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| Author | Jackie French |
|---|---|
| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Children's historical novel |
| Publisher | HarperCollins |
Publication date | 30 March 2005 |
| Pages | 288 pp |
| ISBN | 978-0-207-20011-3 |
| OCLC | 224273471 |
They Came on Viking Ships is a children's historical novel by Jackie French, first published in Australia in 2005. In 2007 it was retitled as Slave Girl for its publication in Britain, and Rover for its publication in the United States.
The story focuses on a 12-year-old girl called Hekja. Hekja lives with her mother in a simple village by the sea. Her two brothers and father have all died. At the beginning of the book, she comes to the aid of a small puppy who was attacked by a seagull on the beach. Hekja takes the puppy to the village's witch, Tikka, for her to help heal the puppy. Hekja is told that the puppy was one of the chief's litter, and she had already given it the True Name of Riki Snarfari (Mighty Rover). The puppy was considered the useless one of the litter and apparently had no value. The chief has shown little interest in him and gives him away to Hekja but later becomes jealous of how strong the pup is. Tikka shows the girl how to look after Snarf, as he becomes known affectionately by Hekja.
Eventually, Snarf recovers, and hardly limps at all from the wound. The time comes for Hekja to spend the summer up the mountain with the other girls of the village. It is a tradition of the village for girls to stay on the mountain when they become of age, and the girls look after the cows and produce cheese whilst up the mountain, with the women bringing supplies "twice every full moon". Except for Hekja's best friend, Branna, the other girls are mean or indifferent to Hekja and abuse Snarf.
One foggy day, the girls hear a howl. Hekja goes to investigate and Snarf follows her. Hekja finds a wolf and plans to kill it before it eats one of the calves. The girls hide and try to persuade Hekja to come back and let the wolf take a calf, but Hekja is stubborn, and wherever Hekja goes, Snarf follows. The wolf appears and Snarf bites it around the neck while the wolf is biting the dog's leg. The wolf quickly dies from the bite. Snarf is considered a hero and is treated with respect and Hekja also becomes a hero. Hekja becomes friends with all the other girls and they discover that she has a wonderful singing voice. They were jealous about her making up a song about Snarf so they plead with Hekja to make a song about them.
One day, whilst still up the mountain, Hekja sees strange ships approaching from the distance. At the protests of the other girls, she runs back down to the village, only to see the Viking raiders murdering the village people, including Hekja's mother and the boy she used to love, Bran. Hekja tries to outrun the invaders, but is captured by a woman called Freydis, who is Erik the Red's daughter, and consequently is taken away as a slave.
Hekja hates the Norse and will not share her singing with them, even if it meant that she would not have to mind the cows as a thrall, if they were to hear her sing. She had told one of the Norsemen, Snorri, when he heard her sing that she did not want anybody to know that she can sing because everything has been taken away from her and that if they heard her sing they would take that away from her too. Hekja's spirit and sheer determination means that she soon finds herself joining her mistress Freydis' expedition to Vinland. Hekja befriends Freydis' brother's thrall, Hikki, and he is the only one she will sing to. They develop a firm friendship.
Upon arriving at Vinland, they find the place beautiful and welcoming. Vinland winters are so mild that the cattle can be left out all year round. Freydis and several other women in the colony are pregnant. Hikki proposes to Hekja in due course. Hekja is taken aback, but tells him to wait until she has finished serving her mistress in two years time even though she doesn't love him herself. Freydis also adopts Hekja and is now Hekja's mother.
There is another who is also after Hekja's heart however: the mysterious Snorri the Skald. He seems to like Hekja, but refrains from letting on. Hikki dies in the Viking's Skraeling raid while Snorri is wounded, and after about two months, Hekja marries Snorri the Skald and they are very happy together.
In Norse mythology, Ginnungagap is the primordial, magical void mentioned in three poems from the Poetic Edda and the Gylfaginning, the Eddaic text recording Norse cosmogony.
Vinland, Vineland, or Winland was an area of coastal North America explored by Vikings. Leif Eriksson landed there around 1000 AD, nearly five centuries before the voyages of Christopher Columbus and John Cabot. The name appears in the Vinland Sagas, and describes Newfoundland and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence as far as northeastern New Brunswick. Much of the geographical content of the sagas corresponds to present-day knowledge of transatlantic travel and North America.
In Norse mythology, Skaði is a jötunn and goddess associated with bowhunting, skiing, winter, and mountains. Skaði is attested in the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources; the Prose Edda and in Heimskringla, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson, and in the works of skalds.
In Norse mythology, a valkyrie, is one of a host of female figures who guide souls of the dead to the god Odin's hall Valhalla. There, the deceased warriors become einherjar. When the einherjar are not preparing for the events of Ragnarök, the valkyries bear them mead. Valkyries also appear as lovers of heroes and other mortals, where they are sometimes described as the daughters of royalty, sometimes accompanied by ravens and sometimes connected to swans or horses.
