Swain's Justice, the Concluding Volume of The Saga of Swain the Viking, to Appear in July
This summer the campaign to reprint Arthur D. Howden Smith’s excellent Saga of Swain the Viking will conclude with the fourth volume: Swain’s Justice. In this collection, Swain Olaf’s son finally crosses swords with the one man who ever defied him and escaped with his life: The murderer Olvir Rosta. For decades Olvir has evaded Swain, but now his pursuer has finally caught up with him. The bitterest blood-feud the North has ever seen will come to an end—but who will survive?
The five stories in Swain’s Justice originally appeared in the legendary pulp magazine Adventure between 1924 and 1944. As Deuce Richardson writes in the introduction, “Howden Smith based his tales directly upon what is known as the Orkneyinga Saga, the Norse account of the jarls (earls) of the Orkney isles north of Scotland. From all accounts, Swain was an uncommonly adept viking and he exerted outsized political sway in the Orkneys and Norway. The pulp version of Swain is all that viking adventure fans could ask for. Raise an ale-horn in honor of one of the great pulp fiction heroes, sword-brothers. Skoal!”
For more information on Arthur D. Howden Smith, see Deuce’s article here.