After a lot of book reviews, I’m aiming for some light-hearted fresh-scraped vellum humor for this week, thanks to the folks at Horrible Histories (and YouTube, of course – you can watch it here too). Incidentally, in the Middle Ages vellum was made from calfskin, and parchment was made from sheepskin. I even included a…
It took far longer than I expected to get around to reading Bernard Cornwell’s Death of Kings. I hoped to skim through the other five books in The Saxon Tales series before reading the sixth book, but that never came to pass. Eventually, I just dove into the novel, and I’m glad I did since…
A while back, I was doing research on Vikings for my next novel, which will be the sequel to Enoch’s Device. In the course of that research, I spent some time on Norse mythology, since many a tenth-century Viking would have clung to the worship of Thor or Odin instead of embracing the Christian faith…
I’m back from fishing – without any sighting of the Midgard Serpent, I might add – and back to a mountain of work. I had planned on writing a post on why I chose an Irish monk as the main character for my upcoming novel, Enoch’s Device. But since I’ve lacked the time to give that post…
A while back I was focused on Viking tales since my second novel has a big Viking component. I’ve unfortunately fallen way behind on both novel #2 and my reviews of great Viking tales, but at least one such tale can serve as my “beginning” of the week. So without further ado, here is the…
For my tenth “beginning,” I’ve chosen the opening passage of Bernard Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom. This is the first novel in his excellent The Saxon Tales series about the conflict between the Vikings and the English during the reign of Alfred the Great. You can read my review of The Last Kingdom here. This is…
Following the release of Death of Kings, I started re-reading some of the earlier novels in Bernard Cornwell’s fantastic series, The Saxon Tales. (You can read my review of The Last Kingdom, the first novel, here.) The books are set in England during the reign of Alfred the Great, who defended the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms against…
I’ll admit, I’m excited for the release today of Death of Kings, the sixth novel in Bernard Cornwell’s The Saxon Tales series. I wrote about the first book in the series, The Last Kingdom, back in September. For those unfamiliar with the novels, they’re about the Vikings’ attempt to conquer England in the Ninth Century….
Byzantium … Constantinople … Istanbul … For fans of historical fiction, these are all names of one of the most fascinating cities that Europe has ever known. In the early Middle Ages (a time period close to my heart), Constantinople was the greatest and wealthiest city in all of Europe, rivaled only by Cordoba in…
I’m still immersed in my research on Vikings, which leads me to another of my favorite Viking-related novels, Lion of Ireland by Morgan Llywelyn. Lion of Ireland tells the story of Brian Boru, perhaps the greatest Irish king who ever lived. He ruled at the end of the Tenth Century, during a time when Norse…
The little things you learn in research can amaze you. While continuing my studies on Vikings, I came across the story of King Harald Bluetooth of Denmark, who died after a battle with his rebellious son, Svein Forkbeard, circa 987 A.D. It turns out that Harald’s surname, “Bluetooth,” provides the name for the ever-popular technology…