THE NARROW SEAS: BOOK XI OF THE NORSEMEN SAGA

When Viking warlord Thorgrim Night Wolf gives his word to friend or foe, he keeps it. If friend or foe gives their word but doesn’t keep it, the swords, spears and axes come out in swift reply. And Thorgrim doesn’t believe anybody’s word for anything, which is why he’s still alive.

“The Narrow Seas” is the 11th volume in Harpswell author James Nelson’s magnificent “Norsemen Saga,” a 10th-century Viking epic of raids, plunder, settlement, trade and vicious battles in Ireland, England and Frankia (France).  Nelson is a masterful storyteller and award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction covering pirates, colonial naval warfare, Vikings and the Civil War.

After years of raiding and trading in Ireland and England, Thorgrim wants to return home to Norway, but first he agrees to escort the English King of Wessex to Paris (for a hefty price, of course). Accompanied by his son Harald, the berserker Starri Deathless, 300 Viking warriors, and Louis, a Frank he doesn’t trust, Thorgrim fully expects to be cheated and betrayed by both the English and the Franks, and he’s right.

The English king’s agent, Felix, is a conniving cad who also works for someone else as well as himself, the duplicitous type of man Thorgrim knows well. The journey across the English Channel and on land in Frankia is met by Frisian raiders and Frankish soldiers, resulting in bloody, gruesome battles with no quarter given or asked. Surprise, Viking skill with hand weapons, and Thorgrim’s careful plotting face Frankish treachery, murder, a large army, and a bit of timely cowardice.

Meanwhile, in Norway, Thorgrim’s oldest son leads a rebellion against the Norwegian king (for good reason), and Thorgrim now has a greater desire to return home, but his work in Frankia isn’t finished.

This is historical fiction at its best.

WHEN THE ISLAND HAD FISH: THE REMARKABLE STORY OF A MAINE FISHING COMMUNITY

Maine’s maritime heritage rests squarely on the shoulders of fishing and sea trade, and the history of Vinalhaven, then and now, perfectly “captures the ways fish were once everywhere in everyday life.”

“When the Island Had Fish” is author and essayist Janna Malamud Smith’s fourth book, a fascinating study of Vinalhaven offering a nostalgic but certainly not idyllic lifestyle, when fish were plentiful and life was hard. Smith spent years researching this story, interviewing Vinalhaven islanders and descendents over the generations, collecting family letters, town and business records, piecing together a remarkable history of hard, dangerous work, hardscrabble subsistence, family toil, booms and busts, resourcefulness and community cooperation.

Smith tells how the Wabanaki indigenous peoples and early European explorers and colonists settled on Vinalhaven, rejoicing in the island’s sanctuary and resources, as well as the sea’s bounty. In the 1700s and 1800s fish were truly everywhere, harvested by bold men fishing from pinky schooners and peapods, inshore and offshore. She tells of the fishermen and their families, along with the tradesmen who operated stores, chandleries, shipyards, fish racks, and the men and women who
farmed and harvested timber and granite.

She also describes specific fisheries, the plenty of then and the depleted resources of now: lobster, haddock, cod, hake, herring, shrimp and scallops, as well as the markets in Boston supplied by island fishermen. Colorful families and notable characters are presented, too, like the Areys and Carvers, and 90-year-old Tim Dyer, who caught a 332-pound halibut with a hand-line in 1893.

Learn when Vinalhaven got its first telephone, what a “wet-well smack” really is, how to make “corned hake,” and what throaters, headers, splitters, idlers and salters really do. This is excellent island history well told.

Bill Bushnell lives and writes in Harpswell.

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