This book is a companion to Hush: An Irish Princess Tale. The heroine in the first novel is Melkorka, a character who appears and reappears briefly in the Icelandic sagas Landnámabók and Laxdœla. Her younger sister, the heroine of the present novel, was made up in the first novel, and so I was free to create whatever story I wanted for her. I blended her story with the well-known story of Alfhild, the first Norse woman pirate so far as anyone knows, and the character I find most striking in the Norse Amazon tradition.
Melkorka and Brigid were princesses in Ireland in 900, but that doesn’t mean they lived in a castle. Castles didn’t come to Ireland for another couple of hundred years. In fact, there were no castles in Denmark at this time either. Instead everyone lived in homes made of wood and mud, often just branches and straw stuck together with soil, clay, sand, or animal dung, usually with only a couple of rooms. Royal families had plenty to eat and nice clothes and jewels. But their lives were not totally leisure; they helped out with chores, even though they had servants to cook and clean for them. And whole families (and often others as well), rich or poor, slept together in a single room in both Ireland and Denmark.
The people of Ireland had organized themselves into alliances of families, called tribes or clans, of perhaps a few thousand people spread across hills and valleys. They lived in private homes and owned private land, but they also shared public land. The clans each had a king. A king’s home was usually fortified by a wall and often larger than the ordinary home, perhaps with some extra rooms. Clans further allied themselves to form larger confederations with nearby clans. There were four main confederations in Ireland at this time, with four main kings. Melkorka and Brigid’s father was a lower king.
Vikings had raided the island for a little more than a hundred years, stealing wealth from monasteries, massacring many, raping and plundering. In sum, they terrorized the Irish—they were criminal. But not all Norse were this way. Some of them established towns and settled down to mix civilly with the Irish. Dublin was such a town; it was huge compared to other towns, perhaps around three thousand inhabitants just within the town walls, and many more outside in the hills and valleys. It was in Dublin that Melkorka and Brigid’s family met the problems you learn about in this book. When a Viking leader wanted to marry Melkorka, their father planned a trick to slaughter him and his men. Since the plan was dangerous, the girls’ mother tried to protect them by dressing them in peasant clothing and sending them off on a horse, not to return until the event was over. But while the girls were hiding out, a Russian slave ship captured them.
The custom of capturing people, particularly women and children, and keeping them as slaves or selling them into slavery was common in this time period (and, interestingly, was probably responsible for the spreading of certain genetic tendencies, such as the appearance of multiple sclerosis in places the Vikings traveled). The slave trade thrived, with captives moving between Europe, Asia, and Africa. In the Icelandic sagas, the slavers who stole Melkorka are Russian, so I kept them Russian in my story. However, the Russians were only one group of many who scanned the shores for slaves. Often captured women and children were brought to Miklagard, which is now called Istanbul and which was said to be the biggest city in the world at that time. People from east and west, north and south, met there for trade. That’s what happened to Melkorka. But instead of being sold in Miklagard, the Russian slaver kept her as he headed back north, and he ended by selling her to a Viking, who took her off to Iceland. Iceland was, essentially, a Norse colony at that time. Starting in the late 800s, the Norse had been settling there, although there is archeological evidence that Irish monks had settled there earlier.
Brigid, however, never traveled to Miklagard. She jumped out of the Russian slave ship as it passed through the Limfjord, way near the north of Jutland, in Denmark, straight into the icy water. Hence begins her tale, told in this book. Denmark at that time consisted of the same landmass as today plus the western coast of what is now Sweden. Across the southern border were the Franks, a people who had adopted Christianity and were viewed as a major threat by the Danes. Denmark, while a small and unimposing country today, was important at that time if for nothing else but its geographical position. It jutted up between the two seas and thus was in a position to control commerce between lands to the east and lands to the west.
Brigid could have followed many paths, for she was only eight when her life was so completely disrupted. But there was something in her character in the first book, Hush, that made me believe she would revolutionize her world. So I went searching for evidence of revolutionary women at that time. And I found Alfhild.
There are many variants on the story of Alfhild—with her living anywhere from the fifth century to the eleventh, with inconsistencies over who her parents were and what role snakes played in her time in the tower, and with debates over whether she was, in fact, a single historical figure, or a blend of several, or a complete fiction. Given these uncertainties, I felt I had some license to use those aspects of the various tales about her that made the present story cohere the way I wanted it to.
The prince Hakon in this story is also made up. However, there was a King Hakon of Norway (the third king of all Norway) around the time that this young Hakon might have become a king. That King Hakon erected beacons on hills to send messages up and down the country quickly. Also around the time of our boy Hakon’s prime, the attitudes in the Norse countries toward Christianity changed. The real King Hakon himself was in favor of Christianity, although he did not manage to make Norway accept it. Meanwhile, King Gorm, who was the first historically recognized king of all Denmark (ruling at least ten years and perhaps more than twenty, until his death in 958), was not opposed to Christianity, and his son, Harald Bluetooth, who ruled from 958 to around 987, was reputed to be baptized by a cleric who went simply by the name Poppa or Poppo or Papi.
The views of Norse mythology put forth in this book are based on materials from a few centuries later. My assumption (which is shared by many scholars of Norse culture) is that those materials were in large part based on oral traditions that predated them by hundreds of years. The first recorded versions we have of the Norse myths are in Icelandic sagas that date from around 1180 AD. But somewhere around 1225 the Icelander Snorri gave us a major work called the Snorra Edda, also known as Prose Edda. Most modern ideas about Norse mythology are based on that work. Alongside Snorri’s work is another collection called the Poetic Edda. It contains a collection of anonymous poems performed by all sorts of people on all sorts of occasions. As I was writing this book, I consulted translations of both works.