Space Ragnar Lodbrok- critique this extract please.

The following extract is from the first few pages of something I typed out a few months ago. In fact, it was typed out of impulse just last night my time. I haven't written all the bits before it yet.

The story is called Crow Queen. It's science fiction inspired by The Saga Of Ragnar Lodbrok, the saga which inspired the TV series Vikings. One character from the show and the Danish Ragnar tradition, the shieldmaiden Lagertha, is mentioned.

That's why I called it "space Ragnar Lodbrok.'' I'm looking for a critique of this extract. In particular, I want to know if in others' opinions, Kraka/Aslaug sounds like a Wise Beyond Her Years teenager married to an older-but-still-young guy (Ragnar)? I often get opinions that my writing isn't clear enough. Is the situation that led to the conversation clear? Can you infer it from my writing, or would you need an explanation? And most of all, would you read the rest? It's in the middle of the story, not the beginning, which is why I created a separate thread rather than putting it in the hook thread.

Ragnar swallowed. “Alright. I’m waiting for what you have to say, Kràka. I’ll listen, I promise.” His accent was thicker, stronger. The smell of salt water and gunpowder on him was overpowering, just as it had been the day I met him, when he saw me dressed in only a net, my black curls tied back, chewing a leek, with a dog running in front of me. It was winter again. There was a little bit of snow falling outside our room, which I could see by peering around his back to look out the window.

Seven months had passed since that day and since he’d carried me off onboard his boat to his home in Denmark, where we’d got married. Ma and Dad didn’t come. They were needed back in Canada at Spangarheid. Besides, they had the gold- enough to buy all the new stuff they needed. And there would be a new scullery maid.

I took my eyes off the ring and gazed as calmly as possible into my husband’s eyes, trying to push away the memory of how it had felt when he slipped it onto my finger. Something told me that if I didn’t say it, Ingeborg would have more chance of taking my place as Ragnar Lodbrok’s wife and queen. It wasn’t going to be easy.

“Here’s the story.” I began, keeping my eyes on his tanned serious face peering out under yards of blond hair. “When my birth parents met, my mother, Brunilda, was sleeping in Hindfell Mansion, up on the top of the cliffs southward of the Glittering Heath back in Vinland. She’d been placed there by order of Skuld Helgisdottir of Odin Command, because she let the wrong man live in battle. She was imprisoned “until someone without fear could wake her.” That person was my father, Sigurd. He was just fifteen, a year or two older than me, and had just killed Fafnir armed with Gram and wearing a mithril byrnie which his own foster father, Regin, had made for him.

They say when he and my mother met after he’d ridden through the gas flames, he lifted off her helmet and fell in love with her instantly. He cut off her byrnie, which had almost molded itself to her flesh, worse than the tightest corset. She’d worn it for fifty years while she slept. Like Sleeping Beauty, but for a shorter period of time.”

I glanced at him. Good. He was listening. Hopefully he could keep at it for a few more minutes.

I continued. “They were together for half a year. In March the next year, he left, leaving my mother pregnant. Her maid, Caridad, who was a midwife, helped deliver me. She kept her promise to my father and named me Aslaug after his great-great-great grandmother. “

I sighed. I could barely believe I’d managed to get out so many words. I glanced quickly at Ragnar for what seemed like the millionth time. His expression hadn’t changed – he still looked at me intently. His hands were bunched together in fists, and the calluses on his tanned fingers seemed more noticeable. Slowly, I gripped his hand.

“I read that they died.” He spoke slowly, searching my face. “Before I even met Thora. I was fourteen, your age. My father brought newspapers home. Sigurd was murdered, and Brynhild died of a broken heart. She stabbed herself in the chest with a dagger. But I don’t remember reading that they had a daughter. What happened then, after you were born?”

“I was fostered out to Heimir.” I blinked away the tears, trying to stop myself from crying. Heimir was my great uncle, the closest thing to a father I’d known apart from Åke. We’d played games together and he’d taught me to read and write English and Icelandic. He’d told me I could be a shieldmaiden when I grew up, that I was my mother’s daughter.

He nodded. Obviously he knew the main parts of my story already, and could guess what happened. “I was three years old when they got the news. He called Arndis, that was my nanny, to get me because we had to leave. All I knew was that it wasn’t safe and that’s why we had to go.

We put on our plainest clothes and he hid me inside a harp with jewelry and dresses.”

I could still remember how it’d felt inside, hard and cool, and the dresses were like a mattress.

Ragnar gasped.

