Viking - Odinn's Child

"The heroes of the north live on" it says on the front cover of the paperback edition of this first novel by the travel writer Tim Severin: they do indeed, and we gradually become involved in their lives and sympathetic to them and the Old Ways, the ways of the followers of Thor and Odinn and Freya, rather than to the followers of the "White Christ" and the new ways their priests are bringing into the north.

If you do not already know, from reading books like The Brendan Voyage (the story of Tim Severin's crossing of the north Atlantic in a curragh, to show - Thor Heyerdahl style - that it can be done, that St Brendan could have crossed to North America long before even the Vikings), then you very soon realise that you are in the hands of an expert; that Severin knows the north Atlantic, the Orkneys, Iceland, Greenland, and the seas that separate and connect them, as few others do.

He also displays a vivid imagination and a true capacity for recreating the past, in this case the world of Eric the Red and Lief Ericsson, which is slowly being swamped by the aggressive - often brutal - proselytising of the priests of the White Christ.

Thorgils, the protagonist and narrator, is the illegitimate son of Lief Ericsson and a mysterious Irish volva (witch) named Thorgunna, who arrives at Birsay in the Orkneys, home at that time of the earls of Orkney, where Lief Ericsson happens to be wintering as a guest. From her, Thorgils inherits the Sight, and from his father, perhaps, his lifelong wanderlust, and also his lifelong adherence to the Old Ways: he never has any intention of converting to Christianity, either now, or later, or even on his deathbed.

So, having been born on the cusp of the new millennium, I was named as a pagan at a time when the tide of the White Christ was beginning its inexorable rise. Like Cnut, the king in England whom I later served as an apprentice court poet, I soon knew that a rising tide is unstoppable, but I resolved that I would try to keep my head above it.

He is still a pagan at the age of seventy when, living as a monk in a Christian monastery, he writes the memoirs of which this book is the first instalment. It takes us up to Thorgils' twentieth year and a narrow escape from death in Ireland. We have another fifty years (at least - he absconds from the monastery!) to look forward to.

Severin is not yet a skilled novelist - the book is never, for instance, unputdownable - but he does create a world you come to know in all its wealth of detail and to feel at home in, and which you are finally reluctant to leave and look forward to returning to, and that for me is always the acid test.