I traveled to Iceland last year, read a bunch of stuff, and found a few books while I was there. Top of that stack was Smile of the Wolf, by Tim Leach.

Kjaran, a wandering skald (a bard), and Gunnar, a retired Viking raider who has made his home in Iceland, encounter a “ghost”, with fatal consequences. The outcome of that start a feud that drives the entire novel. The early part of the book is so transporting. I’m there, in Iceland, in the 10th century. So well done. Here’s the first paragraph:

In the distant lands where men worship the White Christ, I have heard that a ghost is not such a dangerous thing. They are creatures of no substance, who may wail and howl but cannot hurt a man. But in my country, the people are warriors even in death. Our ghosts are not shadow and air, but walk- ing flesh. They wield their weapons with as much strength as they did in life, and more bravely, for they have nothing left to fear. And so, when we heard that Hrapp Osmundsson had crawled from his grave and begun to wander his lands at night, no man in the Salmon River Valley would leave his house after dark without a good blade at his side and a shield on his arm.

The early parts of Smile of the Wolf capture the grim beauty that is both the Icelandic terrain and the pagan northern world view. It mirrors the classic Icelandic sagas in many ways, but where the saga characters are usually pretty opaque, we get inside the heads of the characters and get a detail and color the sagas don’t provide, yet the cadence and speaking voices can be suitably terse or blunt.

The narrative and the prose really work for me. The initial scenes with the “ghost”, and events that follow, are magic. The gradual progression of the resulting feud, leading up to the critical inflection point in the novel, has the same fatalistic unfolding of the sagas. 

Eventually, one of the characters is Outlawed, which in medieval Iceland meant any man could kill you – so outlaws either left Iceland, or lived in desolate areas no one came to. I loved the Outlaw sequence. Many of the sagas feature people being outlawed, but none that I have read really explore what that means to the individual beyond being constantly on one’s guard to avoid being killed. I thought Leach added a lot of color, with the cave, the farming, the thieving, the cold, the rough medicine (for example, having your fingers amputated). 

Many of the sagas (and Smile of the Wolf) feel like American Westerns to me. And of course what’s more Old West than Outlaws? But it feels an interesting difference to me. The American Outlaws feel as though they have chosen their life, and being an Outlaw means one places oneself outside the law. It feels an active, individual choice in a way – I Choose to disobey the law. In the sagas, being an Outlaw is in a way not about choosing to disobey laws, it is that society places you outside the law, the laws do not protect you. You are outside the law, and can be killed. But society is doing it to you, rather than you doing it to society (a few related articles on being an Outlaw in Iceland, if your interests run that way.)

I also found very interesting the treatment of Christianity in the latter half of the book, and the inner life that might lead a pagan who follows the old gods to convert. Again, many books have explored the intersection of the Viking world with Christianity, but usually Christians are portrayed as pious, meek, and not necessarily fierce in battle, and the conversion process has always felt like it was just words, for convenience or under duress. The priest Thorvaldur who joins their Outlaw band is just a fierce a Viking as anyone. And the Christian God of SotW is not the God of love and mercy, that God is the God of Revenge, and feels like a bit like just another god. (also interesting: the Christian God and the White Christ seem pretty conflated in Kjaran’s head….). The Last Kingdom, by Bernard Cornwell (or the TV show), and the relationship between Uhtred and Alfred is an interesting comparison.

I read SotW with a friend on my social reading app, Bookship. They found parts of the book less convincing than I, and wished that some of the characters had been more explored – which I can’t argue with – they are fascinating people, some more explored than others. But in the large, I found the book transporting, and perhaps the best modern capture of the spirit and worldview that is the Icelandic sagas.