Starkadder

Bernard King

This one was a reread of a book I'd first read when I was in my teens. It's a novel about the eponymous doom laden mercenary, gifted by Odin to live three lifespans and cursed by Thor to betray someone in each. The final betrayal leading to an escape from his curse. This is classic fantasy in the Michael Moorcock or Robert E. Howard vein, brutal and bloodthirsty, taking as its basis the fall off the old gods and the gradual rise of the new White Christ. The majority of the attention is on those representatives of the old gods, playing out the last moves of their game before their eventual dissolution.

It is a perfect representation of breed of fantasy inspired by Northern European legends, never really straying towards the original but succeeding through solid story telling and characterisation. Starkadder's fate is laid bare from the beginning but there is still plenty of room to lay out the path to his destined doom and its far greater repercussions. A story from an age where the gods used people as play things from their own ends.

It begins with two of his betrayals already played out: a tired Starkadder meeting with an old witch who knows something of his future, one who has shared something of his past. He is in the employ of a King who fears him and left to face a group of berserkers sent to slay the legendary warrior cursed with immortality. And so begins the train of events that lead to his doom; a blood-fued that pulls in several generations of a family. His King grows more and more insane, inspiring by terror rather than respect, no longer referred to as The Great. Can he take that step, commit that final betrayal and free himself from his over-long life, or is there another song that is playing itself out?