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The Long Ships (Röde Orm #1-2)

by Frans G. Bengtsson, Michael Chabon (Introduction), Michael Meyer (Translator)

4.31 of 5 stars 4.31 · rating details · 1,435 ratings · 257 reviews

Frans Gunnar Bengtsson’s The Long Ships resurrects the fantastic world of the tenth century AD when the Vikings roamed and rampaged from the northern fastnesses of Scandinavia down to the Mediterranean. Bengtsson’s hero, Red Orm—canny, courageous, and above all lucky—is only a boy when he is abducted from his Danish home by the Vikings and made to take his place at the oar...more

Paperback, 503 pages

Published July 6th 2010 by NYRB Classics (first published 1941)

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Mar 23, 2013 Jeffrey Keeten rated it 5 of 5 stars

”His voice became frenzied, and he glared wrathfully from one to the other, brandishing his arms and crying: Blood-wolves, murderers and malefactors, adulterated vermin, Gadarene swine, weeds of Satan and minions of Beelzebub, generation of vipers and basilisks, shall you be cleansed by holy baptism and stand as white as snow in the regiments of the blessed angels? Nay, I tell you, it shall not be so. I have lived long in this house and have witnessed too much; I know your ways. No bishop or hol...more

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Apr 12, 2012 Jacob rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011

October 2011

PROLOGUE
How the shaven men fared in Skania in King Harald Bluetooth's time
Many restless men rowed north from Skania with Bue and Vagn, and found ill fortune in Jörundfjord; others marched with Styrbjörn to Uppsala and died there with him. When the news reached their homeland that few of them could be expected to return, elegies were declaimed and memorial stones set up; whereupon all sensible men agreed that what had happened was for the best, for they could now hope to have a more p

...more

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Dec 15, 2012 Rod rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, not-nyrb, the-high-seas, in-translation, sagas

Swiftly moving, endlessly entertaining, and brimming with historically accurate 10th-century flavor, this recounts in Norse saga fashion the adventures of Orm Tostesson (aka "Red Orm"), beginning with his capture as a young lad by Vikings, where, initially taken as a slave, he quickly proves his mettle and is initiated into the group as one of their own, and is eventually elected chieftain. The book follows Orm as he travels far and wide, makes lifelong friendships (and a few enemies), fights ba...more

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Apr 19, 2011 Elijah Kinch Spector rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Elijah by: Jen

Read a prettier version of this exact review over here!

I was expecting to completely and utterly love this. I ended up just mostly loving it. Disappointment can be so, so hard.

This book works as so many different things all at once that it only just barely edges out being a masterpiece. I'd been meaning to read it for awhile, without actually knowing anything about it, when it stared up at me from the NYRB table at the Brooklyn Book Festival for cheap. Later, I took a look at the introduction, o...more Read a prettier version of this exact review over here!

I was expecting to completely and utterly love this. I ended up just mostly loving it. Disappointment can be so, so hard.

This book works as so many different things all at once that it only just barely edges out being a masterpiece. I'd been meaning to read it for awhile, without actually knowing anything about it, when it stared up at me from the NYRB table at the Brooklyn Book Festival for cheap. Later, I took a look at the introduction, only to see Michael Chabon refer to it as being the last 19th century novel, despite being written in the 1940s. He put Tolstoy, Dickens, Dumas, and a few others all into one sentence in describing this phenomenon. Well, that was all I needed.

The Long Ships is a novel that, if you like to compartmentalize, can be a straight-up adventure story, or a dark comedy, or a travelogue, or a sociological study. Of course, the beauty is that it is all of those things, and almost always makes them work together perfectly. In showing such an unflinchingly detailed view of the ways and beliefs of Norsemen at the turn of the 11th century, Bengtsson makes his reader love and hate a vanished society that is in the process of vanishing even as the book progresses, though none of them know it. (How would one know that some random new God that had been brought up would eventually supplant all of the ones you already had?) Our hero, Orm, is loyal and smart and valorous... but he's also a violent pillager who's mostly just lucky. But Bengtsson writes the kind of story that one would read in the old sagas, wherein the only moralizing to be found is in line with the morals of the period: i.e. murder, theft, and rape are just fine so long as you do them to those who aren't your people. (This is why the worst villains of the story are other Norsemen who've broken that rule.) It works because the book is, in its entirety, written from the sort of detached, ironic narratorial standpoint that never endorses anything: it explains, it gets a little snarky, and it let's us draw the conclusions. It's probably this narrative voice that leads, largely, to Chabon's point about the book being 19th century in style -- it is very much like The Three Musketeers in the way we simultaneously celebrate and denigrate our characters and their ways: The most loyal of men can't be trusted around too much gold, everyone's a murderer, and women really are chattel most of the time... But it's so much fun!

