The Shadow of the Gods
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John Gwynne on The Shadow of the Gods
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Forty years of Norse obsession, one unanswered questionThe obsession started in a classroom, not a library. A teacher read Beowulf aloud, and something locked in.
I was probably ten or eleven years old when I entered that particular rabbit hole, and I can remember clearly reading about Beowulf, Grendel and a very big dragon, and absolutely loving it.
paperprocrastinators.wordpress.com, “Author Q&A: John Gwynne, The Shadow of the Gods – Paper Procrastinators”That childhood moment cascaded into decades of reading: giant wolves, serpents, berserkers, talking crows, and eventually reenactment in an actual shield wall.
The precise starting gun for the Bloodsworn Saga was a single passage at the end of the Völuspá, the seeress’s prophecy in the Poetic Edda, where the Norse gods have already destroyed each other and the world sits ruined. The poem ends on the dragon Níðhöggr rising free, carrying corpses on its wings. Gwynne was reading that passage during his pre-writing research when a question surfaced that the poem refuses to answer.
The first seed for this series began when I was reading the Poetic Edda...There is a beautiful passage in the Voluspa that talks about Ragnarök and the fall of the gods. And right at the very end of it, when the gods are dead and the sun is rising on a new world, the dragon Nidhoggr breaks free of his bonds beneath Ygdrassil, the World Tree, and he flies into the sky for the first time. ‘There comes the shadow-dark dragon flying, / The gleaming serpent, up from Dark-of-Moon Hills; / He flies over the plain, and in his pinions / He carries corpses.’ I thought, wow, that’s cool, and I also thought, I wonder what happens next?
Gwynne resists any grandiose description of what the series represents. After seven books and eighteen years in his previous world, the Banished Lands, he arrived at the Bloodsworn Saga carrying everything he loved about Norse mythology, and chose to describe the whole project with deliberate self-deflation.
Writing the Bloodsworn Saga has been my love-letter to Norse mythology. Admittedly not so much a loving Shakespeare-like sonnet; more like a war-torn, fire-blackened, blood-soaked shred of crumpled parchment.
How he wrote it
Sagas, shield walls, and a bowl of porridgeGwynne’s research method comes from his years teaching at Brighton University: read everything relevant before writing a word. For this book that meant the Poetic Edda, Prose Edda, Icelandic sagas, and Scandinavian folklore. One illustrated glossary of folk-creatures, Johan Egerkrans’s Vaesen, proved especially generative. When he encountered the spertus in its pages, the creature’s dietary requirements set off an escalation he did not quite plan.
One of the most fascinating, or perhaps the most disgusting, was reading about a creature in Scandinavian folklore called a Spertus or Spiritus...They like human spit for their breakfast...once I read this, I knew a spertus had to be in my book, but somehow, over time, the human spit wasn’t enough, so I escalated that to human spit mixed with a drop or two of human blood, all dripped and stirred into a bowl of porridge.
paperprocrastinators.wordpress.com, “Author Q&A: John Gwynne, The Shadow of the Gods – Paper Procrastinators”The research did not stop at creatures. Gwynne made a structural decision to let the prose itself carry the texture of the source texts, which meant learning how Icelandic saga writers compressed meaning into compound words. The kennings in the book are not decoration; they are a deliberate attempt to make the style feel continuous with the literature that inspired it.
I made a definite decision with the prose in this book to try and reflect the saga tales of Scandinavia, so I’ve drawn upon some of the language-devices you’ll find in texts such as the Icelandic Sagas and the Poetic Edda, hence you will find many kennings/phrases like ‘dragon-prowed, rune-cast,’ and ‘white-flecked,’ throughout the book.
Orka, the book’s third point-of-view character and the one who arrives already carrying a violent past she has tried to bury, came from a conversation with his agent, Julie Crisp, about a well-worn archetype. The retired person of violence is everywhere in fiction, from westerns to superhero films. The question Gwynne and Crisp were turning over was what a single adjustment would do to the whole trope.
I’ve always loved the trope of the grizzled, retired war veteran/someone with a violent past who has tried to leave it behind them – William Munney from Unforgiven, Wolverine in Logan, Shane, Benjamin Martin from the Patriot...Julie and I were chatting about a way to give that trope a new angle, and the idea to change the gender came up. And that was that, Orka was born.
Beyond the literary research, Gwynne spent years in Viking reenactment training alongside his sons, and that practice gave him details no secondary source would have supplied. The combat in the book is grounded not in choreography but in physical memory.
Where Viking re-enactment has helped me to write combat is in the details. I’ve learned so many things that I wouldn’t have known or imagined without participating. Like how difficult it is to get into a coat of mail and how heavy it is. Little tricks to alleviate weight of the mail on your shoulders. How to use a shield as a weapon as well as a defensive tool.
What he wants us to sit with
Battle-fame, family, and what it costs to hold bothGwynne frames the book’s coldness as the container, not the content. The violence and the brutal world are the conditions his characters move through; what he is tracking underneath is something warmer and more exposed.
The Shadow of the Gods is my love-song to Norse mythology and Viking era-history. It is set in a cold, hard world...and at its heart, I hope, it is a tale of family and friendship, of love and loss, of betrayal and revenge.
fromfirstpagetolast.wordpress.com, “John Gwynne – Q&A - From First Page to Last”Elvar’s arc specifically is built to put the warrior culture’s central promise, that battle-fame, the conviction that dying gloriously means your name lives on in stories, is worth whatever it costs, under genuine pressure. Gwynne does not set out to demolish the idea but to show what it looks like when a person finally holds it up against actual human loss. He described the design of that pressure in his annotated excerpt.
Elvar...focused on winning her battle-fame; she is young and determined, and perhaps a little obsessed and narrow-minded about that goal. Through the course of the book and series, you will see her re-evaluating her position in regard to her quest for battle-fame.
That re-evaluation is the emotional engine of Elvar’s storyline. The world hands her everything she thought she wanted, and then requires her to decide whether it was worth the price.
Gwynne returns, in interview after interview, to the same measure of success: whether a reader felt, even briefly, the way he felt as a child reading David Gemmell. That is the standard he writes toward, and it is a feeling, not an argument.
I write to entertain, and I hope to give to readers that feeling that I loved when reading, of being swept away to a new world, of caring about characters and what happened to them.