FRANS G. BENGTSSON (1894–1954) was born and raised in the southern Swedish province of Skåne, the son of an estate manager. His early writings, including a doctoral thesis on Geoffrey Chaucer and two volumes of poetry written in what were considered antiquated verse forms, revealed a career-long interest in historical literary modes and themes. Bengtsson was a prolific translator (of Paradise Lost, The Song of Roland, and Walden), essayist (he published five collections of his writings, mostly on literary and military topics), and biographer (his two-volume biography of Charles XII won the Swedish Academy’s annual prize in 1938). In 1941 he published Roede Orm, sjoefarare i vaesterled (Red Orm on the Western Way), followed, in 1945, by Roede Orm, hemma i oesterled (Red Orm at Home and on the Eastern Way). The two books were published in a single volume in the United States and England in 1955 as The Long Ships. During the Second World War, Bengtsson was outspoken in his opposition to the Nazis, refusing to allow for a Norwegian translation of The Long Ships while the country was still under German occupation. He died in 1954 after a long illness.
MICHAEL MEYER (1921–2000) was a translator, novelist, biographer, and playwright, best known for his translations of the works of Ibsen and Strindberg. His biography of Ibsen won the Whitbread Prize for Biography in 1971.
MICHAEL CHABON is the author of ten books, including The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, The Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Klay, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son. He lives in Berkeley, California.
THE LONG SHIPS
FRANS G. BENGTSSON
Translated from the Swedish by
MICHAEL MEYER
Introduction by
MICHAEL CHABON
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
CONTENTS
Cover
Biographical Note
Title Page
Maps
Introduction
Translator's Note
THE LONG SHIPS
Epigraph
PROLOGUE. How the shaven men fared in Skania in King Harald Bluetooth’s time
PART ONE: THE LONG VOYAGE
I Concerning Thane Toste and his household
II Concerning Krok’s expedition, and how Orm set forth on his first voyage
III How they sailed southwards, and how they found themselves a good guide
IV How Krok’s men came to Ramiro’s kingdom, and how they paid a rewarding visit
V How Krok’s luck changed twice, and how Orm became left-handed
VI Concerning the Jew Solomon and the Lady Subaida, and how Orm got his sword Blue-Tongue
VII How Orm served Almansur, and how he sailed with St. James’ bell
VIII Concerning Orm’s sojourn among the monks of St. Finnian, and how a great miracle occurred at Jellinge
IX How King Harald Bluetooth celebrated Yule
X How Orm lost his necklace
XI Concerning the wrath of Brother Willibald, and how Orm tried his hand at wooing
XII How Orm came home from his long voyage
PART TWO: IN KING ETHELRED’S KINGDOM
I Concerning the battle that was fought at Maldon, and what came after it
II Concerning spiritual things
III Concerning marriage and baptism, and King Ethelred’s silver
IV How Brother Willibald taught King Sven a maxim from the Scriptures
PART THREE: IN THE BORDER COUNTRY
I How Orm built his house and church and how they named his red-haired daughters
II How they planned a christening feast for King Harald’s grandson
III Concerning the strangers that came with salt, and how King Sven lost a head
IV How Orm preached to the salt-peddler
V Concerning the great christening feast, and how the first Smalanders came to be baptized
VI Concerning four strange beggars, and how the Erin Masters came to Father Willibald’s assistance
VII Concerning the King of Sweden’s sword-bearer, and the magister from Aachen and his sins
VIII Concerning the sinful magister’s second sin and the penance to which he was condemned for it
IX How the magister searched for heifers and sat in a cherry tree
X Concerning the women’s doings at the Kraka Stone, and how Blue-Tongue’s edge became dented
XI Concerning Toke Gray-Gullsson and a misfortune that befell him, and of a foul gift Orm received from the Finnvedings
XII Concerning the Thing at the Kraka Stone
PART FOUR: THE BULGAR GOLD
I Concerning the end of the world, and how Orm’s children grew up
II Concerning the man from the East
III Concerning the story of the Bulgar gold
IV How they planned to get the gold
V How they sailed to the Gotland Vi
VI How they rowed to the Dnieper
VII Concerning what happened at the weirs
VIII How Orm met an old friend
IX Concerning their journey home, and how Olof Summerbird vowed to become a Christian
X How they settled accounts with the crazy magister
XI Concerning the great hounds’ chase
Copyright and More Information
INTRODUCTION
IN MY CAREER as a reader I have encountered only three people who knew The Long Ships, and all of them, like me, loved it immoderately. Four for four: from this tiny but irrefutable sample I dare to extrapolate that this novel, first published in Sweden during the Second World War, stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure to every single human being on the face of the earth.
