Many of us followed the careers of Lagertha and Aslaug in the terrific series ‘Vikings’ with considerable interest. If that is what floats your longboat, then Lisa Hannett’s Viking Women may be your cup of mead.
Not that Viking Women is about shield maidens, more’s the pity. Rather, it is an attempt to reimagine the lives of several Norse women who feature in the Icelandic sagas. For those late to the party, the Icelandic sagas are an extraordinary body of prose literature about the Norse settlements of Iceland, Greenland and Vinland, written down some 300 years after the events they describe – told in an inimitable deadpan style. They are not history, but they are verifiably based on historical events – for the most part – and can be mined by the astute historian to get close to what those very different people thought and believed.
Hannett’s enthusiasm for her subject is evident in every page and she has a comprehensive knowledge of the Icelandic sagas and the related historiography, which is well deployed in the straight historical sections of the book.
What is unusual is that she has also attempted a fictional treatment of each of her protagonists and interleaves these short stories with her historical account of what the saga in question tells us about the lives of pagan Norse women in the ninth and tenth centuries CE.
Now this reviewer has had occasion to rail against ‘fictional history’ from time to time. But Hannett carefully separates what she imagines her Viking women must have been thinking and feeling from what we can actually reliably infer from the material in the sagas – with all the qualifications that requires (they are fiction after all, just very, very old fiction).
Hannett isn’t the first historian to venture into historical fiction – Alison Weir and Adrian Goldsworthy spring to mind as historians who have produced good historical novels – and her short stories are well written and entertaining. Well worth a look before revisiting your favourite ‘Viking’ TV series.
Reviewed by Grant Hansen
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lisa Hannett teaches undergraduate and Honours classes in Creative Writing and English, and she is a specialist in Old-Norse Icelandic literature, the Viking Age. Under her pen name, Lisa L Hannett, she is an internationally recognised, multiple award-winning writer of five books and over 75 speculative fiction short stories (fantasy, science fiction, horror, and historical fiction).
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