Einarr's Saga Part One

10/12/2021

I have been working on the rest of "Einaar's Saga". The next part should be complete and release-ready during the first half of 2022.

When I originally started writing, it was to form part of the legacy information for my successor, rather than for general publication, and it exactly matched elements of the Family Sagas. In that form there were four parts to "Einaar's Saga". Using this material as inspiration for a novel required the blending of what had been handed down the generations with recent research and the result provided a stand-alone work, but allowing for a series of books to follow the first.

In the past, the sagas were narrations around the winter hearth where they fitted into the available time. The narrator was therefore known to the audience and needed no introduction. In reworking the story into a novel, I chose to use parts of a much later saga to create the narrator. Therefore, in working on the later parts of "Einaar's Saga" I had to decide whether to follow the same format, or omit the narrator's introduction to each section of chapters of Part One of the saga. Where I thought the narrator particularly useful is that I could his life and experiences to set against life in Einaar's time. While there is little written history from Einaar's time there is much more available from the time of the narrator and it is generally more accurate and reliable. It is also likely to be much better know be readers, with each age of saga complementing the other.

There are also several other housekeeping tasks in matching formats for the later parts of "Einaar's Saga" and I may need to complete the second part and begin on the third part to see how well the layout matches from the first part that has already been published.

Some readers may wonder why this is important to me. Basically, I originally wrote the first part of "Einaar's Saga" without the intention of making the later parts into books for general publication. As a result, I numbered chapters from '1' onward, but grouped the chapters into sections which I labeled 'Part One' onward. Now that I am working on all of the later parts, I could use the original format for the first book where the title of the second book could be "Einaar's Saga - The Spring", number chapters from '1' and divide the book into 'Part One' onward. Where it has an importance is that readers buy books according to how the marketing reaches them and may start at one of the later books. If the story catches their imagination, they then want to acquire all parts of the story and many will want to read the series in sequence.

Resolving these issues is going to affect the release date. In writing, there are flashes of inspiration that provide very simple solutions to issues that seemed rather more complex. I will post some updates on these pages as I write on.
GdJ

07/11/2021

06/12/2021

Inevitably, authors are asked if a novel is autobiographical, or partly autobiographical. Some are, some the authors hope they are, but most are not. They do reflect some of the experiences of the author and there are inevitably some interpretations that are coloured by how the author sees life and the world.

In the case of Einaar's Saga, the characters are drawn from the family sagas as they have been described down the centuries. That really means that I am just the most recent author, following all those generations that went before. Each heir will have made some changes in detail which is why historians look down long noses at oral histories. What is different about the family saga is that it was never intended to be shared outside the family. As a result its essence is not distorted by what others may think and it does not have to fit someone else's agenda. Its purpose is to provide guidance for future generations and provide an account for previous generations. As a private family record, there are no sanctions for past deeds and no damage to current reputations from the deeds of previous generations.

My family's sagas stretch back into the distant past. Much of the early stories are very brief and not much more than a line of succession. It is difficult to know whether this means that early generations achieved little of any significance, or whether the use of sagas expanded, or whether later heirs were more thorough in collecting recent histories together. Probably it is a combination of both factors. Early generations were farmers and fishermen in the main and did not travel widely. Therefore much of their lives would have been very similar to farmers and fishermen until very recently, as farming and fishing has become a more industrial activity. As more became involved in trading, they traveled further and experienced many new things. They also came into violent conflict with others and the sagas had very many more lessons to pass down to new generations of the family.

Einarr's Saga was one of my favourite stories and 'The Winter' is just one part of the eventful life of Einarr. I always found it a most interesting part and some of that may have been because I was very young when I was first told his saga. He was also very young in our view of age, as related to activity, although 16 was not that young for the age in which he lived. He did play an important part in some major events. However some of his later achievements were equally impressive. To me, learning the sagas, he was a three dimensional character. Much of his life was very different from mine, as I was learning the sagas, because of the differences between life in a hard and violent environment, where many never lived beyond their twenties, and my growing existence in an industrial society where we are far more accustomed to surpluses rather than shortages.

04/05/2021

Thank you to all who have sent emails with comments and questions about "Einarr's Saga Part One". Some of my responses have been slow as I juggle several competing demands on my time. Its better to have many things to do and little time to do them in, rather than having all the time in the world and nothing much to do, but it can also be taxing.

A lot of the questions relate to what motivated me to write the book and some asked for more information about me which gave me cause to think about more regular postings to this page.

Much of my working life has been in a secret world, a closed community of some extraordinary people. Where I have surfaced in the public domain its usually been in writing in my technical and operational specialities which is why I chose a pen name to write about Einaar, which is a very different form and style of writing.

My motivation for writing about Einaar is rather more complex. Its
easier to say what didn't motivate me.

Some writers are motivated by the hope of great riches, as a best selling author who also sells the movie rights and buys a string of costly homes that are each rarely used. These were never my motives. In any case, Hollywood has already produced a film about Einarr which was great entertainment, definitely A+, but terrible history, an F-, but then Hollywood has never let accuracy stand in the way of box office success.

