A Dynasty of Giants (Viking Sagas Book 1) Read online

  A Dynasty of Giants

  A novel by

  J.A. Snow

  Book One of the “Viking Sagas”

  TEXT COPYRIGHT J.A. SNOW 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the author.

  Introduction

  All myths and legends begin with a kernel of truth. In the land of the early Vikings, stories sprang from a variety of sources, both real and imagined. Twenty centuries later we can glean from them only what makes logical sense to the modern man’s intellect or we can let our minds wander into the mythical realm and absorb a little of the wonder of the ancient times. It was a time of vivid images and colorful folklore that still fascinates us today.

  The word viking is derived from “vik” which means a “creek, inlet, or bay”. Another definition comes from the Norwegian district of “Viken” (derived from the Old Norse) meaning a person from the “Viken”. People from the Viken area were not known then as Vikings, but rather “vikverir” meaning “vik dwellers”. Still another word from the Old Norse language, vika, means a sea mile or the distance between two shifts of rowers.

  Whatever its origins, the word viking seems to be connected to nautical terms and, indeed, the seas, rivers and lakes played an important part in their lives. What is known as the official Viking Age did not begin until the late eighth century and lasted only about three hundred years, although there was no precise beginning or end. During this period, they became famous for raiding many parts of Northern Europe, arriving in their longboats and pillaging from seaport to seaport, sailing up rivers and attacking inland cities as well. But, they had existed for centuries before that. Up until they burst upon the unsuspecting European coastline they had lived in their own semblance of peace, fighting with local clans when disputes arose and eking out a living with their hands. Unfortunately, in those days, simple squabbles could (and often did) lead to death.

  The Vikings had no word for religion, but, rather, their beliefs centered around ideals and customs. They believed that the universe had been formed from a great void known as Ginnungagap and that gods and giants emerged from a land of fire and ice. They believed that the first human beings were called Askr and Embla, much like the Biblical Adam and Eve. Instead of Eve being formed from the rib of Adam, however, the Vikings believed they were both created by the gods from logs of driftwood washed ashore. Most believed in the one-eyed god, Odin, and a plethora of other lesser gods.

  Viking society consisted of three social classes: jarls, karls and thralls. The thralls were the lowest form of slaves, traded and bartered among the wealthy as mere goods. Above them were the karls who, in modern day, would have been considered the working-class. Karls could advance and rise to the level of jarl if they were shrewd enough in their business dealings. The jarls held the highest rung on the aristocracy ladder; these were the vast landholders, the virtual “kings” of the early Viking society. They lived in expansive longhouses built of wood, rock and sod, which they shared with their livestock, their thralls and their extended families.

  Our story goes back to the second century to the Viking man known as Kaleva, who was hired by a Russian prince to help conquer the lands from Eistland (now Estonia) to Kiev. Kaleva was, no doubt, hired because of his impressive physical stature, for he was nothing more than a simple boat builder and had no experience as a warrior. He was, however, a mountain of a man, standing close to eight feet tall and weighing nearly five hundred pounds, a sinewy hulk as strong as a team of oxen, widely known as the “giant”. When he wielded his massive axe and sword, it was said he could tear down any wall with a single swing of his right arm and behead several men at the same time with his left. Kaleva’s prowess in battle was so impressive that Viking children were threatened to sleep with the mere mention of his name before bedtime. On the battlefields, with the Russian prince, he struck down hundreds of men and never seemed to suffer any fatal wounds himself, as no one was big enough or strong enough to be a mortal threat to him.

  After Kaleva had won the battles in which he was hired to fight, the prince gave him the land west of the mountains known as Kvenland as his reward, where he went to live and rule for another half century. He put down his axe and sword and went back to boat-building, swearing never to wage war ever again. He settled in a small village on the coast of the Gandvik, married a Kvenish woman and built himself a longhouse, adding another building in which to build his boats. Around the buildings, he built a high rock palisade for protection from thieves and rival clans. He had one son named Fornjot, who would eventually grow to be almost (but not quite) as big as his father. After Kaleva had passed away, he was remembered fondly as the “Ancient Giant”.

