information is of value to the casual fan, but having Howard’s creations available in their proper form is a tremendous improvement from the situation of twenty or thirty years ago, when Howard was only available in diluted, rewritten, or rearranged form alongside a group of modern pastiche writers as part of massive, artificially-conceived series. I always distrusted those books as a kid and so unfortunately never grew up reading Howard, but now his unaltered writings are available in faithful collections from several publishers.

Bran Mak Morn grows from Howard’s fascination with the Picts — but not the Picts of modern, sober archaeology — rather the Picts of turn-of-the-century pseudo-scientific conjectural history, the sort of thing that was available in 1908 for a young Howard to read. But that, believe it or not, is a good thing; for these Picts are a mysterious people with a strange past rooted in lost continents and trans-world migrations and civilizations long vanished. Some of Howard’s magic, whether in the Bran stories or those of Solomon Kane’s skewed 17th Century or Conan’s Hyboria, grows out of the freedom of his time to fill in the gaps of the historical record with imagination — wild speculation on Atlantean colonies and strange transpositions of race were not yet the sole province of semi-educated cranks. If it was the case that less reliable history and questionable science was what Howard had to draw upon, that just had the effect of allowing him to dream bigger dreams.

And Bran Mak Morn is something like a dream of Late Antiquity. Bran, the last King of a people that are the degenerate and near-savage remnants of a race that once ruled a mighty civilization lost to the shadows of time, must fight the Roman Empire as it encroaches on Pictland north of Hadrian’s Wall. These stories are bleak and Bran is heroic precisely because he fights a battle he knows he cannot win, one that, in effect, has already been lost centuries ago. And his heroism underscores too his aloneness as the only ‘civilized’ man amongst a people who have succumbed to barbarity. Unlike Howard’s other heroic outsiders, Bran is an exemplar of his people, his fate bound entirely to their own, his significance to them resonating down through the ages long after he fought and lost his last battle.

What may be disappointing to many readers is just how few Bran stories there are; the Bran cycle consisting of essentially four stories — only two of which feature Bran Mak Morn in the sort of heroic mold of a Conan or Kull. That’s two stories in a 300 plus page hardback book. Readers expecting to discover another Conan will be disappointed, but this collection goes beyond just being about Bran Mak Morn to illuminating Howard’s keen interest in the idea of lost races of men lurking at the fringes of human history.

The first Bran story is an example of this, ‘Men of the Shadows,’ which is essentially a history of Howard’s Picts in which Bran is seen through the eyes of a captured Norse mercenary in Rome’s employ. The Picts, which are akin to H.G. Well’s Morlocks with their twisted limbs and hunched backs, are given a detailed — and highly speculative — history based on then-current theories of population migration in the ancient world. Howard’s Picts are descended from Mediterranean stock, and are slighter and darker than their Celtic and Germanic neighbors, and also debased by millennia of barbarous living. ‘Men of Shadows’ is not much of an adventure, but as a weird history illuminating one of Robert E. Howard’s driving passions, it serves as a fine introduction.

Three excellent stories follow, forming the heart of this book. In ‘Kings of the Night’ we see Bran in action for the first time, leading a coalition army against Roman onslaught, dealing with issues of his command and deployment. It’s a great battle piece, and it also features an appearance by another Howard hero — summoned from his own time to lead an unruly Norse contingent. Again we see Bran through another’s eyes, this time a Celtic chieftain, and Howard’s characterization of Bran as a shrewd leader whose paramount concern is the well-being of his own people is well-drawn.

In ‘Worms of the Earth,’ another classic tale, Bran is the viewpoint character for the first and only time. Very little of the Picts are featured here, instead Bran treats with loathsome magics to get revenge on a cruel Roman governor who has executed one of Bran’s countrymen. Bran is consumed by his hatred, and employs the aid of an even older, more degenerated people than his own. Again Howard plays with the theme that dominates all of the stories in Del Rey’s collection, but this time Bran is alone amongst forces older and darker than even his Picts.

And that’s it for Bran . . . or almost. In ‘The Dark Man’ we jump ahead some 600 years to the eleventh century, for the story of an Irish warrior fighting to rescue the woman he loves from Viking raiders. Bran Mak Morn appears in the story as a statue — the mysterious and potent Dark Man of the title — and his presence looms over the action in one great, moody piece of storytelling. The setting and concerns of ‘The Dark Man’ are completely different than those of the other Bran tales, but thematically it fits perfectly alongside the others, even giving those earlier pieces a weight they may not have had as we look back from the bloody vantage of ‘The Dark Man’ to the half-remembered past of the age of Bran Mak Morn.

More stories of Picts and lost races follow, some set in the past and some in the present, but there are no more completed Bran Mak Morn tales to be had. These later stories are worth reading, but are frankly anti-climactic after ‘Kings of the Night,’ ‘Worms of the Earth,’ and ‘The Dark Man.’ But that’s to be expected, and the book is worth it for those three pieces alone — any of them as good a Howard story as the best of those featuring his brooding Cimmerian. Everything else in Bran Mak Morn: The Last King is a bonus: some poetry, story fragments and drafts including a piece of Howard juvenilia featuring Bran written in Howard’s own hand, and an excellent appendix featuring an examination of Howard’s interest in the Picts and notes on the stories.

Ultimately, one cannot read Bran Mak Morn without wanting more, say a good dozen stories of the nature — if not the stature — of ‘Worms of the Earth,’ to really do the character justice. Unfortunately, outside of pastiches, that’s not possible, and one is left with the lingering feeling that Howard’s most mysterious hero was perhaps never meant for our knowing, and that we should be grateful for whatever glimpses of his lost world that have survived intact into our own.

• Bran Mak Morn: The Last King at Amazon
• Conan.com
• Howardworks.com

My review of the gritty viking adventure The Whale Road was just posted over at BlackGate.com this weekend. This was a fantastic book, full of slick action sequences, vibrant details, and terrific prose. It’s told with one ear aimed at the poetry of the sagas, and the other at the modern military or adventure thriller. I found it completely immersive, from the mundane realities of everyday life in the tenth century, to the horrors of men in combat, to the dominating presence of ritual and notions of fate and religion that guided the every thought of the people of this era — The Whale Road brings this era alive in a way few other books have for me.

The Whale Road Reviewed at BlackGate.com

Robert Low’s Sequel to The Whale Road, The Wolf Sea, just came out last spring — and it is defintiely a book I plan to review soon. If you like historical adventure, Low’s series is something I highly recommend.