ABSTRACT
Snorri Kristjansson’s Swords of Good Men (2013) is a very bad book. The story takes place in the Viking age, as Olag Tryggvasson is subjugating Norway, and sets up an apocalyptic conflict between the old gods and Christianity. There are many things which make this a dreadful read, but believe it or not, the fact that one of the Norns has a human body and leads the resistance to Tryggvasson’s Christian hordes is not one of them. Nor is it that Odin, Freyja, Thor, and Loki make their own brief appearances. What bothered me the most, apart from the writing itself, was the author’s brazen indifference to period detail, which led him to populate the story with any number of anachronistic and even fantastical weapons, and which led him to invent the combat and siege from whole cloth rather than basing any of it in historical fact or—heaven forbid!—mechanics.