The plot meanders in a few spots, and there are times when the narrative voice is a little too detached (I would've liked it if some of the action had been set up better), but for the most part it works wonderfully. Orm takes three voyages in the book, coming home for what would be the end of most historical adventures, only to go on and keep the plot running wherever he happens to be, stopping often to venerate the names of old chieftains of his who weren't really all that great in the first place, and later to extoll the virtues of his new Christian religion, which he really does not understand.

The strange nominal embrace of Christianity is one of the book's best threads, actually. The spread of this religion is such a strong part of the story, and yet we never know if this sardonic narrator considers this spread to be a good or a bad thing. Sometimes Christianity brings mercy, often it doesn't, sometimes it changes age-old traditions, and sometimes it does absolutely nothing.

The role of women is particularly interesting in The Long Ships, because part of Bengtsson's unflinching attention to detail and accuracy comes through in the sadly real fact that women in this society had very little power (gaining some in marriage, if they were lucky) and were largely at the disposal of the strong men around them. It doesn't age as badly as most older historical adventure books because the author doesn't try to modernize his character to match his own current sensibilities, (which would now be out of date) he simply turns a cynical eye to the past -- a past that, for all its horrible sexism, is also immensely different from the Western European pasts that we've grown so accustomed to. The women here are certainly owned and often only matter insofar as treating them well or ill will affect the men in their lives, but they are also allowed to have, loudly express, and act upon their sexual desires, and they are not considered to be ruined as a bride if they're known to have actually, you know, had sex before. These facts in no ways mitigate the problems with the society shown here, but it speaks to the fact that what we're shown is (I think) a relatively true-to-life depiction of this time and place, at least as far as opinions and mores are concerned.

The feats portrayed are probably less realistic. This book -- and I should've pointed it out earlier -- is full of bad-ass, exciting battles and escapes that lead to strange adventures and a huge cast of weird characters (many of whom, in the finest adventure story tradition, come back when they are least expected). The story is unbelievable and down-to-earth, full of violence that is both fun escapism and a disturbing look at terrible people, and these contradictions are handled by way of a beautifully written (and translated) narrative that works to make everything so very darkly funny. You come for the action and adventure, stay for the wry snapshot of a vanished culture, and leave feeling surprisingly wistful about those characters and the very ideas of age and change. It's really, really fun.(less)

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Oct 11, 2011 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nyrb

A five hundred page novel about Vikings set in the year 1000? Sure, why not? This book has got more booty than a Sir Mix-a-Lot video. [rimshot!] Of course, I mean old school booty, as in creaky wooden chests filled with gold coins and jewel-encrusted amulets. Red Orm is our hero, a strangely lovable barbarian who begins the novel as a pubescent naif and ends it as a wealthy chieftain. Oops, spoiler alert (retroactive). I'm not really giving anything away there. This is very much an old fashioned...more A five hundred page novel about Vikings set in the year 1000? Sure, why not? This book has got more booty than a Sir Mix-a-Lot video. [rimshot!] Of course, I mean old school booty, as in creaky wooden chests filled with gold coins and jewel-encrusted amulets. Red Orm is our hero, a strangely lovable barbarian who begins the novel as a pubescent naif and ends it as a wealthy chieftain. Oops, spoiler alert (retroactive). I'm not really giving anything away there. This is very much an old fashioned epic of seafaring, treasure hunting, and grisly spear fighting, so there's little doubt that that things end well for the protagonist—which isn't to say that he doesn't have to steer his painted dragon ship through many a shitstorm to arrive at the happy ending. Anyway, people who lived in Scandinavia one thousand years ago were some hardcore mofos. I'm not implying that non-Scandinavian people were pussies, but I haven't read any novels about them, so they're temporarily irrelevant. Life's pretty cheap to this sort. One day everything is status quo, and the next day they're at a drunken feast fighting to the death with some Swedish lug for giving them the stinkeye. And nobody bats an eyelash. This is just another day. In other words, don't make any longterm goals, because any day now someone could split your skull in half. Maybe even by accident, thinking you were Smalander when you were really from Lister. But it's just no big deal. Your family washes out your chainmail and asks what's for dinner. There is a lack of sentimentality in Y1K that makes the Seinfeld final episode look like a Douglas Sirk movie. Bengtsson, I think, realized that this could be a problem for modern audiences, so he gives us a relatively honorable and 'good' Viking to follow around. Don't get me wrong. Red Orm is all about killing for booty, but he lets the other dude attack first so he can take the moral high ground. But needless to say, when you're dealing with a five hundred page novel about Vikings set in the year 1000, you start out a little skeptical maybe. This doesn't exactly sound like something to read while you're waiting for your oil to be changed. But this novel has received some pretty rapturous acclaim from blurbsters the world over. In fact, one female reviewer made a case that even chicks would dig this book. I don't know about that. I mean, maybe a certain type of chick. I'm thinking a Renaissance Faire chick or one who enjoys role playing games. And that's still a maybe. I think the so-called universal appeal of this novel is somewhat overstated. Yes, it is a rollicking adventure, but that's all it is. If you're looking for more—like literary substance and profound meaning—go pick up a V.C. Andrews novel, for Chrissake. That's not what The Long Ships is trying to sell you. This is the tentpole movie of literary fiction. Approach it as such and enjoy.(less)