Most writers are motivated because they have something they want to say and that is me, but the other issue is "who do they want to say it to and why?"

Several decades ago I wrote down my family sagas to pass on to my successors. I was the first generation to be taught the sagas in English and that was because my father remarried late in life and was not sure he could teach my Old Norse and the Sagas. I was also the first generation living in an information age with great mobility and a family scattered across the world. The Winter Hearth, that had served the sagas so well, no longer existed. As the current heir, it was my duty to find a way to ensure the sagas survived as they had done for the best part of 2,000 years.

The challenge was that there was so much information and, in writing it down, it ceased to be an interactive process as it had been for so many generations as they gather around the Winter Hearth in the long evenings of Northern Winter. It did enable me to send copies to a number of family members to ensure the stories survived but it did need something more.

My favourite stories were from Einarr's Saga and I thought that would be fun to turn into a novel and add colour and depth to the sagas in framework. When I started, I had no intention of publishing the result and making it available to a very much wider readership.

I did add the book to the British Library's then new Electronic Copyright Database as a pdf format document and very selectively published it. Frankly, I had too many things to attempt to do to spend time on marketing a book never intended for general publication.

What changed was a combination of factors, a sick wife and then a period of poor health for me. An urgent operation was delayed when most of the NHS closed down to protect itself during the Wuhan-19 panic. That uncertainty prompted me to find a way for a story I enjoyed to survive. Deciding on a distribution system was not easy and it required me to convert the format to Kindle, which has some challenges, with the added challenges that were brought by failing sight. I still haven't managed to read the paperback to make sure that there are no typos lurking in the text.

Now that it is published, I hope to have the time to write the rest of Einarr's story. My health recovering helps although I still have a raft of conflicting demands on my time.

10/06/2020

Nighthawk Publishing now has a new Internet portal that includes a section for "Einarr's Saga" nighthawk.broadlyboatnews.com

08/13/2020

Thanks to all who have sent emails and messages to us about "Einarr's Saga - The Winter".

We have been looking at options for developing the information flow. We will shortly by opening a new FIRE Project portal specifically for the new publishing program. That will allow us to post very briefly to our social media feeds with a link to the new portal that will then provide greater information an d related databases.

We are still working on the portal format and deciding whether to also create a new portal for each new publication, or to create dedicated sections within the new Nighthawk Publishing portal

Nighthawk Admin

08/09/2020

Most famous for their longships and seamanship, they were also skilled horsemen, making equally lengthy expeditions on land. Some expeditions involved starting by ship, hauling the ships across land, and also moving on land to other waters to build new ships to continue their expeditions.
Those people of the British Isles who followed and descended from the Vikings were to copy the process of long voyages in search of trade, giving the world a common business language. As with the Vikings, these later adventurers placed trade first and fought only when trade was denied, or when they were attacked. Galwegians, together with Border and Lowland Scots, were a remarkably high proportion of these adventurers. They sailed with Huguenot and English corsairs to prey on the Spanish gold and silver ships that carried this wealth back to Spain. They founded colonies and they made a significant contribution to the growth and dominance of the Royal Navy.
As with the Vikings, modern Britons face out to the seas and their future is through trade across the world. In time there will be new migrations beyond the boundaries of the Earth and its atmosphere. There will be new sagas told, or written, but in many ways they will be a grander retelling of the adventures of the past.
GdJ

08/02/2020

The Viking impact on the development of Europe and the expansion to the Americas was significant. In England, the Vikings directly influenced national development and, then indirectly, through the Normans who were strongly of Viking stock. We now know that Vikings did sail to North America and build settlements, proven by archaeologists. That they sailed further, as sagas maintain, has yet to be proven by the discovery of the remains of settlements in far lands. However, we know that they sailed South down through the rivers of Central and Eastern Europe into the Black Sea, served as mercenaries in the Guard of the Emperor in the Eastern (Byzantine) Empire of Rome, and traded around the Mediterranean. There is also evidence that Vikings sailed along the Northern coast of what is now Russia and travelled by land far to the East, to areas that are now in China.

07/31/2020

For Centuries, the Vikings were regarded as a plague of violent savages, having no merit as a people. We now know that this is very far from the reality. They did have a form of writing but they preferred to live on in an oral tradition. They were an inventive people, with a rich art and technologies. They were supreme seamen and ranged across oceans in sophisticated ships, employing navigation aids that have been lost in history.
We know relatively little of the longship beyond those preserved examples in Oslo. As these were funeral vessels, we do not know how representative they were of other contemporary vessels. Drawings and tapestries that have survived provide indications of variations in design and in the detail of construction. We do understand how Viking sailors used the sun wheel but we understand more widely the magnetic compass, which they also used. The other important navigation tool was the sun stone, but we have absolutely no idea what the sun stone was, or how it functioned. From the sagas, the sun stone was a stone or crystal that could see the sun through the thickest of cloud. It takes on a mystical form but it must have had a physical reality. We also have no idea what maps and charts they used, or how they recorded their tracks. Their sailing masters built up a huge knowledge of the appearance of the seas, but it is unlikely that they depended on memory alone.

