The Long Ships

• 1. Introduction

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  The Long Ships opens with a boy named Orm Tostesson being hauled aboard a Viking ship against his will. He is the youngest son of Toste, a Scanian chieftain, and from that moment of abduction his life spirals outward across the full width of the known world. His creator, the Swedish writer Frans Gunnar Bengtsson, published the novel in two parts: the first in 1941, the second in 1945. Together they form one of the most widely read books in Swedish literary history.

  The story spans the late 10th century and early 11th, carrying Orm from the coast of Scania to the courts of Andalusia, the halls of Harald Bluetooth in Denmark, the raiding grounds of England, and finally east to the Dnieper weirs of Kievan Rus. Bengtsson wove real rulers and battles into the fiction: Almansur, Brian Boru, Ethelred the Unready, the Battle of Maldon. The book has been translated into at least 23 languages.

  What made Bengtsson write it? When asked about his intentions, he reportedly said he had none. He just wanted to write a story people could enjoy, like The Three Musketeers or the Odyssey. Whether or not that modesty was sincere, The Long Ships arrived during the Second World War and carried meanings that went far beyond entertainment.

• 2. Orm and His World

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  Orm's journey begins in the year 982. A Viking party led by a man named Krok sweeps him off the coast of Scania, and the expedition sails south toward Spain. Things go badly. Krok's company falls into the hands of Andalusian Muslims and its survivors spend more than two years as galley slaves before being absorbed into something stranger: Almansur's personal bodyguard. For four years they serve the most powerful ruler in Iberia, raiding Santiago de Compostela under his command.

  The cast around Orm is carefully distributed. Toke Grey-Gullsson, an adventurer from Blekinge, joins the company early and becomes Orm's lifelong friend. Solomon the Jew, a Sephardi silversmith, is rescued by Krok's company and proves useful well beyond the moment of rescue. Lady Subaida, the young daughter of a Leonese margrave, becomes a concubine of Almanzor. Two Irish jester brothers, Felimid and Ferdiad, cycle through the narrative as recurring figures. Bengtsson gave each of them a name, a homeland, and a function, building the texture of a world in motion.

  When the survivors return to Denmark they arrive at the court of Harald Bluetooth, where Orm meets both Ylva, the king's daughter born of an Obotrite slave-girl, and Father Willibald, a priest assigned as physician to Harald's court. Both will follow Orm for the rest of the novel.

• 3. England and Baptism

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  Orm returns to Scania with a retainer named Rapp, but peace does not last. The narrative notes a brief period of calm in England following the reconquest of the Danelaw in the mid-10th century by King Edgar, Ethelred's father. That calm ends, and Orm joins a raiding party again, this time under Thorkell the High.

  The decisive turn comes when Orm learns that Harald's daughter Ylva is staying in London. He gets baptised and marries her. It is a pragmatic conversion in a pragmatic story: Orm does not experience a spiritual crisis; he acquires a wife. The couple settle on a neglected farm in Göinge, in northern Skåne near the border with Småland, the land being Orm's mother's inheritance.

  From 992 to 995 the family takes shape. Ylva gives birth to twin girls named Oddny and Ludmilla, then a son named Harald, and then another son named Svarthöfde. The parentage of Svarthöfde is left deliberately ambiguous in the text, possibly fathered by Rainald, a Lotharingian priest who came to stay. Father Willibald joins Orm at the farm and helps him convert the local heathens in the district. The year 1000 arrives without Christ returning, which is treated as a simple fact rather than a disappointment.

• 4. The Bulgar Gold

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  In 1007, when Orm is forty-two years old, his brother Are comes home from the east after years serving the Byzantine Empire. Are brings word of a hidden treasure known as the Bulgar gold. Orm mounts an expedition east: he, Toke, and the Finnveding chieftain Olof man a ship and travel to the Dnieper weirs in Kievan Rus.

