The Tale Of Hauk

After two Old Stone Age Stories, "The Forest" and "The Long Remembering," and one Roman Empire story, "The Peat Bog," we return, in "The Tale of Hauk," to the Viking period already familiar from several of Poul Anderson's novels. Like his Hrolf Kraki's Saga, this story begins in the Saga style. We do not enter the title character's or even any other character's point of view. Instead, we are given an objective account of our hero's father:

"A man called Geirolf  dwelt on the Great Fjord..." (Anderson, Fantasy, New York, 1981, p. 21).

And the first thing that we are told about Geirolf, father of Hauk Geirolfsson, is who his father was. In this milieu, we cannot know Hauk unless and until we know his antecedents.

Anderson's three, or more, main genres are displayed in these four stories:

"The Forest" is (pre)historical fiction;
"The Long Remembering" is science fiction;
"The Peat Bog" is historical fiction;
"The Tale of Hauk" will turn out, as I remember from an earlier reading, to be historical fantasy because it will assume that its characters are right to believe that there is a supernatural realm from which the dead can return to trouble the living.

I have reread to page 25 and am about to go out for the evening. Thank you to those who are responsible for 55 pageviews so far today.