The Sea Road
10 best books like The Sea Road (Margaret Elphinstone): The Greenlanders, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman, The Journey Home, The Whale Road, VIKING: The Green Land, The Lighthouse Stevensons: The extraordinary story of the building of the Scottish lighthouses by the ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson, Daughter of a Thousand Years, The First Blast of the Trumpet, Finn's Fate, The Norseman
| Author | Jane Smiley |
| ISBN | 1400095468 |
Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders is an enthralling novel in the epic tradition of the old Norse sagas. Set in the fourteenth century in Europe’s most far-flung outpost, a land of glittering fjords, blasting winds, sun-warmed meadows, and high, dark...
Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed off the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say. Even after archaeologists found a Viking longhouse in Newfoundland,...
| Author | Olaf Olafsson |
| ISBN | 0571204996 |
For years, Disa has lived a quiet life, managing an English country-house hotel with her companion Anthony. However, upon learning that she is terminally ill, Disa decides it is time to travel back to the village in Iceland where she was born. Olaf Olafsson takes the reader with Disa on her quietly heroic...
| Author | Robert Low |
| ISBN | 0312361947 |
A band of brothers, committed only to each other, rides the waves, fighting for the highest bidder, treading the whale road in search of legendary relics.
Life is savage aboard a Viking raiding ship. When Orm Rurikson is plucked from the snows of Norway to brave the seas on the Fjord Elk, he becomes...
ICELAND, 982 A.D. A SHIP OF OUTLAWS. A WOMAN, ALONE. Dangerous seas…and even more dangerous secrets on board.
Iceland’s powerful Althing Council has convicted seafarer Tiller Thorvaldsson of murder - to force him on a ship for a perilous quest in search of a legendary land, said to lie...
| Author | Bella Bathurst |
| ISBN | 0006530761 |
I for one had no idea that the 14 lighthouses dotting the Scottish coast were all built by the same Stevenson family that produced Robert Louis Stevenson, Scotland's most famous novelist. But Bella Bathurst throws a powerful, revolving light into the darkness of this historical tradition.
Robert...
Daughter of a Thousand Years
Greenland, AD 1000
More than her fiery hair marks Freydís as the daughter of Erik the Red; her hot temper and fierce pride are as formidable as her Viking father’s. And so, too, is her devotion to the great god Thor, which puts her at odds with those in power—including her own brother, the...
The First Blast of the Trumpet
| Author | Marie Macpherson |
| ISBN | 1908483210 |
Hailes Castle, 1511. Midnight on a doom-laden Hallowe'en and Elisabeth Hepburn, feisty daughter of the Earl of Bothwell, makes a wish ― to wed her lover, the poet David Lindsay. But her uncle has other plans. To safeguard the interests of the Hepbum family she is to become a nun and succeed her aunt as...
This is the story of an epic journey in the tenth century which takes three young men from Lapland to Denmark where they become crew members on "Ulf", a Viking ship. They cross the North sea to plunder Anglo Saxon England. The book is linked to authentic historical events and culminates in a disaster for...
| Author | Jason Born |
| ISBN | 1468187171 |
The Norseman is the first volume of the vividly-detailed historical chronicles of Halldorr, an orphan whose entire desire was to lay beside both a warm hearth and a plump wife, but fate had another thread to spin. Instead, he found himself exiled, resigned to a life of raiding, killing for plunder and...
They came from the North and fought their way through France and Spain. Now this fearless band of brothers sets sail for the greatest city in the world.
Plunging through the living hell of Pope Leo’s shattered, perverted Rome, the dragon-faced ships of Sigurd the Lucky are manned by a strange...
"No land. No father. No brother. No son." When his father is murdered and his brother betrays him to steal his birthright as Jarl of Grenner, Ulfrik Ormsson finds himself adrift on a sea of vengeance and corruption. Aided only by a beautiful slave, a smiling warrior, and a group of blood-lusting berserkers,...
| Author | Neil M. Gunn |
| ISBN | 0571200788 |
This 1941 novel is what you may choose as a holiday book or, as I did, to read its near 600 pages over the Christmas period. First and foremost it’s one of those lovely warm stories to become immersed in, unworried about its cleverness or literary wit. Easy to hold up as an example of the ‘classic realist...
| Author | Poul Anderson |
| ISBN | 0890835977 |
Originally reviewed at Bookwraiths.
I’m a fan of history. Any history really. I love it all. But tales of the Vikings have always been one of my favorites, especially when they are filled with examples of their legendary prowess as warriors. Well, in The Golden Horn, Poul Anderson gives me...
| Author | George Mackay Brown |
| ISBN | 1904598331 |
This book takes the reader on a journey from Orkney, over to Norway, into Iceland and Ireland, recreating with historical accuracy the customs and landscapes of the time while bringing the age to life through a large cast of engaging characters. Through the telling of Ranald's story, Mackay Brown displays...
| Author | Gavin Francis |
| ISBN | 1846970784 |
The stark, vast beauty of the remote Arctic Europe landscape has been the focus of human exploration for thousands of years. In this striking blend of travel writing, history and mythology, Gavin Francis offers a unique portrait of the northern fringes of Europe. His journey begins in the Shetland...
| Author | Kevin Crossley-Holland |
| ISBN | 1847249396 |
It is 1036. Halfdan is a Viking mercenary who is determined to travel to Constantinople and become one of the Viking Guard serving Empress Zoe. He promises to take his daughter, but one morning Solveig wakes up to find him gone. Setting off in her own tiny boat, she is determined to make the journey from...
| Author | Hilda Lewis |
| ISBN | 0752439456 |
Matilda of Flanders, queen to William the Conqueror was beautiful, exquisitely small, clever, with a perfect courtesy trained in the rigid school of medieval manners. But within lay a root of darkness - inheritance, perhaps, of Viking ancestors. Twice, at least, in her lifetime the Viking streak...
| Author | Tim Severin |
| ISBN | 0330426753 |
It is Constantinople in 1035, and Thorgils has become a member of the Varangian lifeguard, where he witnesses the glories of the richest city on earth. He embarks on a campaign launched to recover Sicily from the Saracens. After years of traveling, Thorgils retreats to Sweden, but is eventually summoned...
| Author | William T. Vollmann |
| ISBN | 0140131965 |
The time is the tenth century A.D. The newcomers are a proud and bloody-minded people whose kings once changed themselves into wolves. The Norse have advanced as implacably as a glacier from Iceland to the wastes of Greenland and from there to the place they call Vinland the Good. The natives are a bronze-skinned...
Set in Norway and Iceland at the beginning of the eleventh century, this is the story of the beautiful, spoiled Vigdis Gunnarsdatter, who is casually raped by the man she had wanted to love. A woman of courage and intelligence, Vigdis is toughened by adversity. Alone she raises the child conceived in...
| Author | Sarah Bower |
| ISBN | 1905005393 |
January 1067. Charismatic bishop Odo of Bayeux commissions a wall hanging, on a scale never seen before, to celebrate the conquest of Britain by his brother, William, Duke of Normandy. What he cannot anticipate is how utterly this will change his life-even more than the invasion itself.
His...
