The Tale Of Hauk II

For a safe trading voyage, Hauk offers to Thor, Aegir and St Michael - the thunder god, the sea giant and a warrior archangel, protectors from storms and pirates. Michael could be Tyr or Mars.

In fantasy, the dead can return either as ghosts or as zombies but Geirolf is a bit of both. It is definitely his body that leaves its grave and physically attacks folk at the full moon but he also has "Ghost-strength..." that turns swords aside (Anderson, Fantasy, New York, 1981, p. 37). Hauk must wrestle with this ghostly body and break its neck so that it is immobilized and can be burnt. Hauk is then called "...the Ghost Slayer." (p. 47)

But is he now under a doom or a weird? Before slumping and lying still, Geirolf  had "...traced a line through the air and a line growing beneath that." (p. 46)

Does that mean a horizontal line with a longer vertical line descending from its mid-point, a T shape, like a Cross without the shorter vertical line above the horizontal?

A character appropriately named Grim explains, "That's naught but the Hammer...He blessed you..." (pp. 46-47)

So all is well. However, a knowledgeable British Heathen told me he thought that the Sign of the Hammer was an upside down T, more like a reversed Cross.

Geirlof's ghost-strong body is described as a "...drow..." (p. 44) My Chambers Dictionary defines a drow as "a form of troll" and a troll as "in Scandinavian mythology, a goblin or supernatural dwarf (earlier giant)," from the Old Norse. That is somewhat confusing but why apply this term to what Geirolf has become?

This short story presents in twenty seven pages the kind of subject matter and narrative techniques to be found in Anderson's Viking novels.

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.