The Beginning Of The End

At last a start on reading Poul Anderson's The Sign Of the Raven, Vol 3 of his The Last Viking Trilogy. The Volume begins with a welcome thirteen page Foreword summarising Vols 1 and 2. I would not have remembered all of those details. Presumably an omnibus edition of the trilogy would omit the lengthy Forewords to Vols 2 and 3, thus reducing the page count.

In a recent post, I referred to Vol 3 as comprising 282 pages by the conventional means of simply reading the page number of the last page. However, the text of the novel begins on p. 23 so the real length of the novel is 260 pages. I think that, as an agreed publishing convention, the text of a novel should always be paginated from p. 1 and the preceding pages from p. i. In this case, pp. 1-22, which should be i-xxii, comprise:

p. 1, three paragraphs quoted from the novel;
p. 2, a list of titles by Bram Stoker available from the same publisher;
p. 3, the title page;
p. 4, publishing information;
p. 5, dedication;
p. 6, blank;
pp. 7-19, Foreword;
pp. 20-21, maps;
p. 22, a poem attributed to Sighvat.

There is no Table of Contents.

p. 1 is unnecessary and should have been the title page, p. 2 should have been other titles by the same author and p. 6 could have been the Contents.

The Foreword reminds us that the familiar names, Macbeth, Duncan and Malcolm, had appeared in the previous Volume. It also reminds us that Catholic clergy reproached Harald because he kept Orthodox clergy for his Russian wife. Well done, Harald. He appointed bishops himself. This was the Investiture Contest which, waged between Popes and Emperors, split Western Christendom and recurred again in the Church of England. If church and state had been separate, if during feudalism bishops had not been  landholders wielding political power, then the conflict would have been unnecessary.