Snake the Red - The Complete Saga

Snake the Red — is taken by Vikings as a boy and spends his youth as a slave in Moorish Spain before earning his freedom with a sword. His road home leads through the courts of King Harald Bluetooth and King Ethelred of England, across seas thick with longships, and into the strange new world that Christianity is making of the North.

Snake the Red has come home. He builds his farm on the Swedish border, raises a palisade and a church, and sets about converting his neighbours — by persuasion where possible, by other means when necessary. His red-haired daughters grow fierce and his son grows fiercer, and the years settle into something almost like peace. Then word comes of a fortune in Bulgarian gold, buried somewhere along the eastern river road. Snake assembles his crew and sets out through the Baltic and down the Dnieper — into the world the Norse call Gardarike, where the rapids are deadly and the trading posts are full of armed men who have heard the same rumour.

Frans G. Bengtsson's saga is drily funny, relentlessly readable, and completely its own thing. This translation aims to bring that voice into modern English without losing the deadpan grandeur of the original.