07/22/2020

In writing this book, I have researched the periods covered, to place into perspective the family sagas that inspired the start of this project. As I dug deeper, I came to realize that recorded history is much more fragile than we generally accept. The Saxon Chronicles, much lauded as a written history, were developed by scribes in various parts of the Saxon-controlled regions of the British Isles. They were Christian monks or priests who represented most of the literate population of the time. Their writings were not contemporary accounts of events, but based on recollections, oral accounts passed on over many years. When a chronicler confidently states the size of an army, or even the locations of a battlefield, he is really saying that the number of warriors was a large number and the battle may have been fought in a particular area, familiar to the chronicler. In many cases, he is fitting his account of history to integrate with established Christian teaching, or the views and ambitions of his patrons, who may have been his superiors in the Church, or secular leaders, nobles and Kings.
Even in modern times, we are partial in our recording of history. Some accepted accounts of events after 1939, in an age where millions of photographs and many thousands of miles of film have recorded events, literacy standards in Europe were high, with thousands of individuals’ recording events in diaries and letters home, we still see new assertions published that overturn accepted accounts and prove to be correct.
Einarr’s Saga has been written to entertain. I have attempted to avoid taking an historical setting that is wildly different from accepted views of history, but this is not a history book. There was a character Einarr Ivarsson, and other members of his family, who existed in history. Archaeological discoveries have validated some events and activities of the family saga that were previously dismissed by historians.
GdJ

07/20/2020

If we set fashionable and extreme belief to one side and look at what is known of the past, the last great Ice Age drove the human population South to the Mediterranean. As temperatures rose, and the ice receded, people moved further North once more. We know virtually nothing of what societies preceded the Ice Age because the glaciers changed the landscape and the weight of ice forced down the land to an extent where, even today, the land along the North Baltic coast of Sweden is still rising, no longer being depressed by the weight of glaciers.
Since that Ice Age, the temperatures have risen and fallen in a series of cycles, which are poorly recorded. What we now know is that the global cooling at the end of the Roman Empire continued until the Medieval period, when a new spell of global warming was begun and continued until the start of a mini-ice age from the middle years of the Sixteenth Century. That new period of global cooling continued on into the Nineteenth Century. Since then temperatures have been once more recovering, but are still lower than in the Middle Ages and the Roman period.
Einarr’s Saga began in the second half of a period of global cooling and this book has covered the period of his life when he developed into manhood. The narrator of the Saga lived at the start of a further period of global cooling and the start of a new pattern of migration, as seamen ranged out once more to rediscover lands discovered by those of Einarr’s age. What we do not know with any certainty is how many cycles of similar human migration preceded Einarr.

07/11/2020

Over the years, the views of history have come to accept from the sagas what they once denied. There is a conceit that just because an account of history is written down, it must be correct, ignoring that much of history was originally written down many years after events, from oral history! The scribe was not only far removed from the events, but also following a political, or religious, agenda, deliberately distorting what fragments of original information remained, to fit that agenda.
When the Roman Republic and the Empire expanded out from Rome, in a period of significant global warming, there was a migration further North by the people of Europe. In their new Northern lands, these people flourished and multiplied. There is a lack of information on which to consider whether the Roman Empire began its rapid contraction because it had outgrown its ability to administer such an enormous and diverse area, or because global cooling had begun. Perhaps it was a combination of a changing climate and a decadence that had begun a social, military, and political decay. What we do know is that the reducing temperatures led to the people of the North expanding to the South, making considerable voyages in large open ships.
The very great gaps in knowledge of the past encourages us to artificially take a few events and cultures out of context. In recent years it has become popular to create a new doomsday scenario of catastrophic global warming, claimed to be caused exclusively by human activity, and to ignore all of the patterns of climate change over the millennia.
GdJ

07/08/2020

This story was inspired by family sagas that, in many parts, did not follow established views of history. Although accepted history is changing towards them through archaelogical finds..
There were two types of saga. The popular sagas were tales and poems recited around the hearth during the long cold winters, handed down through the generations. Their intention was to entertain. There were many of these sagas but of them the only one to have survived the centuries and prospered is the Saxon poem Beowulf, a powerful tale that honours the warriors of the Northern lands, be they Saxon or Norse.
The family saga was different because it was handed down through generations as a private account of the generations that had lived before. The intention was to produce a guide, or manual, for the new leaders of the family. In the telling over generations, some errors may have crept into the family sagas but they were not intended to stroke anyone’s ego, or intimidate outsiders. They may therefore prove to be a rare and pure record of historic events and activities.
The Galwegian families of South West Scotland, on the border with England, carried their sagas back into the Viking heritage of these families. Sir Walter Scot was inspired by the sagas in his writing and was an avid collector of such stories.

GdJ

07/08/2020

"Einarr's Saga - The Winter" is now available from Amazon as a Kindle eBook at http://tinyurl.com/yclmhw6z and also as a paperback at http://tinyurl.com/yaowpbdd The books can also be found on Amazon national sites priced in the local currency for each site

Einarr's Saga, The Winter eBook: de Jonestun, Gilbert: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store