The record of a series of three imaginary but plausible voyages (inter rupted by a singularly eventful interlude of hanging around the house) undertaken by a crafty, resourceful, unsentimental, and mildly hypochondriacal Norseman named “Red Orm” Tosteson, The Long Ships is itself a kind of novelistic Argos aboard which, like the heroes of a great age, all the strategies deployed by European novelists over the course of the preceding century are united—if not for the first, then perhaps for the very last time. The Dioscuri of nineteenth-century realism, factual precision and mundane detail, set sail on The Long Ships with nationalism, medievalism, and exoticism for shipmates, brandishing a banner of nineteenth-century romance; but among the heroic crew mustered by Frans Bengtsson in his only work of fiction is an irony as harsh and forgiving as anything in Dickens, a wit and skepticism worthy of Stendhal, an epic Tolstoyan sense of the anti-epic, and the Herculean narrative drive, mighty and nimble, of Alexandre Dumas. Like half the great European novels, The Long Ships is big, bloody, and far-ranging, concerned with war and treasure and the grand deeds of men and kings; like the other half, it is intimate and domestic, centered firmly around the seasons and pursuits of village and farm, around weddings and births, around the hearths of women who see only too keenly through the grand pretensions of men and bloody kings.
The book offers, therefore—as you might expect from a novel with the potential to please every literate human being in the entire world—something for everyone, and if until now The Long Ships has languished in the secondhand bins of the English-speaking world, this is certainly through no fault of its author, Frans Bengtsson, whom the reader comes to regard—as we come to regard any reliable, capable, and congenial companion in the course of any great novel, adventure, or novel of adventure—as a friend for life. Bengtsson re-creates the world of 1000 AD, as seen through the eyes of some of its northernmost residents, with telling detail and persuasive historiography, with a long view of human vanity, and with the unflagging verve of a born storyteller—but above all, and this is the most remarkable of the book’s many virtues, with
an intimate detachment, a neighborly distance, a sincere irony, that feels at once ancient and postmodern. It is this astringent tone, undeceived, versed in folly, at once charitable and cruel, that is the source of the novel’s unique flavor, the poker-faced humor that is most beloved by those who love this book. Though at times the story, published in two parts each consisting of two parts over a span of several years, has an episodic feel, each of its individual components' narratives is well constructed of the soundest timbers of epic, folktale and ripping yarn, and as its hero grows old and sees his age passing away, that episodic quality comes to feel, in the end, not like some congeries of saga and tall tale but like the accurate representation of one long and crowded human life.
Nor can blame for the neglect of The Long Ships be laid at the feet of Bengtsson’s English translator, Michael Meyer, who produced a version of the original the faithfulness of which I leave for the judgment of others but whose utter deliciousness, as English, I readily proclaim. The antique chiming that stirs the air of the novel’s sentences (without ever overpowering or choking that air with antique dust) recalls the epics and chronicles and history our mother tongue (a history after all shared, up to a point, with the original Swedish), and the setting of parts of the action in Dark Ages Britain further strengthens the reader’s deceptive sense that he or she is, thanks to the translator’s magic and art, reading a work of English literature. Toss in the novel’s unceasing playfulness around the subject of Christianity and its relative virtues and shortcomings when compared to Islam and, especially, to the old religion of the northern forests (a playfulness that cannot disguise the author’s profound but lightly worn concern with questions of ethics and the right use and purpose of a life), and the startling presence, in a Swedish Viking story, of a sympathetic Jewish character, and you have a work whose virtues and surprises ought long since to have given it a prominent place at least in the pantheon of the world’s adventure literature if not world literature full stop.
The fault, therefore, must lie with the world, which, as any reader of The Long Ships could tell you, buries its treasures, despises its glories, and seeks contentment most readily in the places where it is least likely to be found. My encounter with The Long Ships came when I was fourteen or fifteen, through the agency of a true adventurer, my mother’s sister, Gail Cohen. Toward the end of the sixties she had set off, with the rest of her restless generation of psychic Vikings, on a journey that led from suburban Maryland, to California where she met and fell in love with a roving young Dane, to Denmark itself, where she settled and lived for twenty years. It was on one of her periodic visits home that she handed me a U.K. paperback edition of the book, published by Fontana, which she had randomly purchased at the airport in Copenhagen, partly because it was set in her adopted homeland and partly because there was nothing on the rack that looked any better. “It’s really good,” she assured me, and I would soon discover for myself the truth of this assessment, which in turn I would repeat to other lucky people over the years to come. Gail’s own adventure came to an end at home, in America, in the toils of cancer. When she looked back at the map of it, like most true adventurers, she saw moments of joy, glints of gold, and happy chances like the one that brought this book into her hands. But I fear that like most true adventurers—and unlike Bengtsson’s congenitally fortunate hero—she also saw, looking back, that grief overtopped joy, that trash obscured the treasure, that, in the end, the bad luck outweighed the good.
