Time Travel Twins: The Viking Attack
Twins Scarlett and Thomas are hurtled back in time to the year 859 AD in a somewhat cavalier manner by means of their grandfather’s homemade time machine (shades of Doc Brown in ‘Back to the Future’!). Equipped only with the knowledge gained through their school Vikings project and each furnished with devices that enable them to speak and understand any language, they arrive at different places, albeit in the same year.
Thomas finds himself on board a ship with a band of Viking warriors and Scarlett in a Saxon village with the scholarly Alfred, recuperating from illness, a king’s youngest son who believes he will never be king himself (and who lets the bread burn!). Their journeys bring them together but, as they are attached to warring communities, will they be able to reunite in order to use their grandfather’s device to return simultaneously to their own time? At one point they become embroiled in a battle, bringing the salutary realisation that it’s not like a computer game.
This is the first in a proposed series featuring historical topics prescribed in the English National Curriculum and aiming to show two sides of history. While readers will learn about aspects of Anglo-Saxon and Viking lives from this illustrated story, the Vikings are very much presented as villains apart from an acknowledgement in the endnotes that ‘Some of them preferred not to fight at all, instead farming or trading.’
The Roman Invasion, the second story featuring the Time Travel Twins, will be published in September 2023.
