The Sea of Trolls

This is a long and satisfying read set in Dark Age Britain and Scandinavia. Jack, a Saxon boy of 11, is apprenticed to an Irish bard who teaches him stories as well as a servant’s normal duties, and also initiates him into the ways of the life force, the source of the bard’s magic powers. The bard is widely-travelled, and claims not only to have witnessed the events of the poem ‘Beowulf’, but also, disguised as a pike, to have helped Beowulf defeat Grendel’s mother, and to be the author of the poem itself! A year later Jack’s village hears the dreadful news of the Viking raid on Lindisfarne, which dates this book at 793 A.D. Then Jack and his little sister are kidnapped by a ship full of Viking berserkers, and taken north as slaves. Using his wits, Jack wins the favour of the captain with his weather magic, and begins to train as a skald. Unfortunately he offends the Norse Queen, a half-troll, by not finding the right way to praise her, and is sent on a quest to Jotunheim, with a Viking girl of his own age, for the magic to restore her beauty. If he fails, his sister will be sacrificed to Freya.

Farmer lists a wide range of sources: Norse myths, sagas, popular tales, and serious history books, so we know details of Viking daily life and warfare are authentic. I think I can also find echoes of other children’s books, especially The Hobbit, also based on Norse sagas, with its shape-shifter and spider-battle, and The Silver Chair, with its journey to a giant’s castle. Both the spider-battle and the castle sequence have pleasanter outcomes; the trolls respect the boy and girl and send them away with good clothes and gifts. I was also reminded of the rite-of-passage voyages chronicled by Henry Treece, for example in Horned Helmet and Viking’s Dawn where a young man takes ship with Vikings, including berserkers. Furthermore, Farmer’s USA provides the education of a young lad into nature magic and shape-shifting, in the ‘Earthsea’ saga, and her ‘life force’ recalls the Force of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Whatever she has read has been very well digested, so that The Sea of Trolls is told in a fresh, direct voice, without Tolkienian archaisms, but with occasional poetic descriptions of magical events. This is an outstanding blend of real history and fantasy, for good readers and adult fantasy fans.