That is the great advantage, of course, that reading holds over what we call “real life.” Adventure is a dish that is best eaten takeout, in the comfort of one’s own home. As you begin your meal, as you set off with Frans Bengtsson and Red Orm and the restless spirit of my aunt, I salute you, and bid you farewell, and even though I have just finished reading the book for the fourth time, I envy you the pleasure you are about to find in the pages of The Long Ships. When you arrive at its bittersweet, but mostly sweet, conclusion, I trust that you will turn to your shipmate, your companion in adventure, and swear by ancient oaths, as I hereby swear to you: It is really good.
—MICHAEL CHABON
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
THE ACTION of The Long Ships covers, approximately, the years 980-1010 of our era. At that time the southern provinces of Sweden belonged to Denmark, so that Orm, though born and bred in Skania, regarded himself as a Dane.1
The Vikings harried the countries of northern and western Europe more or less continuously for a period of over two hundred years, from the end of the eighth century until the beginning of the eleventh. Most of the raids on western Europe were carried out by Danes and Norwegians; for the Swedes regarded the Baltic as their domain, and at the end of the ninth century founded in Russia a kingdom that endured for three hundred and fifty years, until the coming of the Mongols. Ireland was, at first, the favorite western hunting-ground of the Vikings; it was not until 838, forty years after the first attack on Ireland, that they began to raid England in large numbers. For the next sixty years, however, they— especially the great Ragnar Hairy-Breeks and his terrible sons— troubled England cruelly, until Alfred withstood them and forced them to come to terms. Then, from 896 until 979, England enjoyed eighty years of almost unbroken respite from their fury. In France the Northmen were so feared that, in 911, Charles the Simple ceded part of his kingdom to them; this came to be known as Normandy, the Northmen’s land. Vikings peopled Iceland in 860, and Greenland in 986. In the latter year a Viking ship heading for Greenland went off its course and reached America, which, because of the good grapes they found there, the men named “Wineland the Good.’ Several other Viking ships sailed to America during the next twenty years.
The Battle of Jörundfjord, or Hjörungavag, so frequently referred to in the following pages, was one of the most famous battles fought in the north during the Viking age. It was fought between the Norwegians and the Jomsvikings. The Jomsvikings (to quote Professor C. Turville-Petre) were “a closed society of Vikings, living according to their own laws and customs. None of them might be younger than eighteen years, and none older than fifty; they must not quarrel amongst themselves, and each must avenge the other as his brother.” No woman was allowed within their citadel, Jomsborg, which was sited on the southern shore of the Baltic, probably in the region of where Swinemünde now stands. According to Icelandic sources, Canute’s father, King Sven Fork-beard, invited the Jomsvikings to a feast. As the ale flowed, King Sven swore an oath to invade England and kill Ethelred the Unready or else drive him into exile. The Jomsviking chieftain, Sigvalde, swore in his turn to sail to Norway and kill the rebel Jarl Haakon or else drive him into exile. All the other Jomsvikings, including the two Skanian chieftains, Bue Digre and Vagn Akesson, swore to follow him. They sailed to Norway with sixty ships, but Haakon got wind of their approach and, when at last they turned into Jörundfjord, they found him waiting for them with a fleet of no less than one hundred and eighty ships. At first, despite being thus outnumbered, the Jomsvikings looked likely to prevail; but the weather turned against them and, after a bitter struggle, they were routed and slaughtered almost to a man.
This was in 989. In the following spring another vital battle was fought in Sweden, on Fyris Plain before Uppsala, when the dreaded Styrbjörn, the exiled nephew of King Erik of Sweden, sought to win his uncle’s kingdom, but was killed by a chance spear in the first moments of the fight. It is to the echoes of these two battles that The Long Ships opens.
M. M.
1. Denmark also claimed suzerainty over Norway, though the Norwegians regarded themselves as independent.
THE LONG SHIPS
Harp Song of the Dane Women
What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?
She has no house to lay a guest in—
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.
She has
no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you—
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.
Yet, when the signs of summer thicken,
And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,
Yearly you turn from our side, and sicken—
Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters.
You steal away to the lapping waters,
And look at your ship in her winter-quarters.
You forget our mirth, and talk at the tables,
The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables—
To pitch her sides and go over her cables.
Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow,
And the sound of your oar-blades, falling hollow,
Is all we have left through the months to follow.
Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?
RUDYARD KIPLING
PROLOGUE
HOW THE SHAVEN MEN FARED IN SKANIA IN KING HARALD BLUETOOTH’S TIME
MANY restless men rowed north from Skania with Bue and Vagn, and found ill fortune at Jörundfjord; others marched with Styrbjörn to Uppsala and died there with him. When the news reached their homeland that few of them could be expected to return, elegies were declaimed and memorial stones set up; where-upon all sensible men agreed that what had happened was for the best, for they could now hope to have a more peaceful time than before, and less parceling out of land by the ax and sword. There followed a time of plenty, with fine rye harvests and great herring catches, so that most people were well contented; but there were some who thought that the crops were tardy, and they went a-viking in Ireland and England, where fortune smiled on their wars; and many of them stayed there.
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