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Dec 15, 2010 Newengland rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: classics-newly-read, finished-in-2010

Written in 3rd-person Viking, THE LONG SHIPS gives a more favorable view of the Norsemen, especially Orm Tostesson, who travels widely and sees the World, such as it was in the 10th century A.D. Author Frans G. Bengtsson, a Swede, knows his history, as well he should -- himself a translator of many olden works such as PARADISE LOST and THE SONG OF ROLAND. Bengtsson showed some mettle himself (Red Orm would be proud), refusing to consent to a Norwegian translation of his book as long as the Norwe...more Written in 3rd-person Viking, THE LONG SHIPS gives a more favorable view of the Norsemen, especially Orm Tostesson, who travels widely and sees the World, such as it was in the 10th century A.D. Author Frans G. Bengtsson, a Swede, knows his history, as well he should -- himself a translator of many olden works such as PARADISE LOST and THE SONG OF ROLAND. Bengtsson showed some mettle himself (Red Orm would be proud), refusing to consent to a Norwegian translation of his book as long as the Norwegians were allied with Nazi Germany.

But the book. It captures the spirit of a-Viking as a way of life. This, from p. 343 of the nyrb edition, shows the Vikings back on a voyage after a long spell at home. Old friends Toke and Orm are reunited, and with them is Orm's young son, Blackhair, who is getting his first taste of seasickness:

"I cannot understand why I have kept away from the sea for so long," [Toke] said, "for a well-manned ship is the best of all things. It is good to sit contented ashore, and no man need be ashamed to do so; but a voyage to a far land, with booty awaiting a man and this smell in the nostrils, is as good a lot as could be desired, and a sure cure for age and sorrow. It is strange that we Northmen, who know this and are more skillful seamen than other men, sit at home as much as we do, when we have the whole world to plunder."

"Perhaps," said Orm, "some men prefer to grow old ashore rather than to risk encountering that surest of all cures for age that seafarers sometimes meet with."

"I smell many odors," said Blackhair in a distressed voice, "but think none of them good."

"That is because you are unaccustomed to them and know no better," replied Orm. "It may be that the sea-smell here is not so rich as that in the west, for there the sea is greener with salt and so has a richer tang to it. But this smell is nothing to complain of."

Orm travels to Spain under the Moors and is captured. He and a fellow Viking become bodyguards for a Muslim prince and convert to the faith of Muhammad (to become a Muslim is a simple act, after all -- one need only recite that there is only one God and Muhammad is His prophet).

When their chance to escape comes, Orm and friend flee and wash up on an Irish island. Soon they're in a second escapade battling King Ethelred of England -- another real person (this being historical fiction). A brief idyll takes us to Denmark, where Orm marries, has children, and becomes relatively comfortable, though adventures never cease (including a battle against raging berserkers) and Orm converts to Christianity, something many Vikings still shied away from in his day.

The last segment takes us past Kiev where Orm and a shipload of Vikings seek out Bulgar gold. This last part moves quickly and seems to get short shrift compared to the Moorish segment and the English one.

Overall, a wonderful plot book that gives you a real sense of how the Vikings lived, ate, killed, and thought. Of course, not all Vikings are alike, as Orm proves all too well. Written in a traditional, narrative style, the book has an old-fashioned feel to it and catches you up in the tide of its story. You grow to like Orm and his wild wife, Ylva. And, when all is said and done, you kind of miss them.

One more voyage, you wonder? But Bengtsson is long gone, having died in the 50's. A wonderful modern classic with a nice plea for all to read from Michael Chabon in the introduction. Ah, the Mysteries of Jutland....(less)

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Jul 10, 2012 Algernon rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012, favorites

This is most laughs I've got out of a book dealing with pillaging, raping, burning, slaving at a galley's oar, duels to the death, wars at sea or on land. The fun starts from the very first chapter where it is dryly suggested that the reason the Northmen were so fond of going a-viking to the ends of the known world every spring was to escape the sharp tongues and the fiery tempers of their beloved consorts, after being cooped in with them for six long and cold winter months.

The hero of the story...more

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Jun 28, 2010 Hazel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Keely, Paul

Recommended to Hazel by: Jan Steckel

Thanks to Jan for recommending this. It's taken me many months to find a copy at the library. This is a yellowing, somewhat tattered 1954 edition, which has been filed away somewhere and last borrowed almost 30 years ago! What a waste! I'm only a few chapters in and already it's terrific. :-) I need maps though. But that's what Google is for. :-)

Manny, you've probably read this, haven't you? In Swedish!

