I’ve just finished Land of Wooden Gods, the first book in Jan Fridegård’s trilogy set in Viking-era Sweden. This trilogy should provide a bracing antidote for tendencies to romanticize Viking-era Heathen religion or tribal society. The story takes place near ninth-century Birka, and there is action and drama aplenty, including raids, fights, and one of the great nine-year blots at Uppsala.

However, the heroes are the household thralls, and we are given a very unsentimental view of their lives and challenges. The chieftain is not a noble warrior who doles out rings, but a bowlegged bully with food in his beard and a penchant for exposing babies. Holme the smith, the male protagonist, is trying to make a living and protect his family in a savage era. Fridegård narrates the tale with a cool, dispassionate, almost clinical tone that provides an ironic contrast to the vivid plot.

Religion certainly looms large in the story, where the Heathen majority are visited by eager Christian missionaries. But the overall view of religion of any sort is largely cynical, as befits a work of social realism.

The translation by Robert Bjork includes a lengthy essay placing Fridegård and his smith-hero in the larger context of Scandinavian literature. The book is out of print, but there are plenty of used copies at Amazon.com. It should provide an interesting read for anyone seeking an imaginative but unsentimental view of what it might have been like to live in a Heathen society on the verge of conversion.