Many Times

Recently here, there was combox discussion of whether Poul Anderson's time travel story, "The Little Monster," should be collected with other Old Stone Age stories or with time travel stories. Searching the blog, I find that this issue had been addressed here. Thus, two novels and two collections could be classified as "Many Times" because none of these four volumes covers only a single period.

"Many Times" could be read after the eighteen volumes that stretch from the prehistorical civilization of Robert E Howard's Conan the Barbarian to the historical fourteenth century. At present, having just reread the four-volume The King Of Ys, co-written by Karen Anderson, set during the decline of the Roman Empire, I have reembarked on the five Viking volumes which stretch from the fifth to the tenth centuries. Nearing the end of War Of The Gods, I will probably continue with the next volume, Hrolf Kraki's Saga.

Hadding's son, Frodi, has been born. Anderson's source, Saxo, identified this Frodi with Hrolf's great uncle of the same name although Anderson tells us in his Afterword to War Of The Gods that this cannot be correct. Nevertheless, for me, Saxo's mistake helps to relate these two volumes chronologically. We know which of them comes first. As a diptych, they come shortly after The King Of Ys and centuries before Eirik Blood-ax and his wife, Gunnhild.

War Of The Gods is indeed a biographical novel, beginning before Hadding's birth and ending after his death. We see his up-bringing and preparation for kingship, then the ups and downs but mainly ups of his career and finally the later period when he ages and is widowed. It is true of anyone's life that many important events occur both before and after it. In this case, the opening and concluding chapters present mythological events because Hadding is an incarnation of the god Njord.