Samantha Sinclair and her colleagues at the Maritime & Coastguard Agency provided swift and enthusiastic validation of the search and rescue helicopter scene.
A Yachtsman’s Log by Frank G. G. Carr (Lovat Dickson & Thompson, London, 1935) was a rich source of information about the layout, sail plan and handling characteristics of a ‘Bristol Channel pilot cutter’. Frank Carr’s boat, TheCariad, was built in 1904, and by 1922 was the last sailing pilot cutter in service. She has since been restored and now sails off the southern Brittany coast.
For the vocabulary and style of Nordic Sagas, I drew on the Heimskringla by Snorri Sturluson (written ca. 1230), as translated into English by Erling Monsen and A. H. Smith and published as From the Sagas of the Norse Kings (Dreyers Forlag, Oslo, 1967).
The fragment of Torbjørn Hornklove’s poem ‘The Battle of Hafersfjord’ is from a translation placed in the public domain by the Department of Humanities at the University of Oslo.
Old Norse words and phrases were verified using A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic by Geir Tómasson Zoëga (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1910).
Anglo-Saxon words were provided by An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online (https://web.archive.org/web/20190717111339/http://bosworthtoller.com).
The short extract from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 876–7 is an edited version of the 1914 translation by J. A. Giles, formerly in the MonumentaHistorica Britannica and now in the public domain (Wikisource).
Finally, huge thanks to Xander Cansell and the team at Unbound for picking Draca out of the submissions pile, and for providing the excellent editorial services of Philip Purser-Hallard and Derek Collett.
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Draca Page 32