BooksBarbecue
Back A Night of Flames Save as PDF
Chapters (76)
  1. Cover
  2. Praise forMATTHEW HARFFY
  3. BY MATTHEW HARFFY
  4. Title Page
  5. Copyright
  6. Dedication
  7. Maps
  8. Epigraph
  9. Contents
  10. Place Names
  11. One
  12. Two
  13. Three
  14. Four
  15. Five
  16. Six
  17. Seven
  18. Eight
  19. Nine
  20. Ten
  21. Eleven
  22. Twelve
  23. Thirteen
  24. Fourteen
  25. Fifteen
  26. Sixteen
  27. Seventeen
  28. Eighteen
  29. Nineteen
  30. Twenty
  31. Twenty-One
  32. Twenty-Two
  33. Twenty-Three
  34. Twenty-Four
  35. Twenty-Five
  36. Twenty-Six
  37. Twenty-Seven
  38. Twenty-Eight
  39. Twenty-Nine
  40. Thirty
  41. Thirty-One
  42. Thirty-Two
  43. Thirty-Three
  44. Thirty-Four
  45. Thirty-Five
  46. Thirty-Six
  47. Thirty-Seven
  48. Thirty-Eight
  49. Thirty-Nine
  50. Forty
  51. Forty-One
  52. Forty-Two
  53. Forty-Three
  54. Forty-Four
  55. Forty-Five
  56. Forty-Six
  57. Forty-Seven
  58. Forty-Eight
  59. Forty-Nine
  60. Fifty
  61. Fifty-One
  62. Fifty-Two
  63. Fifty-Three
  64. Fifty-Four
  65. Fifty-Five
  66. Fifty-Six
  67. Fifty-Seven
  68. Fifty-Eight
  69. Fifty-Nine
  70. Sixty
  71. Sixty-One
  72. Sixty-Two
  73. Author’s Note
  74. Acknowledgements
  75. About the Author
  76. An Invitation from the Publisher

A Night of Flames, just like the first book in the series, A Time for Swords, is historical fiction with a capital F. The world that Hunlaf, Runolf and friends inhabit is based on the real world of the early Viking Age of the late eighth century. The kings and kingdoms are grounded in fact and many of the events described historically occurred. Likewise, the culture, lifestyle, technology, clothing and weapons are all as accurate as I can make them.

But just as with the first story in Hunlaf’s tale, there is also much of this book that has sprung from my imagination. There was no rogue thrall who led a brutal uprising in Rogaland, but hopefully after reading this story you can believe there could have been.

The journey up the river aboard Gullbringa owes much to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal film, Apocalypse Now, the script of which John Milius had loosely based on Conrad’s nineteenth-century novella. Where in Conrad’s story they sail along the Congo River, Milius transposes the action to the Vietnam War. The story is so timeless that I was instantly drawn to it and the idea that The Treasure of Life might corrupt the mind of someone already broken by circumstance and trauma to become a murderous, Kurtz-like figure.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that in the year 794, the year after the first Viking attack on Lindisfarne, Vikings attacked the monastery at the mouth of the Wear, but “some of their leaders were slain; and some of their ships also were shattered to pieces by the violence of the weather; many of the crew were drowned; and some, who escaped alive to the shore, were soon dispatched at the mouth of the river”.

When I read this entry, it seemed inevitable that Hunlaf and his companions should be at the scene of such an event. Following the attack on Jarrow and Monkwearmouth, there is a hiatus of decades where no more Viking raids are described as taking place on the Northumbrian coastline. The fact they had been beaten soundly at Jarrow may well have had something to do with that, or perhaps other attacks did not involve such prominent locations and so were omitted from the records, or, as I have postulated here, perhaps the Northumbrian king brokered a deal with the Norse kingdoms from which the raiders came.