The Thrall of Leif the Lucky: A Story of Viking Days

The year is the 10th century. The place is Nidaros, a city where the air smells of salt and smoke, where thralls are bought and sold in the market square, and where the old gods still hold sway over the hearts of men. Alwin is Saxon. He has known England, its green fields and church bells. Now he knows only the weight of chains and the sting of the whip. Captured by the Viking Gorm and sold to a trader, he enters a world where a man's worth is measured in steel, where the only law is the law of the strongest. But slavery cannot quench the fire in him. His blood carries the memory of a noble lineage, and in the eyes of the fierce shield-maiden Helga and the mysterious warrior Sigurd, he glimpses another way to exist in this brutal world. This is a story of valor when everything has been taken, of the human spirit refusing to bow, and of the strange loyalties that form even in the shadow of the sword. Written in 1902, it captures the romance and roughness of the Viking Age with a young man's fight to define himself in a world that insists he is nothing.