------------

I'm about halfway through The Long Ships which is a romance (not in the sense of...more

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Mar 15, 2013 Elizabeth K. rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013-new-reads

Here there be vikings!

This is (relatively) recently back in print in English, and the new edition has a forward by Michael Chabon, in which he goes on about it like a maniac. One of the things I like about Michael Chabon is that you can always count on him for some solid hyperbole, so I wasn't taking it that seriously.

By about the third page, I was convinced it was the best book I'd ever read, and by the tenth page, was wondering why anyone ever bothered writing a book after 1945. After the worl...more

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Mar 18, 2013 Benjamin rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I picked this book up because, come on, it has Vikings. I really didn't expect it to be one of the best books I have read in some years, but it is. It's a fun jaunt through 10th century Europe starring a hypochondriac Viking, a surly priest, Irish jesters, and more other memorable characters that it's worth listing, but what makes it so good is the pervasive and extremely dry humor that runs throughout. I can't say that I laughed out loud, but then that's rarely happened when reading any book, b...more

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Feb 18, 2009 Johan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I read this one as a teenager in Swedish so this "review" is slightly frayed by years of pillaging on my own brain and memory. Most significantly I remember it as one of those book you never want to end. It was so much fun to hang out with Orm and his friends and enemies that you wished you could just keep reading it forever.

Frans G. Bengtsson said he wanted to create something between the Odyssey and the Three Musketeers and it's a pretty good description.

I'm witholding one star because it's a...more

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Apr 25, 2013 Bjorn rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Historical allegories are always useful when you live in troubled times but don't necessarily want to talk directly about them because you never know who might be listening, and obviously for painting a bigger picture with older roots than newspapers can do. Sweden was neutral in WWII and eager not to openly piss off our big neighbour in the South, and consequently historical literature got a boost; Vilhelm Moberg's Ride This Night is a thinly veiled anti-fascist tract set in 17th century Sweden...more Historical allegories are always useful when you live in troubled times but don't necessarily want to talk directly about them because you never know who might be listening, and obviously for painting a bigger picture with older roots than newspapers can do. Sweden was neutral in WWII and eager not to openly piss off our big neighbour in the South, and consequently historical literature got a boost; Vilhelm Moberg's Ride This Night is a thinly veiled anti-fascist tract set in 17th century Sweden, singer Karl Gerhard was blacklisted for likening Nazi sympathisers to the invaders of Troy, and Eyvind Johnson's 1946 novel Return To Ithaca lets Homer's characters live through the aftermath of a war that's ruined everything they've ever known.

The Long Ships, on the surface, doesn't have any such pretenses. It's the story of Orm Tostesson, born in what is today southern Sweden in the mid-10th century, and his life and travels as a viking. Kidnapped by vikings at a young age, he travels all over Europe - sold as a slave to the Moors, rises to chiefdom among his men, helps plunder England, goes treasure-hunting in the Ukraine, and eventually settles on a farm in Scania where he becomes old and rich. Along the way, he meets many of the great men of his time (far too conveniently at times, but hey), converts to Islam, converts back to paganism, converts to Christianity, consumes a lot of beer and pork, and makes good use of his sword.

It strikes me about halfway in that this really is a Western novel set in the Viking age. A very ambitious, fun and well-written Western novel, but still; substitute long ships for cattle trails, Englishmen, Swedes and Khazars for Indians, kings for cavalry colonels, long swords for Colt revolvers, and posses for... well, posses, and Orm could easily have been played by Clint Eastwood or James Garner. (Not Gary Cooper, though.) It's a frontier novel, a novel set at a time when new land was being claimed both geographically and philosophically. And it's tremendously entertaining but at the same time occasionally disturbing in its frankness. As anachronistic as it is on some points (more on that below), Bengtsson doesn't try to turn his hero into an enlightened 20th century man, and robbery, violence, rape and slavery are all seen as perfectly normal - though obviously something to be avoided where you yourself is concerned. The protagonists are, at first, more concerned with what's possible than what's right; if you have more gold than us, and we have sharper swords than you, isn't it fair that we should, ahem, trade?

And yet, underneath all the bawdy tales of kidnappings, beheadings, and bearded men dying with a macho one-liner (in runic verse, obviously), there's more to it.

For starters, there's Bengtsson's language, which (at least in the original, I can't speak for the translation) is a marvel to read. Terse, dryly humorous and almost completely devoid of unnecessary adjectives, both his narration and his dialogue somehow manages to carry a feeling of the old sagas despite being written in 19th century Swedish (which has about as much in common with Old Norse as Jane Austen does with Beowulf). It's a wilful anachronism, both for his own time and for Orm's, that's so obvious it seems to mean something; as if Bengtsson is deliberately setting them loose from the time they live in.

