“Third Long Arc” - process notes

I’m looking at the document I wrote when I was developing The Plague Widow… Northlanders being designed the way it is, each time I start a new story what I’m doing is starting a brand new project.  So there’s a lot of proposal-writing and outlining and collecting of reference.

Here’s the working list of titles I had for this story:

Titles:
THE WINTER OF THE PLAGUE
THE PLAGUE WINTER
THE PLAGUE YEAR
DEAD YEARS
DEAD WINTER
THE YEAR OF THE PLAGUE
THE OUTBREAK
OUTBREAK 1000AD
THE FALL AND THE DEATH
DEATH OF A VILLAGE

I remember the first two were the ones I presented to my editor Mark Doyle at Vertigo.  The others are more stream-of-consciousness, just writing stuff to exercise the brain sort of thing (you should see the titles list for The New York Four - close to a hundred ideas).  “The Plague Widow”, the actual title, came later, in an email exchange with Mark.  Not sure how or why, but as soon as I typed it I knew it was the one.  I changed a few things around in the outline so the story more closely followed Hilda, our widow.

The Rus, as they are called, camped above the river
trading furs from a log hall, axed out by slaves.
The men—tall as date palms, blond, tattooed—
had set a pole out front carved with gods
to which they offer things to bless their trade.
This was all I saw of their piety or conscience.
Caliph, they are the dirtiest creatures of God.

- Ibn Fadhlan, On an Arab Mission, Encounters Vikings Volga River, 922 A.D.

A great passage I found while researching the Rus.  I remember noting down a reminder to make more of the characters blond.

According to F. Donald Logan (The Vikings in History, cit. Montgomery, p. 24), “in 839, the Rus’ were Swedes. In 1043, the Rus’ were Slavs.” The Scandinavians were completely absorbed and, unlike their brethren in England and in Normandy, they left little cultural heritage in Eastern Europe. This almost complete absence of cultural traces… is remarkable, and the Slavicists therefore call the Vikings “cultural chameleons”, who came, ruled and then disappearede. This seems to suggest that these Rus’ were a small group, less than a people in the nation sense of the word; less than an ethnos.

“the last of the vikings?”

That final line was a note I wrote in response to the paragraph above.  For a moment I contemplated saving this story for the end of Northlanders The Series, but I’ve always known the final story would be about the famous Lost Greenland Settlement.

Original character notes (Hilda was initially called Hild):

HILD – she is a small woman, pretty and delicate but more towards the boyish than the supermodel (a blond Bjork?).  Her strength is an inner strength and anyone would be surprised to see such stamina and resilience in such a small person.  KARIN, her daughter, is just an 8yo version of herself.

Hild has white-blond hair, long to the waist.  Married Norsewomen always wear their hair up in public, and free-flowing hair on an adult is a sign of a single woman.  So at first she will wear it up, but then probably cut it short to circumvent the whole thing. 

Hild is probably only 25, but that means something different in those days and she looks more like 37 – wrinkles around the eyes, a world-weariness about her.  Possible model: http://tinyurl.com/r8x6rc

GUNBORG – like a small-town cop, he is a big beefy guy losing the war of muscle vs. fat.  His gut is growing, but no one would doubt the power in his arms and back to deliver some damage.  Like any Viking, he hair long hair tied back, a big beard, and maybe a busted nose. 

He’s older, maybe 40, which is retirement age.  He might have been a warrior once, but now he’s living in the sticks, trying to start over.  Or give up?

His main weapon is the battle axe, which is one of those serious ones mounted on a 6-foot pole: http://www.ydalir.co.uk/gallery/2004/elvaston/axe_fight_big.jpg

BORIS – dark features, and immense sort of Moses beard.  Wears a woolen cap on his head at all times.  Vaguely religious in appearance, like a crazy renegade monk that makes people laugh.
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/4436400/jpg/_44364703_russiabeliever_afp416.jpg (this is fantastic, but with jet black hair)

Sergei Kirillov’s The Holy Rus Trilogy:

Iceland

In 2006 I went on a research trip to Iceland (okay, it was also my honeymoon) and brought my shitty old Holga with managed to shoot one last roll of 120mm before crapping out.  I got the film developed into negatives, and, long story short, it was ages before I got them scanned.  Here are a few shots from that dying plastic camera, only slightly adjusted for contrast and with some double-exposed frames pasted together.  I love them, weird and dreamlike and pretty much exactly how I remember the sun-drenched summer days I spent there.

Northlanders Research Source List

(re-posted from an earlier version of this site)

Partial list of the sources and texts that were part of Brian Wood’s research for the book:

Non-fiction
-The Anglo-Saxons by Geoffrey Hindley
-Queen Emma and the Vikings by Harriet O’Brien
-Gods and Myths of Northern Europe by HR Ellis Davidson
-The Far Traveler by Nancy Marie Brown
-1066: The Year Of The Conquest by David Howarth
-Wars Of The Irish Kings by David Willis McCullough
-The Barbarian Conversion by Richard Fletcher
-The Druids by Peter Berresford Ellis
-The Viking Art Of War by Paddy Griffith
-Collapse by Jared Diamond
-The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danzinger
-The Vikings by Jonathan Clements
-1066: The Bayeux Tapestry by Andrew Bridgeford
-Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga edited by Fitzhugh and Ward
-The Norsemen by Count Eric Oxenstierna
-The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings
-Battle and Warrior by HR Grant
-Battles Of The Medieval World
-Warfare: The Middle Ages 768-1487
-The Viking World by James Graham-Campbell

Sagas and Ancient Texts
-The Sagas of the Icelanders
-Orkneyinga Saga
-The Vinland Sagas
-The Sagas of the Jomsvikings
-The Tain translated by Thomas Kinsella
-Alfred The Great (Asser’s Life of King Alfred)
-The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
-Beowulf

Modern Fiction
-Vinland and Magnus by George Mackay Brown
-The Ice-Shirt by William T. Vollman
-Saga by Jeff Janoda
-The Thrall’s Tale by Judith Lindbergh
-The Sea Road by Margaret Elphinstone
-The Saxon Series by Bernard Cornwell
-Eaters Of The Dead by Michael Crichton
-Conscience Of The King by Alfred Duggan
-Viking Trilogy by Tim Severin
-Thunder God by Paul Watkins