  The land of Kvenland was situated in a place that is now known as Finland. A very long, narrow valley of forests and lakes between towering mountains on the east and the Gandvik (called the Gulf of Bothnia today) on the west, it was a land of bone-chilling winters and beautiful but very short summers. Kvenland was not only cold but it could be a noisy place as well. Still today, it is quite inhospitable nine months out of every year with its deep snow drifts and deafening winds that whip and whistle their way up through the fjords and down through the clefts in the rocks that had once been rivers of glacial ice. It was on just such a turbulent night that Kaleva’s son, Fornjot, was born and our story begins in 160 A.D.

  The giant in front of you is never bigger than the gods who live within you.

  Christine Caine

  Part One

  “Growing Up Giants”

  Chapter One “Fornjot”

  The north wind was screaming at the door and permeating like icy fingers poking through the cracks in the rock walls of the longhouse. Helga was laying on the floor, writhing in excruciating pain. Her body was drenched in sweat; it was trickling down her temples, burning her eyes with its saltiness. Blood had already begun to flow from between her legs, draining her body of the strength she needed to complete the birth, staining the mat of sea-grass beneath her a dark shade of crimson. Kaleva sat beside her, wringing his huge hands, not knowing what to do.

  “Go fetch Nordrana,” Helga pleaded with her husband.

  Kaleva hesitated. The mere thought of the village witch’s hands touching his wife sent chills up his spine. Nordrana did not worship the gods of Asgard, as did most of the people in Kvenland; instead, she held dark rituals and offered up live animals in a most hideous way to the spirits of the underworld. She even looked like a demon, with her tangled, coarse grey hair and her narrow, steely eyes that were sunken back into their sockets, giving her face the look of a flesh-less skull. And, yet, she was the most seasoned midwife in Kvenland. “Are you sure?” he asked.

  Helga nodded. She reached out and took his hand, squeezing it tightly in her tiny one. In her eyes was the look of desperation. “Please, Kaleva. Go now, before it is too late to save our child.”

  He rose reluctantly, wrapping a thick cloak of marten skins around his powerful shoulders and pulling a woolen cap down over his long, braided, yellow hair. When he opened the door, a tremendous gust of cold arctic air flooded in and scattered ashes from the fire around the room. “I will return soon,” he promised her.

  The roads were empty in the early morn; most of the inhabitants of the little village on the Gandvik were still indoors, filling their stomachs with warm mead to stave off the cold before they ventured outside. All alone, Kaleva hurried along through the snowdrifts, cutting a wide, deep swath with his body and headed toward the hovels that dotted the frozen harbor, the homes of the poorest of the villagers. It was also home to the shamans
and thieves that existed on the edge of Kvenish society. Kaleva was not afraid of any of them physically, for he towered above all the men in Kvenland and most of his people respected him. It was the witchcraft and bloody rituals practiced by a few that made him uneasy. And, now, having to summon one of the very worst to come assist in the birth of his child was contrary to everything he believed in.

  He knocked on the door of the last shanty, the one closest to the water’s edge, its greying boards crusted white from the spray off the harbor. The aroma of burning sage, mixed with the smell of salt water and rotting animal flesh, struck his face when the door was opened. It was murky inside and a pair of bloodshot eyes appeared out of the darkness, looking up at Kaleva through the smoke that lingered in the air, with an unfriendly stare.

  “Nordrana,” demanded Kaleva. “You must come tend to my wife. She has labored for hours and the babe won’t be born.”

  The old woman did not utter a discernable word, only incoherent mumblings under her breath. He watched her from the doorstep, as she went about collecting items she would need in her birthing ritual. She plucked dried bunches of musky herbs, a ball of soiled twine and some strange-looking bird eggs from a basket near the door and pocketed a large knife shaped from bone. She pulled the hood of her dirty grey robe up over her head and followed Kaleva back to the longhouse in silence. When they reached the door, Kaleva took the old woman by the throat and looked directly into her eyes. “If she dies, you die, Witch,” he said. “Remember that.”