Then there's the time he sets it in, a time when everything was changing. Because the years around 1000 AD is when Scandinavia was christianised, and religion is the basis of many conflicts in the book; not only between pagans, Christians and Muslims, but also between hardliners (the missionaries sent to convert the Norse by whatever means necessary, the pagans determined to stick to their old gods) and the secularists (most of the actual vikings). Orm himself and many with him take a very pragmatic view of religion; they just want to live as well as possible (for themselves), and whichever god makes the best offer at the moment gets the nod.

"I've never been so lucky in everything before as I have been since I stuck with Christ" [said Orm]. "All you need to do is to deny the old gods and instead say this: There is no god but God, and Christ is his prophet."
"Not his prophet, his son," said Father Willibald.
"His son," Orm quickly added. "That's it. I knew that."

It's no coincidence that one of Orm's first defining acts is to rescue a Jew who's been enslaved on another ship; he does it for his own winning's sake, sure, but as the novel progresses, the unspoken question of what's fair (to other men, to women, to other peoples) becomes more and more central. Orm starts to compromise, starts to form alliances based on more than mutual greed or lust for revenge, starts to rule by law rather than force. It's not a direct result of becoming a Christian - all sides are portrayed as being equally prone to both kindness and atrocities - but simply of growing up, of seeing more of the world, not buying into extremism but starting to develop something that 1000 years and many ethical discussions later might be called humanism. And somewhere underneath it I bet you can find Bengtsson in 1945, wishing Europe itself would do the same; that there can be another new time, a time when everything can change.

Mind you, that's all very sneakily done. For the most part, it's rustic anecdotes about life on the high seas or in the big halls, big action scenes, strong men, strong-minded women, well-written character drama and just a heck of a good yarn.

Sex and beer and runic verse are very good indeed.(less)

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Apr 24, 2012 Mary Ronan Drew rated it 5 of 5 stars

In his introduction to Frans G Bengtsson's The Long ShipsMichael Chabon has this to say about the novel:

In my career as a reader I have encountered only three people who knew The Long Ships, and all three of them, like me, loved it immoderately. Four for four: from this tiny but irrefutable sample I dare to extrapolate that this novel, first published in Sweden during the Second World War, stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure to every single human being on the face of the ea...more In his introduction to Frans G Bengtsson's The Long ShipsMichael Chabon has this to say about the novel:

In my career as a reader I have encountered only three people who knew The Long Ships, and all three of them, like me, loved it immoderately. Four for four: from this tiny but irrefutable sample I dare to extrapolate that this novel, first published in Sweden during the Second World War, stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure to every single human being on the face of the earth.

Let me make that five out of five. I am immoderately excited about this novel, a story in a genre that I never, ever read - slam, bang adventure, war, sea stories taking place in the 9th century. But this tale about a red-haired Dane called Orm, who accidentally goes off on an adventure with a ship full of Vikings and comes home a hero is irresistible.

Red Orm is kidnapped and becomes one of the adventurers in an open boat that heads for the south coast of England to rape and pillage. They pick up a slave from some other adventures who don't want him because he won't eat pork and refuses to row on Saturdays. He turns out to be a Jew from Spain, which had not too long before been conquered by the Moors. He is a wealthy goldsmith, who directs them to Cordova, where they are themselves enslaved by the caliph.

Orm is a sensitive lad, at least by Viking terms, and a bit of a hypochondriac. He gets nervous when the slave next to him on the rowing bench has a cough. There is an adventure a minute in this book and before you know it Orm and his friends have stolen a bell from Santiago de Compostella, summered with some monks in County Cork, and offered the bell as a gift to King Harald Bluetooth.

There are other adventures, sword fights, a bit of wooing, and a trip to the Black Sea, all moving along at a brisk clip. The book is surprisingly entertaining in many ways, not least of which is the dry, understated wit of the author as he regards the world the Danes look on as normal and we look on with horror. His religious characters are a delight, especially the poor monks who are trying to convert these warriers to Christianity while they continue to attribute their luck or lack of it to the old gods.

This book stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure to almost any reader. It has done so for me.

2012 No 70

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Mar 20, 2012 Tony rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction-mainstream

