Vik and The Night Raider

by Marie-Louise Jensen

One of the first questions I tend to ask myself, once a story has formed in my mind, is where is it set? I need to be able to see it. I've mentioned this in connection with Runaway in my last post, but it's true of everything I write. Sometimes it's a wonderful excuse to revisit a place I love.
When I wrote The Night Raider for the Fiction Express website last year, I wanted to choose a different location in Iceland to my two teen novels. There, I fictionalised the settlement of Husavik on the north coast. For this story for younger readers, I chose another place in Iceland that made a big impression on me.
I don't know whether it was the incredible weather we had the first time I visited Vik on the south coast, the sky cloudless and the deepest blue I've ever seen, or whether it was the incredible black volcanic-shingle beach:

"Reynisfjara, Suðurland, Islandia, 2014-08-17, DD 163" by Diego Delso. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reynisfjara,_Su%C3%B0urland,_Islandia,_2014-08-
17,_DD_163.JPG#/media/File:Reynisfjara,_Su%C3%B0urland,_Islandia,_2014-08-17,_DD_163.JPG

This is a beautiful picture, but it doesn't fully depict how black the shingle is to stand on, and no picture can communicate the sound of the beach - the roar and rattle of the stones as the wild North Atlantic ocean surges against it. 

Another thing I loved about Vik, was that it was the first place I saw puffins flying from the cliffs. I saw plenty later, but this was my first sighting of the funny, charming, awkward fliers:

"Puffin002" by T.Müller - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puffin002.jpg#/media/File:Puffin002.jpg

A third thing I loved about Vik was the campsite was right below bird cliffs, so the second time I visited, and camped, we had kitiwakes and other gulls nesting right around us. Of course Vik also lies close to one of Iceland's big volcanoes, Katla. It is due an eruption soon  and the town is on permanent alert. 
The Vikings settlers in my story don't know about the volcano; it's lurking beneath the glaciers. They are more concerned with a mysterious thief who is stealing livestock in the night...


The Night Raider is print-publishing at the end of June and is suitable for ages 9-11. 
Follow me on twitter: @jensen_ml

Romantic Heroes (and how we perceive them)

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I'm writing this post on St Valentine's Day having just run the gauntlet of the pink-and-heart-strewn aisle of my local supermarket. And as Catherine Johnson so rightly says, on the blog today what single person wants to be reminded of Valentine's Day?

But what with the day of romance and all that plus a great conversation I had on twitter yesterday, the thought of romantic heroes and how they've changed has been going over in my mind.

I'm a Georgette Heyer addict. I admit that without shame or excuses. Whenever the going gets tough, the tough hide under the bedclothes and read Georgette Heyer. I discovered her historical fiction novels (almost exclusively Georgian or Regency) at 14 and have returned to them in times of illness and trouble ever since. They've also influenced my own writing.

But rereading a few of them more recently with a more heightened awareness of gender and power balances within relationships, a few of the male protagonists, the way they are portrayed and the female responses to them, make me uncomfortable.

Heyer's female characters are, like most women of their time in fiction, entirely concerned with finding a husband; a genuine constraint in a society that doesn't allow women autonomy. The desirable husbands were a range of dashing blades, dissolute bucks, witty dandies, brave soldiers and the like. Quite a swoony collection of men, in fact.

The ones that make me uncomfortable are the 'masterful' men - and the women who like to submit to this mastery, because it's what they've secretly been desiring all along. What makes me so uneasy is just how close 'masterful' is to 'controlling and abusive' and how close this submissiveness is to 'she likes it really'.

There's a difference, I feel, between a strong male character and one who is imperious and dominating. It's a fine line, and just which side of it we tread and find acceptable has changed enough in the last few decades to make a few of these older books (Heyer was writing mainly from the 1930s to the 1960s) jar with the modern reader. Strangely there is more that jars with me in Heyer's historical fiction than there is in Austen, the Brontes, Gaskell, Burney or even Radcliffe - many of whose heroes are positive paragons of virtue.

