The Broken Sword!

I'm amazed it has taken me this long, most of my life as it turns out to finally read Poul Anderson's famous The Broken Sword. I thought I had read it once before, back in the 80's but soon after launching into it, I realized I was on untraveled ground. The power of this narrative is nigh magical. It captures you, snarls you in its spell and it's hard to put down. But then when you do, it's surprising how short a distance you've come. The story is exceedingly compressed, in the manner of myth which rolls out the narrative with relentlessness. 

The novel was first published in 1954, the same year that J.R.R. Tolkien's masterpiece The Lord of the Rings first began to hit the bookshelves with The Fellowship of the Ring For that reason, I gather Anderson's book has been hidden in that epic's shadow. Not because of any other reason surely as Anderson also gives us a tale full of brave warriors, elves, trolls, and other magical creatures. They are profoundly different from Tolkien's creations, filled with a brutality and violence which fills The Broken Sword. Anderson does a magnificent job of capturing that sense of fatalism which informs Icelandic sagas and other Nordic myth. We meet characters only to see them die a few paragraphs later, but rather we feel that we're being cheated of story we are immediately put onto another trail. The richness if this tale is potent. 

This is a Viking saga in which we meet a brutal man named Orm who seeks his own fame and fortune. He murders the family of a witch, and she curses him. He takes a wife Alefrida and has a son, but circumstances are such that an elf named Imric replaces the child with a changeling. The changeling is named Valgard. Imric names the boy Skafloc and raises him to be the best a human can be in the Elven way. Valgard's origins are such that he's an even more violent and brutal son for a violent and brutal man, and he feels apart from his supposed family. What roles this man and changeling play in the wars between elf and troll and to some small extent man makes up the story, as well as the great sin which forms its darkest center. These can be hard characters to like, but they are characters one can admire, if only on their own brutal terms. 

This is story I'm hesitant to discuss in too much detail, as it might spoil the potential excitement for new readers. And the purpose of this post is just that. I want to encourage everyone and anyone to read The Broken Sword. It's taken me far too long to savor this truly awesome tale and I want others to get to it as soon as possible. Michael Moorcock prefers Anderson's story to Tolkien's more famous tale, and I can see why at last, even if I do hold the latter in still high regard. Many aspects of Anderson's saga find a shape in Moorcock's expansive writings. It has been exciting to find a story I can get excited about, even after all these decades. 

It's been a while since I've read a book I didn't want end, while as at the same time I raced to the inevitable conclusion. Read The Broken Sword. 

Rip Off