THE LONG SHIPS. (1955). Frans G. Bengtsson. ****.
Get ready for a couple of late-night readings when you first pick up this book. This edition comes with an introduction by Michael Chabon, who admits reading it for a total of four times. He also claims to know four other people who read it and also enjoyed it. Based on this small sample, five out of five, he blieves that this book will please everyone in the world. Maybe. I liked it, but I don’t think it’s for everyone. It’s a historical novel f...more THE LONG SHIPS. (1955). Frans G. Bengtsson. ****.
Get ready for a couple of late-night readings when you first pick up this book. This edition comes with an introduction by Michael Chabon, who admits reading it for a total of four times. He also claims to know four other people who read it and also enjoyed it. Based on this small sample, five out of five, he blieves that this book will please everyone in the world. Maybe. I liked it, but I don’t think it’s for everyone. It’s a historical novel full of action and adventure, set during the times of the Viking incursions – mostly around 911 A.D. It’s the story of Red Orm, who, as a boy was abducted from his Danish home by marauding Vikings and forced to become one of their slave rowers on their ships. The descriptive powers of the author make it seem as if you ae the one chained to a seat, manning one of the long oars. As a Viking slave, Red (he has red hair, and, later, a red beard) is forced to take part in their raids. He is then captured by the Moors when they invade what is now Spain, and ends up becoming a bodyguard for the Caliph of Cordova. He soon escapes, and, along with some of his shipmates, takes a ship and sails to Ireland, where he encounters a group of Christian monks. Along the way, he manages to pick up several languages, a talent that stands him in good stead among both his fellow former-prisoners and the people he meets along the way. There’s always lots of action that accompanies Red as he travels the known world of the Vikings, but this is not just an action-adventure story. The author manages to infuse his tale with large doses of humor that is often subtle, though often crude. It’s really a boy’s adventure book told for grownups. The author (1894-1954) initially issued this book as two separate volumes, the first in 1941 as “Red Orm on the Western Way,” and the second in 1945 as “Red Orm at Home and on the Eastern Way.” The two volumes were combined and published in England and the U.S. in 1955. Fortunately, there are also maps included with this edition, so that you can follow Red’s routes to adventure. The novel also provides a realistic look at the Vikings and their way of life and the effects they had on the development of Western Europe. They were fierce fighters and much feared by those countries on which they preyed. One fact that I didn’t know was that in 911, Charles the Simple (I love that name) ceded part of his kingdom to them; this came to be known as Normandy, the Northman’s Land. If you’re up for a good old-fashioned read, I recommend you give this book a try.
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Jan 08, 2012 Scott Erickson rated it 4 of 5 stars

This was a fun read. Is it an accurate portrait of life 1000 years ago? I don't know, but it certainly paints a pretty portrait of an alien world where just about everyone seems at least slightly mad and offbeat. This is communicated through good dry humor that made me chuckle throughout. It's a dangerous world where bandits, kings, and religious fanatics battle each other for silver, gold and God, and the characters take the rampant death and destruction in stride. In fact they often approve of...more

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Oct 19, 2011 Felice rated it 5 of 5 stars

Who knew? Long before the Swedes wrote mysteries about gloomy detectives and women victimized in horrific ways they sometimes wrote amazingly vigorous adventure stories. Go figure.

Have you ever read The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson? This transporting tale was originally published in Sweden during World War II as two separate novels. Then it was published here as one book in 1955. It has been in and out of print here ever since. It is currently it is available in a New York Review Books edition...more

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Jun 25, 2011 Maxwell Krohn rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I loved this book. After hearing so much about how the Vikings and liked-minded barbarians wreaked havoc on the early Christian settlements of Northern Europe, it's fascinating to hear the other side of the story. After reading about Orm, you'll never look at a fortified monastery on the hill the same way. You might even see Orm and his Viking hordes as eking out an honest-ish living the only way they could.

As others have said, this book is funny. It's also quite suspenseful: Orm's readers are a...more

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Apr 04, 2011 Mark rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

An immensely entertaining novel, written in the '40s. It recounts the life of the Viking Orm, from his first long voyage through his later years.

The book is part travelogue, part historical novel, part adventure novel. It covers a rich period in history, with the gradual Christianization of the pagan Scandinavians taking place alongside ongoing raids in England and the Baltic, not to mention Spain and Russia as well. The travelogue elements are a bit of a throwback in style--you could almost ima...more

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Feb 10, 2011 Jacqueline rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is one of the best books I've ever read. It's a great rollicking adventure story, but more importantly it's a great insight on the lives of a people who have been so mythologized it's sometime hard to believe that they actually existed.

This story follows the main character you can see his perception of the world changes through his travels and at home. While he goes from being conquer to slave and back again, back at home the women in his life and other start to give over their Viking belie...more

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Dec 27, 2010 Justus rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a great adventure book (really, a sequence of several unrelated adventures all featuring Orm) whose dry, sly humor sets it above the usual run of the mill. My edition comes with a ridiculously over the top introduction from Michael Chabon that doesn't do it any favors. When Chabon calls the book "a novel with the potential to please every literate human being in the entire world" I almost think he's mocking it. But when he describes it as having "irony as harsh as...Dickens, a wit and sk...more This is a great adventure book (really, a sequence of several unrelated adventures all featuring Orm) whose dry, sly humor sets it above the usual run of the mill. My edition comes with a ridiculously over the top introduction from Michael Chabon that doesn't do it any favors. When Chabon calls the book "a novel with the potential to please every literate human being in the entire world" I almost think he's mocking it. But when he describes it as having "irony as harsh as...Dickens, a wit and skepticism worth of Stendhal, an epic Tolstoyan sense of the anti-epic, and the Herculean narrative drive, mighty and nimble, of Alexandre Dumas" he's clearly serious but setting Bengtsson's book up for failure. No book can live up to that level of hype.