  She immediately motioned for Kaleva to leave the room with a sweep of her bony hands and she went to work, laying the strange eggs on Helga’s distended stomach and burning the pungent herbs in a bowl beside her prostrate body, all the while chanting in some foreign tongue. Then she pulled out her knife and went to cutting. It went on for hours, or so it seemed to Kaleva, who sat in the kitchen a few feet away. Just when he thought he could not stand another minute listening to the old crone torturing his wife, he heard the sound of a baby crying and he burst through the doorway, expecting to see his wife smiling, holding their child.

  The scene was not what he expected however. Nordrana was attending to the babe in a corner of the room, an enormous infant covered in blood and its own feces. Kaleva watched as her wrinkled old hands cut the purple umbilical cord that was as thick as a chicken neck and tied it off with twine. It was a boy with a good pair of lungs and his cries almost drowned out the sound of the wind outside; Kaleva was pleased with that. Helga had given him a strong, healthy son! After taking a moment to inspect the baby to be sure he had all his fingers and toes, he finally turned toward his poor wife, who was lying motionless and silent, in a coagulating pool of her own blood. Her eyes were closed and her skin was quite pallid; from his days on the battlefields, Kaleva knew well the look of death.

  “I could not save her, Jarl Kaleva,” Nordrana said. Her eyes were dull, not at all reflective of the fear she was feeling in her gut; she knew that the jarl could easily kill her on the spot, as he had threatened.

  “Get out, Woman,” said Kaleva miserably. He was wise enough to know that the labor of bringing his enormous son into the world was the cause of his wife’s death and, although he would have enjoyed killing the old witch just for good measure, he restrained himself and focused on the boy. “I will need a wet nurse,” he barked at Nordrana. “Send one from the village and perhaps I won’t cut your throat.”

  The witch gathered up the tools of her trade and fled the house quickly. Kaleva sat beside his new son and his dead wife. He stroked Helga’s blond hair and felt unmanly tears pooling in his eyes. He decided immediately to name the boy Fornjot, for a giant he certainly was, splitting his own mother apart to come into the world. So large and yet so small, Kaleva thought to himself, and such a long way from becoming a man.

  And, so, that very day, Fornjot went off to live with a neighbor woman, who was suckling a baby of her own, and agreed to help Kaleva keep the boy alive. Fornjot grew quickly at the breast of his wet nurse. For his first few years, he remained with her until it was time for him to be weaned, and every week Kaleva came to check on the boy’s progress. When he was finally old enough to feed and clothe himself, he came home to live in his father’s longhouse that they shared with a flock of chickens, two cows and several noisy goats. Young Fornjot was given the task of shoveling the animal dung off the dirt floor, for even though his father was the jarl of the valley and his son was next in line to rule Kvenland, Kaleva believed in teaching the boy the value of hard work and humility.

  By the age of six, when most boys his age were barely able to wield an axe, young Fornjot was already trudging up the mountainside with Kaleva every summer, felling the towering pines and ash trees that grew there. He was as strong as two grown men by the time he was ten, and, every year he built boats with his widowed father. Side by side they toiled every day and, in the evenings, they would sit by the fire or, in the few months when the weather was pleasant, on the rock palisade that surrounded their land. Kaleva would tell his son the stories he had heard from his father, magical stories of dwarves who were said to live under the rocks, and trolls who were the spirits of the woodlands. The lad was fascinated by the places in his father’s stories, places like Asgard, the home of the one-eyed god Odin, Jotunheim where the real giants lived, and the Other Place, where the demons that Nordrana worshipped lurked in the darkness.

