1976, Bantam Books, 217 pages

For anyone that has researched the Norse, the brief fragment of Ibn Fadlan from A. D. 922 describing a Norse funeral in Russia, in which a slave girl is inseminated by the foremost men and then sacrificed by The Angel of Death, an old shamanic crone, leaves a lasting impression. I read it when I was 14, at about the time this novel was written. This passage and the few associated observations were used in the first season of the cable series The Vikings, and also served Michael Crichton in his off beat exploration of two European questions:

Who were “the little people” who figure so prominently in legend as dwarves, elves, leprechauns, pixies, kobolds, goblins and brownies?

Crichton answers this question with the other huge European origins question, The Neanderthals.

He does so by tying in the historical observations of Ibn Fadlan and the saga of Beowulf. All along he commits to the fiction that there is a complete account of Fadlan’s manuscript and names various cleverly contrived bogus sources, until finally he lets the reader of the hook by naming the Necronomicon by H.P. Lovecraft as a source. The footnotes are predominantly nonfiction and informative.

The author does present a clear picture of the depths of slavery in Arabic and Norse culture. Indeed the word slave derives from the Arabic term for the Slavic girls they bought from Rus slave raiders.

As a Neanderthal-identified reader I quite liked the following line from a Norseman to Ibn Fadlan, “You Arabs are like old women, you tremble at the sight of life.”

The illustrations by Ian Miller are perfectly harsh and ritualistic in tone.

If you can’t get a hold of the book, try the movie The Thirteenth Warrior, with Antonio Banderas.