It is pretty good though (3-starts for me equates to about 5-stars for many goodreaders; I haven't given out a single 5-star review in 2010) but the unevenness of its episodes lets it down. The novel is really four books: the early life of Orm (~7 years from his late teens), his quest to get his wife (~a few months), his settling down (~15 years), and his final voyage (~a few months).

Three of the four sections were good -- the first was the strongest, I thought -- but Orm's "middle years" were a bit of a drag. This was primarily because they took the already-episodic nature of the book and turned it into a sequence of mini-episodes. Each of the miniepisodes usually revolved around some stranger showing up and telling a tale. It felt very Canterbury Tales and broke up the flow of the book for me.

I read the first 50% of the book pretty quickly (two or three sittings). Then I hit those middle years and the I found myself finding other things I preferred to do with my spare time. I'd nibble at a chapter here and there but I wasn't devouring it anymore. Once I got to the final voyage, though, I finished the book in another day or so. It is this third section that knocks that extra star of my rating.

The book has an odd distance to its characters. It has more of the feel of an old epic poem rather than the modern omniscient third-person perspective we're more used to. We rarely get more than a glimpse of the inner workings of Orm and less than that of anyone else. And Orm isn't a particularly notable fellow. Maybe that in itself makes him notable for the genre. (c.f. Chabon's comments about the anti-epic epic.)

As mentioned earlier, what really sets this above the pack are is the very subtle presence of Chabon's Stendhal-like narrator. The humor is so subtle that I think I missed it the first time or two it appeared. Once I knew what to look for I appreciated its occasional appearance. It was never enough to turn the book into a comedy or a farce but enough to make a modern reader laugh at the ridiculousness of many of the standard features you expect a book like this to have.

For example, Orm breaks into a neighbor's house, and dangles him headfirst over a well until the fellow agrees to sell him some goods. Orm remarks how glad he is that everything is resolved without having to resort to force. Likewise, at one point Orm says something like, "About my lineage let nothing be said, though I am descended from Ivar of the Broad Embrace."

Anyway, worth reading but skip Chabon's introduction so you don't expect more than the book is actually going to deliver.(less)

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Jul 19, 2010 AJ Conroy marked it as to-read

From NPR:
It might be difficult for anyone younger than 30 to remember, but there was a time when you could talk about a "smart summer blockbuster" without everybody laughing. Even though The Long Ships was first published in 1941, it remains the literary equivalent of an action- and intrigue-filled adventure movie that won't insult your intelligence. Bengtsson's novel follows a 10th-century Swedish boy named Red Orm who is kidnapped by Vikings as a child and then enslaved by Moors in Spain, eve...more

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Apr 09, 2012 Janne rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012

This is a fun book to read. Set in 10th century Europe, it's hero is Orm, a Viking, the youngest son of a chieftan in the land of Scania. Orm is pampered and protected by his mother, who, afraid of losing yet another son, tries to keep him from going with his father in his plundering expeditions - the expression used is "to go a-viking". But one day another group of Vikings attacks Orm's parents farm and Orm is taken prisoner. From then on his adventures begin and he goes as far as Andalucia, wh...more

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Jan 15, 2011 Jim rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-novels

When asked what he had in mind writing his adventure novel The Long Ships, author Frans Gunnar Bengtsson answered, "I just wanted to write a story that people could enjoy reading, like The Three Musketeers or The Odyssey." In this, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. His work has been translated into 23 languages at last count.

I have always loved literature by and about the Vikings -- from the great Icelandic Sagas to the Saxon Tales of Bernard Cornwell -- and I have always felt that they ha...more When asked what he had in mind writing his adventure novel The Long Ships, author Frans Gunnar Bengtsson answered, "I just wanted to write a story that people could enjoy reading, like The Three Musketeers or The Odyssey." In this, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. His work has been translated into 23 languages at last count.

I have always loved literature by and about the Vikings -- from the great Icelandic Sagas to the Saxon Tales of Bernard Cornwell -- and I have always felt that they have received short shrift from literary critics. So much the worse for them!

The only thing I could possibly complain about The Long Ships is that it's almost too much of a good thing. If it were written today instead of during the dark days of World War II, it would have been turned into a whole series of novels and made even more money and fame for its author. But during wartime, writers and other artists had to make do with what they could. (I remember, for instance, two wonderful films produced under the Nazis during the war, both of which are now available in DVD. One was Joszef von Baky's Baron von Munchhausen, and the other was Marcel Carné's great Children of Paradise.)