  When he was still very young, for Fornjot was never little, he always feared losing sight of his father and worried that Kaleva would go away and leave him just as his mother had. But, as he continued to grow bigger and stronger, he began to lose his fears. Even if he had not been the jarl’s son, his mere size kept other boys and their fathers alike from challenging him. Soon he lost all fear of the gods and the demons too, forgetting that he was, still, just a mere mortal. Kaleva doted on the boy and, despite his best intentions, spoiled him, knowing Fornjot would be his only son, for after Helga’s death he had lost the will to marry again and risk losing another wife.

  Every summer Kaleva and Fornjot would carry their finished boats to the nearby shore where they tested their seaworthiness. After months of back-breaking, tedious work, it was quite a sight to see father and son emerge from the boathouse, one at the bow and one at the stern, with the keel of a new boat resting on their broad shoulders, and make their way down the valley road to the harbor on the Gandvik or across to one of the nearby lakes, of which Kvenland had thousands. Kaleva had built a good business; his boats were much improved from their earlier models that were crafted of animal skins and bone. Now he built strong, sturdy, clinker-built vessels, held together with crude iron spikes and hardwood that was pounded and stretched into perfectly-tapered, over-lapping strakes. Customers came from near and far with silver in their pockets and Kaleva became quite wealthy.

  Kaleva was the ruler of all Kvenland, but he never considered himself a jarl and never referred to himself as such. He was a simple man who only wanted to be left alone to build his boats and raise his son. When not on the battlefield, he was surprisingly soft-spoken and quiet, rarely quarreling with the neighboring clans. But he was very protective of his people and Kvenland knew prosperity and security unlike ever before.

  Many people migrated to Kvenland during the years when Fornjot was growing up; some were Saamis from the north, known as the reindeer people, for they brought their herds of reindeer with them every spring, pitching their tents on the outskirts of the village and letting their reindeer roam freely to forage for fodder while they brought news and a supply of fresh venison. Some were Finns from the south, traders of foreign goods; others were fishermen from villages to the east, attracted to the large lakes and the deep harbor of the Gandvik, that were teeming with schools of fish. Many others came from beyond the mountains for the sole purpose of purchasing the quality boats built by the giants of Kvenland.

  One Saami family arrived in the summer of Fornjot’s sixteenth year, with a daughter named Hildi who was the most captivating cre
ature he had ever seen. All his life he had worked alongside his father and kept himself so busy that the thought of marriage had not often entered his head. He and his father had managed quite well in the years since Helga’s death and he was not attracted to most of the women in Kvenland anyway, all of whom he considered ugly and fat, with coarse voices and even coarser whiskers on their chins and upper lips. Although he could not actually remember his own mother, he had heard his father describe her many times and he believed she must have been the most beautiful woman in the world. In Kaleva’s words, she had blond hair the color of sunflowers, breasts as smooth as ducklings’ down and eyes that matched the blue of the mountain skies. With that image as an example, Fornjot came to believe there were no women in Kvenland that were worthy of a second look. It began to look like he would never experience love. But, when he first set eyes on Hildi, walking through the village with her long skirts billowing in the wind and reindeer running at her heels, he fell instantly under her spell. She was quite the opposite of his golden-haired mother; her hair was as dark as a night sky and her eyes were almond-shaped, deep brown like the soft fur of an otter, with the olive-toned skin of her family. Hildi only knew a few words of the Kvenish language so their conversations were brief and mysterious.

  “Papi?” he asked his father one evening as they sat together on the rock palisade, drinking horns of warm mead and quietly enjoying the nororijos, which was what they called the colored lights that often lit up the night skies across Kvenland. “How do you know when you are in love?”

  The old man glanced at his son with a knowing smile. “Love?” he asked, thinking of his beloved Helga. The question made him uncomfortable; this was a question the boy should be asking his moder. He scratched his bearded chin and shifted his eyes back to the vivid colors above him. “Why dost thou wonder about love, my son? Hast thou been lusting after one of those handsome Saami wenches who have come to town?”