  The passage through Kievan Rus also nods to the wider geography Bengtsson mapped across the novel. The same territory sits beside the Patzinaks, a nomadic people the source names as neighbors of Kievan Rus. Bengtsson was drawing on the Icelandic sagas and Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla as primary sources, supplemented by medieval chronicles and contemporary historical research. The historical architecture underneath the adventure is dense.

  Orm's party recovers the treasure and returns home safely. But the final crisis waits at the farm. Rainald, the failed German missionary who had earlier been a figure of comedy, has transformed into something dangerous: a renegade who turned pagan priest of the old Norse gods and the leader of a band of robbers and outlaws. He causes serious trouble before being overcome. After that, the novel's final note is quiet. Orm and Toke live as good neighbours in peace and plenty. Svarthöfde Ormsson goes on to fight for Canute the Great and becomes a famous Viking. In their old age, Orm and Toke never tire of telling of the years when they rowed the Caliph's ship and served Al-Mansur.

• 5. The Craft Behind the Saga

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  Bengtsson built the novel's prose deliberately. The grammar in the Swedish original is slightly archaic by design, and the language is modelled on the Icelandic sagas. Early in his career Bengtsson had promoted a lofty, almost ceremonial style for saga translations. When he came to write The Long Ships, he reached instead for what the sagas could do with wit: wisecracks, comic understatements, a dry distance from the action.

  The approach to character follows the same discipline. Bengtsson wrote in essays that he had contempt for the psychological realism of his day, where authors made explicit what characters think and feel. In his novel, inner life is shown through actions and outward signs, not stated. The narrative drives on verbs and nouns with almost no adjectives. The main characters are likable anti-heroes, not the romantic Vikings of 19th-century imagination.

  Joan Klein identified a deeper dimension in the novel's design. She noted that within the 10th-century story the Viking protagonists have never encountered Jews, carry no prejudice about them, and when Solomon the Jew rescues them and leads them to treasure, they are simply grateful. Klein argued that this was not accidental, given when Bengtsson was writing: during the Second World War, while Nazi Germany persecuted Jews and simultaneously claimed the Viking heritage as its own. Bengtsson, she wrote, was throwing the Viking heritage back in the Nazis' face.

• 6. A Century of Adaptations

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  The 1964 British-Yugoslav film The Long Ships, starring Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier, was loosely based on the novel and retained little more than the title and the Moorish settings. It was not a faithful rendering.

  A much more ambitious Swedish screen adaptation took shape in the 1980s. Hans Alfredson was set to direct, with Stellan Skarsgård as Orm and Sverre Anker Ousdal as Toke. Financial problems cancelled the project, but Alfredson's script survived: it was reworked into radio theatre and broadcast in 1990.

  Charlie Christensen's comic adaptation, published in four volumes from 1999 to 2004, covered the first book of the series under the title Röde Orm. In 2002, Swedish author Mikael Westlund published a debut novel called Svarthöfde, which extended the brief closing summary of Bengtsson's novel into a full story following Orm's son. Westlund preserved the archaic flavor and the humor of the original.

  At the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, Danish producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen from Zentropa, the company founded by Lars von Trier, announced he intended to produce a new adaptation. He had Stellan Skarsgård in mind to play the old Orm, with Skarsgård's own sons Alexander, Gustaf, Bill, and Valter playing Orm at different ages. The plan was for two films and a four-part television series, directed by Hans Petter Moland from Norway, with filming expected in Västra Götaland in 2016. Film i Väst ended their collaboration with Aalbæk and the project was cancelled.

  The Royal Danish Theatre staged a version in 2017, performed not inside a building but on the roof of the recently built Moesgård Museum, atop a large wooden stage built to resemble a crashed Viking ship with a dragon's head. Director Henrik Szklany cast Andreas Jebro as Röde Orm. In 2018 the production moved to Ulvedalene in Dyrehaven park. Two years later, the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Sweden presented a stage version featuring Emma Broomé as Orm, but COVID-19 cut the run short despite strong reviews.