The Long Ships takes place all over the known Viking world, with the exception of Iceland, Greenland, and the struggling Vinland colony. Its hero, Red Orm Tostesson, sails to France, Spain (where he serves in the guard of the Moorish leader Almansur), Ireland, England, Denmark, Sweden, and even Russia. He marries the daughter of King Harald Bluetooth of Denmark, finds buried treasure in the lands of the Patzinaks (Pechenegs) in Russia, and conducts a war against brigands who raided and plundered his household while he was away.

The tale takes place in that strange period just before and after the year 1000 A.D. Christians were predicting the end of the world, which, of course, did not happen, but Red Orm himself converts to Christianity, as does most of his household, and he actively tries to convert other local Asatru-worshipers in his part of Southern Sweden. One of the best characters is Father Willibald, who builds a church on Orm's property. Historical characters who appear include, in addition to King Harald, King Sweyne Forkbeard, Erik the Victorious, Styrbjorn the Strong (the Jomsviking leader), Almansur, and King Ethelred the Unready of England.(less)

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Feb 10, 2013 Joanna rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book takes you "aviking" along with its characters. It is a grand adventure and learning opportunity along the way, for it is clearly well researched and an accurate representation of the period and people it represents. What I found most fascinating was how the Norse men viewed religion. Their views were very practical - the gods that they believed in we're human and suffered human weaknesses, but their existence explained some natural phenomenon, in most cases, that there was no science t...more

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Apr 01, 2011 William Ramsay rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book comes under the heading of a good yarn or even an epic yarn. It's not your usual novel. And yet it's a really good read. There's something happening on almost every page. It's the story of the Vikings and takes place in the late 900's. It's the story of Orm Tosteson who starts on a voyage in his teens that takes him to Ireland, England, France, and even the Ottoman empire. It's the story of how he becomes a great chieftain and a Christian to boot. I think the charm of the book lies in...more

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Jan 31, 2011 Nick rated it 5 of 5 stars

Michael Chabon, in his introduction to this paperback edition of The Long Ships, says it could "bring lasting pleasure to every single human being on the face of the earth." He's not far wrong. While there are a few individuals, I imagine, in deepest darkest Idaho who might not enjoy this book, anyone with any sense will. It's an adventure story of Vikings plundering the known world of AD 1000, told with a droll detachment and wit. Sound a little far-fetched for you? Read it for the authorial vo...more

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Dec 26, 2011 Owen Curtsinger rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Such a fun read. Adventure told from the gut: bouts of rowing, bouts of drinking, plenty of slaying, stealing, and feasting, but it's not all vapid or one-dimensional. Orm is perhaps one of the most romantic vikings to ever grace the canon of viking literature, and Bengtsson tells his tale with some smart jabs at organized religion and a healthy amount of disdain for wealth and the bad luck that too much plundering brings.

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May 02, 2012 Howard rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Along with Middlemarch, the best thing I've read this year. Smart, funny, vastly entertaining, and--having recently read a lot about this period--as far as I can tell, historically/culturally accurate, so there's that documentary bonus that you get from great historical fiction.

While the author never interferes with the illusion that we are in their world, and the voice seems perfectly right to tell the story of 10th century Vikings, there's the slightest distance between their perspective and...more

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Jul 25, 2011 Joe rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical-fiction

What we have here is collected adventures of Red Orm, a Danish viking from around the year 1000 AD. By the time this lengthy tale is over Orm gets to do just about everything a viking of his era could do, from raiding England to serving in the armies of the Caliphate of Cordoba, from marrying a kings daughter, to hunting treasure on the rivers of Russia.

The languge of the book is a rare treat. On the surface it conveys the story-telling patterns characteristic of an ancient tale, and yet it is t...more

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Jan 21, 2011 Tim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Think of this book as an Viking epic retold by a clever academic interested in cultural encounters and ritual and with an understated wit about him. This is not to make the book seem boring and didactic, for Bengtsson has created an excellent adventure here with swordplay and violence. It just also resonates with a deep understanding of motivation, tradition, and the differences among the Northmen. Red Orm, whose luck is very good, travels the world (serving Almansur in Spain, fighting Ethelred...more

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About Frans G. Bengtsson

Frans G. Bengtsson (1894–1954) was born and raised in the southern Swedish province of Skåne, the son of an estate manager. His early writings, including a doctoral thesis on Geoffrey Chaucer and two volumes of poetry written in what were considered antiquated verse forms, revealed a career-long interest in historical literary modes and themes. Bengtsson was a prolific translator (of Paradise Lost...more

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Books by Frans G. Bengtsson

Orm le rouge: Tome 1, Sur les mers de la route de l'Ouest

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Quotes from The Long Ships

“...Orm always afterwards used to say that, after good luck, strength, and skill at arms, nothing was so useful to a man who found himself among foreigners as the ability to learn a language.” — 4 people liked it

“A wise man, once he is past fifty, does not befuddle his senses with strong drink, nor make violent love in the cool spring night, nor dance on his hands.” — 1 person liked it

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The Long Ships (Röde Orm #1-2)

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