I've become gradually more aware, over the years I've been writing, of the need to portray mutual respect between the genders and around issues of consent. This is especially the case writing for a young adult readership. Romance writing is a responsible business. The romances you read as a young person are likely to shape your attitudes to and understanding of romantic relationships.

The rise of teen 'dark romance' with its borderline-abusive relationships, including stalking, voyeurism, danger of imminent death and other unsavoury ingredients, portrayed as romantic, trouble me very deeply. I know I'm not alone in this.

I've reacted by making my own male protagonist in my most recent historical novel, Runaway, more respectful. I probably need to go much further down this path, in fact and make my girls more assertive, although this is harder to achieve convincingly in historical fiction, where social norms were different. But consent and mutual respect are vital to portray. In fact, I think I'll end this with the wonderful words of one of the university guides my eldest son came across a year or so ago: "Consent is setting the bar too low, guys. Hold out for enthusiasm."

Democracy, Law Enforcement and Honour

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I'm currently writing a new Viking e-book for Fiction Express and it has set me thinking again about just how unusual a country Iceland was and is.
When Iceland was claimed and settled by the Scandinavians in 800-900, it became Europe's first republic (or commonwealth) and first democracy. Without a feudal system of Kings, lords and land ownership, this new land forged its own way. All the settlers came from monarchies, but this model wasn't how they chose to shape or build their new country.
Land was claimed by the settlers as they arrived (apparently according to how many bonfires you could light within view of each other in a day if you were a man or how much land you could lead a goat around in a day if you were a woman, but I'm sure it was also a matter of what you could grab!) As the land became settled, a number of regional councils were set up which met in spring to agree laws and settle disputes. And ultimately a national council was set up at Thingvellir, (council valley) in the rift valley outside Reykyavik. These type of councils had already existed elsewhere in Scandinavia but there they were ultimately subject to the king. Men (yes, I'm afraid it was almost all men, though women in Scandinavia were far from powerless) met inside a circle into which they could bring no weapons and there they talked.

 

This annual meeting - the largest in the Icelandic calendar - was held with all the side shows such a gathering would naturally attract: booths, food, trade, horseracing and so on. A lawmaker was appointed to serve for a number of years and he would recite the laws of the land as agreed by the council. Disputes were settled, and important decisions taken, such as the occasion on which Iceland faced the ultimatum from Norway: convert to Christianity or be invaded from Norway. The Icelanders democratically appointed a man to take the decision, and he opted for a peaceful conversion.

This sounds idyllic and in many ways it was. It worked. The problem was that there was no independent law enforcement to ensure the sentences passed at the Thing were carried out. If a sentence such as outlawry was passed on an individual (typical for the crime of killing a man), it was up to the guilty party to abide by it. If he did not, he could lawfully be killed by anyone.
Some people openly flouted the law and stayed on their farms or didn't pay their fines. Then a posse of vigilantes (often the families

who had been injured in the first place) would get together and kill him.
The real problem here came with the Icelandic notions of honour. If someone in your family has been killed, your honour is in question until you have avenged him. This didn't theoretically apply to lawful killings, but in practice often did. And then his family would be honour bound to take revenge in their turn.
From this stemmed many blood feuds that over generations wiped out whole familes. Many of the Icelandic sagas centre around feuds and their resolutions. Gradually, a few powerful familes gathered most of the country's wealth and influence into their hands; never a healthy situation.
Tragically, violence and killing reached such a pitch by the  thirteenth century, that the Icelanders decided to call the Norwegian crown to restore peace. This was their undoing and led to a long period of colonial oppression, poverty and starvation, even worse than the initial problem. The darkest period of Iceland history was when Norway and Iceland came under the Danish crown and were treated with heartlessness and cruelty.
Iceland didn't become a democratic, monarch-free state again until Denmark was occupied by Germany during World War Two. They then seized their opportunity and who can blame them?
Thus from its earliest history, Iceland led the way for democracy. I find it fascinating to note that recently they have led the way again, by refusing to be crushed for several generations by the unscrupulous business practices of a few Icelandic bankers. Instead of agreeing to accept their debt as a nation, they rejected the notion of national guilt and (as I understand it) democratically rewrote their constitution online. As a result, after a brief but severe recession, the country is thriving while the rest of Europe is groaning under the yoke of austerity.
This view of Iceland's history is of course open to debate and not everyone agrees they made a right or fair decision. But as far as I'm concerned the message is: Long live democracy! (but you do need law enforcement...)