“He gave me a leek to eat and played songs for me. The leek was one of those genetically modified ones that make you less hungry. We went up north to Canada, walking through the country and one night he told me we were going to stay somewhere. I remember looking out through the peephole at all this grass and seeing a little house and other buildings and animals around it. The road was dirt. And I knew he was tired because I could feel him walking slower.

The next thing I heard was this woman saying that of course we could stay there, since they got so few visitors at Spangarheid. She said her name was Gríma and her husband’s name was Åke, and she’d explain it to her husband when he got back home. Well, that night she got us settled in her barn, but the next thing I remember was hearing an axe and then Heimir groaning. They talked about the dresses and gold, and when they found me I wouldn’t talk to ‘em. No one would believe me if I said they killed my foster dad. She called me Kràka because I was “black like a crow”, and shaved off my hair and coated my head with tar. She made me call her and Åke Ma and Dad.”

I sighed. My head was full of memories. Herding the goats. Meeting Ragnar’s cook in the scullery. Being told I looked like a crow, and like Ma’s mother, Kràka.

Ragnar still didn’t look as if he believed me. I bent down and touched my stomach, feeling my son inside. Maybe this would convince him. “You know how I’m pregnant?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I know a few things about this one. It’s a boy like the others. He’s going to have a snake-shaped birthmark in his right eye, and if it’s there when he’s born you’ll know I’m not lying. If that happens, I want him to be named Sigurd after my father, and for the engagement to Ingeborg to be cancelled. If it doesn’t happen you can do what you like. All I’m asking you is to stay for a while, until he’s born at least.”

“I can do that.” He got up, yawned, took off his shirt and put it onto the table beside our bed. He pushed his nightshirt down over his chest and climbed into the left side.

"Goodnight." he called.

My nightgown felt soft against my skin. I’d changed minutes before he came to the room- I was exhausted from weapons training and now really understood why Lagertha had become one of the most famous shieldmaidens.

"Night, Ragnar."

edited 14th Jul '13 6:27:15 AM by MorwenEdhelwen

The road goes ever on. -Tolkien

Well, I'll supply a crit. As a warning, I haven't read any of the legends this is based off of, and know less than the bare bones about them.

I won't do a line-by-line or critique grammar, as it's a pain on the best of forums, and this forum's posting format is irritating. However, I do think that you pack in extraneous information and tend to do run-on sentences, as well as a telling, not showing. In this one:

"The smell of salt water and gunpowder on him was overpowering, just as it had been the day I met him, when he saw me dressed in only a net, my black curls tied back, chewing a leek, with a dog running in front of me."

Show me how his stench overwhelms her. And you don't need to tell us the exact particulars of that meeting, unless the leek, her hair, and the dog play important parts in the story.

For Kraka/Aslaug's maturity/wisdom, I don't really get that vibe from her. This excerpt is pure exposition interspersed with weak reactions from her husband and her own sadness. If you want to show us her wisdom, show her to readers when she's actually making/thinking about choices, or acting in situations, not just telling us a story to her bored husband.

I wouldn't read your story from this excerpt. Besides the grammar/narrative structure and my disinterest in the base subject matter, this piece was just a bunch of exposition; despite learning about her backstory, I know nothing of her - she gets sad, as would any normal person, but that's all. The husband seems pretty laid back, and besides the setting being apparently having modern/technological equivalents of mythological stuff like Valkyries, I know nothing of your world, and have no interest in learning more.

Ok, so here's my inference of the events leading up to this scene. It's obvious that Ragnar is considering marriage to another woman (Ingeborg) and Aslaug doesn't want this to happen. I'm not sure if it means she'd be divorced, or demoted to a secondary wife status since I don't know the marriage customs of your setting, but it's enough to know she is trying to avert this fate. In order to try to convince Ragnar not to marry Ingeborg, Aslaug tells him her history. Not really knowing your setting or the rest of the story I'm not sure why this would help her case. My current assumption is that her heritage (being the daughter of such famous persons as Sigurd and Brunilda) is considered important, and she thinks that if Ragnar knows her heritage he's more likely to want her for his wife. Also she makes a prediction about what her son will look like, implying some sort of magic is involved.

So that's what I've got from what you've written.

As for the characters themselves, Aslaug struck me as just intelligent, not necessarily wise beyond her years (It was difficult to peg her age based on this excerpt alone). I mean, if she has magical proof (the snake birthmark) that her story is true, she doesn't really need to be clever to convince Ragnar, she can just let the evidence speak for itself.

I did get the feeling that Ragnar was older, most likely from the distance between his character and Aslaug. From her comments it seems she has difficulty getting him to notice her at all. I got the impression he is very much considered 'above' her in terms of status. (There was one point where Ragnar gasped, which confused me. Nothing in the story seemed worthy of a gasp, especially not from someone as difficult to impress as Ragnar)

Misc. Comments/Critiques: Some details seemed awkwardly inserted just to provide information, or were just unimportant to me, like the characters randomly mentioning their ages, the name of Brunilda's midwife, or the fact that the leek was genetically modified.

Is a 'harp' some sort of storage container as well as a musical instrument? I gathered as much from the text, but the word threw me off a bit.

If you hadn't told me this was a science fiction story, I probably wouldn't have realized it based on this section alone. The mythic names and your writing style had me picturing an ancient setting (even if things like 'Canada' and 'newspapers' popped up from time to time to break the mood).

Overall though, if I had gotten this far in the story think I would keep reading. Aside from a few nitpicks your style easy to read, I could follow the flow, and you've got me interested in Aslaug's dilemma.

Nobody wants to be a pawn in the game of life. What they don't realize is the game of life is Minesweeper.

@Haggardy: He's a warlord/leader of a group of modern-day/futuristic Vikings, complete with fishing boat fitted for smuggling gold and jewellery. And he's also a king. Of course he's kind of above Aslaug in status, knowing that at this point everyone thinks she's just a poor girl from the country and has no idea she's anything more than Kraka *

a farmer's daughter, even if she's the queen. That said, he married her out of love.

"Brunilda" is the Spanish form of "Brynhildr/Brynhildur."

Re the harp: It's both.

I'm having a bit of trouble with another issue; how should I compress the timeline of several years of the original while keeping the essential events? Here's what IMO are the essential events and what I have planned out.

Birth of Ivar The Boneless- soon after Ragnar and Aslaug's marriage.

Births of Hvitserk and Bjorn Ironside: Hvitserk is born one year after Ivar and Bjorn a year after him.

Ragnar attempting to replace Aslaug

Birth of Sigurd Snake-Eye

Deaths of Erik and Agnar (Thora Town-Hart's sons) and Aslaug and her sons' revenge- three years after Sigurd Snake-Eye's birth. This is in keeping with the saga, which states that three-year-old Sigurd Snake-Eye convinces his remaining older brothers to raise an expedition against Ingeborg's father.

The Valkyries are a combination of combat unit and priestesses of Odin.

The video above is Ragnar's death-song, the Krakumal, as a Faroese ballad. The title translates as "We swung the sword."

edited 14th Jul '13 8:53:25 PM by MorwenEdhelwen

The road goes ever on. -Tolkien

Oh, so it's a box type harp! Ok. That makes a lot of sense.

As for compressing the timeline, how many years does the original story take place over? Really, it depends on the sort of story you're trying to tell, but I imagine you wouldn't necessarily need to compress the timeline at all: just write out the events you consider important for your plot, and skip over the time where nothing vital happens (with perhaps a bridging paragraph to cover the intervening time.)

Since a lot of these events are births, you're going to be sort of limited by the amount of time you can compress on that front. However (and bear in mind I'm not familiar with the original work) if the 'revenge' plot takes place over a larger period of time, your story could easily compress this. I can see lots of voyages and battles which take place over weeks or months (maybe even years) in the original setting take place in just a few days or weeks in your setting given their more advanced technology, which would hopefully mean faster transportation, etc as well.

Nobody wants to be a pawn in the game of life. What they don't realize is the game of life is Minesweeper.

According to the translation I have, "A little while" (IMO one, two or three years)passed between Ivar's birth and the others. Sigurd Snake-Eye was born later, and was three years old when his stepbrothers were killed.

The road goes ever on. -Tolkien

Hm. So when you say Sigurd was born 'later' I take it that, in the original story, the time between Sigurd's birth and the Bjorn's are somewhat long? Or are the brothers somewhat young when they go on their revenge mission?

Since you mentioned genetic engineering being a part of your setting, I suppose you could incorporate some sort of accelerated growth technology to decrease the amount of time between the birth of Sigurd and his brothers. That way they'd be physically capable of going on this revenge mission when Sigurd is still quite young.

edited 17th Jul '13 8:14:14 AM by LittleBillyHaggardy

Nobody wants to be a pawn in the game of life. What they don't realize is the game of life is Minesweeper.

Sigurd was born a while later I think.

The road goes ever on. -Tolkien