In Norse mythology, Ymir, also called Aurgelmir, Brimir, or Bláinn, is the ancestor of all jötnar. Ymir is attested in the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional material, in the Prose Edda, written by Snorri Sturluson in the 13th century, and in the poetry of skalds. Taken together, several stanzas from four poems collected in the Poetic Edda refer to Ymir as a primeval being who was born from Eitr, yeasty venom that dripped from the icy rivers called the Élivágar, and lived in the grassless void of Ginnungagap. Ymir gave birth to a male and female from his armpits, and his legs together begat a six-headed being. The grandsons of Búri, the gods Odin, Vili and Vé, fashioned the Earth from his flesh, from his blood the ocean, from his bones the mountains, from his hair the trees, from his brains the clouds, from his skull the heavens, and from his eyebrows the middle realm in which mankind lives, Midgard. In addition, one stanza relates that the dwarfs were given life by the gods from Ymir's flesh and blood.
Freydís Eiríksdóttir was an Icelandic woman said to be the daughter of Erik the Red, who figured prominently in the Norse exploration of North America as an early colonist of Vinland, while her brother, Leif Erikson, is credited in early histories of the region with the first European contact. The medieval and primary sources that mention Freydís are the two Vinland sagas: the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red. The two sagas offer differing accounts, though Freydís is portrayed in both as a strong woman.
Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir was an Icelandic explorer, born at Laugarbrekka in Snæfellsnes, Iceland.
The Saga of Erik the Red, in Old Norse: Eiríks saga rauða, is an Icelandic saga on the Norse exploration of North America. The original saga is thought to have been written in the 13th century. It is preserved in somewhat different versions in two manuscripts: Hauksbók and Skálholtsbók.
Grottasöngr is an Old Norse poem, sometimes counted among the poems of the Poetic Edda as it appears in manuscripts that are later than the Codex Regius. The tradition is also preserved in one of the manuscripts of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda along with some explanation of its context.
Snorri Thorfinnsson probably born between 1004 and 1013, and died c. 1090) was the son of explorers Þorfinnur Karlsefni and Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir. He is considered to be the first child of European descent to be born in the Americas, apart from Greenland. He became an important figure in the Christianisation of Iceland.
Thorfinn Karlsefni Thórdarson was an Icelandic explorer. Around the year 1010, he followed Leif Eriksson's route to Vinland in a short-lived attempt to establish a permanent settlement there with his wife Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir and their followers.
Blondi was Adolf Hitler's German Shepherd, a gift as a puppy from Martin Bormann in 1941. Hitler kept Blondi even after his move into the Führerbunker located underneath the garden of the Reich Chancellery on 16 January 1945.
Grœnlendinga saga is one of the sagas of Icelanders. Like the Saga of Erik the Red, it is one of the two main sources on the Norse colonization of North America. The saga recounts events that purportedly happened around 1000 and is preserved only in the late 14th century Flateyjarbók manuscript.
Hyrrokkin is a female jötunn in Norse mythology. According to 13th-century poet Snorri Sturluson, she launched the largest of all ships at Baldr's funeral after the Æsir gods were unable to budge the vessel.
The Ice-Shirt is a 1990 historical novel by American author William T. Vollmann. It is the first book in a seven-book series called Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes.
Garden of the Purple Dragon is a children's fantasy novel by Carole Wilkinson, published in September 2005 by Macmillan Publishers. It is the second in the Dragonkeeper series and the predecessor to Dragon Moon. It is set in ancient China, during the Han Dynasty, and continues the story of Ping, slave girl turned dragonkeeper.
"The Pretty Little Calf" is a Chinese fairy tale collected by Wolfram Eberhard in "Folktales of China". It is related to the theme of the calumniated wife and to the tale type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children", of the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index, in that a woman gives birth to children of wondrous aspect, but jealous relatives conspire to separate them. Similar stories are attested in East Asian literature, specially Mongolian and Korean, wherein the boy is murdered, but is later reborn in the shape of a calf.
Skáldskaparmál is the second part of the Prose Edda, compiled by Snorri Sturluson. It consists of a dialogue between Ægir, the divine personification of the sea, and Bragi, the god of poetry, in which both stories of the Æsir and discourse on the nature of poetry are intertwined. The work additionally includes tales of human heroes and kings. The overarching mythological setup gradually fades and the work becomes more of an early form of a poetic thesaurus of Old Norse, presumably intended for usage by skalds. Much of the work is focused on poetic phrases and descriptors. The origin of these kennings is given; Bragi delivers a systematic list of kennings for various Æsir, people, places, and things. He then goes on to discuss poetic language in some detail, in particular heiti, essentially poetic synonyms or alternate words. For example, the simple hestr, "horse", might be replaced by jór, "steed".
The Skogsrå, Skogsfrun, Skogssnuvan, Skogsnymfen, Råndan or Huldran, is a mythical female creature of the forest in Swedish folklore.
Maria is the title given to a Filipino version of Cinderella collected by Fletcher Gardner and published in The Journal of American Folklore, in 1906. The story is related both to the international Cinderella narrative, as well as to the motif of the calumniated wife.