Georgian Beauty Remedies

by Marie-Louise Jensen


I'm not adverse to a few moisturisers and beauty treatments from time to time, but I can be quite lazy about anything that takes much effort.
I was looking through my copy of Eliza Smith's The Compleat Housewife (first published in 1758 and invaluable for describing food in Georgian books) the other day and came across the various beauty remedies towards the back of the volume. I fear if I'd lived in Georgian times, I'd have lacked the motivation to try for any semblance of beauty at all.
A Remedy for Pimples runs thus:
"Take a quarter of a pound of bitter almonds, blanch, stamp them, and put them into half a pint of spring water; stir it together, strain it out; then put it to half a pint of the best brandy, and a pennorth of the flour of brimstone; shake it well when you use it, which must be often; dab it on with a fine rag."
Honestly, I'd rather be spotty. And who could afford those ingredients?
To Whiten and Clean the Hands, Smith suggests the following recipe:
"Boil a quart of new milk, and turn it with a pint of aqua-vitae; and take off the curd; then put into the posset a pint of rhenish wine, and that will raise another curd, which take off; then put in the whites of six eggs well beaten, and that will raise another curd, which you must take off, and mix the three curds together very well, and put them into a gallipot and put the posset in a bottle; scour your hands with the curd, and wash them with the posset."
Next time I read in an old book that a character brews a posset, I will have a lot more respect for the time it would take! I definitely would have been spotty AND lacking white hands!
And I think, looking at Smith's remedy for scurvy of the gums, her readers would have done better to have ignored the long, time-consuming recipe for a gargle and just eaten the six oranges she recommended putting in it.
The cure for breast cancer could come in handy one day though; apparently if you collect the warts from a stone horse and powder them, you can also brew something as a cure with them. Hmm. I suspect you'd be more likely to be trampled to death by the stallion if you tried scraping his warts off than cured of cancer.

Cant

by Marie-Louise Jensen

In early Georgian times it became fashionable, especially for well-to-do young men to speak 'cant' or slang; the language as spoken by the poor or more especially by the less-respectable members of society. Namely, the sharpers, the sharks, the bites, the wild-rogues, the varlets, the queer-bluffers, the rascals and scoundrels.

There is a lot of fun to be had. I've not yet been able to master the vocabulary fully enough to create a canting character, and in any case I think it might be bewildering for my young readership, but I do like to throw in a few Georgian expressions now and again. Some of these are cant and some are simply expressions that have fallen out of usage.

We had some discussions about some of these at the copy-edit stage recently. Because most are outdated and unheard-of now. Where would be the fun if they were still current? But who today knows about job horses, match-bays or wantyres? Horses are no longer our form of transport.
Nor do we any longer have such widespread suffering from gout, so the expression 'in the gout' to depict an ageing gentleman rendered grumpy, difficult and at times incapacitated by a painful condition is no longer familiar.
I also wanted a character to use the expression 'sick as a cushion' for comic effect. Then when called upon to defend it, I couldn't find it anywhere. One of my editors did track it down in the OED (hurrah!) but in the end we settled for 'sick as a parrot' which is probably more comic.
I haven't yet managed to work in 'farting crackers' to a manuscript (a cant term for breeches) although I fully intend to one day. But I did have to track down an era-appropriate term for a man's privates. I found tool, which I thought was comic without being crude. And did you know that a cant term for testicles was 'whirlegigs'? I don't even want to think about how that might have originated...
 Here is the cover of the new book (publishing next June) that provided the fun: