The Dragon’s Hoard
I really enjoyed these eleven stories from the Viking sagas, obviously carefully chosen for their variety. Most involve fighting but sometimes, as in Hunting Magnus, the Viking, Magnus, decides that he doesn’t want to fight. Instead, he escapes from his lord by a clever trick. In The Boy in the Bones, the hero, Bodvar, takes a bullied boy under his wing and gives him the courage to stand up for himself.
It’s a glimpse into a world with very different assumptions from our own, one where men are expected to enjoy killing people, and where the weak are disposed of. However, when the warrior Thorir comes across an abandoned baby in The Beserker’s Baby, he decides not to leave it to its fate. My favourite is The Bear in Chains. Audun captures a polar bear in Greenland as a present for the King of Denmark. Here the story is turned on its head when Lari Don changes viewpoint and tells us what the bear did next.
Females rarely feature in the sagas but, when they do, they come across as single-minded and often fierce women. Eithne, the Viking mother in The Raven Banner expects her son to die in battle; not to do so would disgrace her.
The spiky ink and watercolour illustrations, by Cate James, are obviously well-researched and get across the stark but compelling nature of the sagas, where survival is only for the fittest. The world she depicts complements Lori Don’s stories admirably.
The Dragon’s Hoard is meant to be read out loud, and Lori Don tells us she often changes the story slightly when reading them aloud in schools – as the original story-tellers would have done. Some of the stories are blood-thirsty, but most children of six plus should enjoy them, especially if an adult is there.
