Eaters of the Dead

Eaters of the Dead Book Cover Eaters of the Dead
Michael Crichton
Fiction
Harper Collins
April 28, 2009
304

I've read this a few times. I like everything about it. It is semi-based in historical fact; an Arab fighting along side of Vikings and a monster to slay.

As proof of widespread trading, Arabic coins appear in Scandinavia as early as A.D. 692. During the next four hundred years, the Viking trader-pirates expanded as far west as Newfoundland, as far south as Sicily and Greece (where they left carvings on the lions of Delos), and as far east as the Ural Mountains of Russia, where their traders linked up with caravans arriving from the silk route to China.

Our oldest stories, the Iliad, Beowulf, the Song of Roland, were all intended to be sung by singers whose chief function and first obligation was entertainment.

Finally I said to Herger, “The rain is cold.” To this he laughed. “How can the rain be cold?” he said. “You are cold and you are unhappy. The rain is not cold or unhappy.

Herger said, “One God cannot be enough.

I asked Herger what was the sword, and he said, “That is Runding,” and then Buliwyf ordered all his party to the boat, and we set out to sea again.

“Be ready now,” Herger said to me, and also the Northmen’s saying: “Luck in battle.” This wish I repeated back to him in the same words, and he moved away.

To kill the wendol, you must strike at the head and the heart: you must overcome their very mother, in the thunder caves.

Of the other Northmen, they gave no sign of coldness or fatigue, but rather greeted each wave as a fresh invigoration; also they smiled with the happy anticipation of the coming battle, and for this last I hated them.

“Here is a warrior and a hero fit for the gods. Bury him as a great king,