Viking life was hardly the lap of luxury. The houses were quite sparse, dirty, cold, unappealing. I decided that the Viking age is really quite a bad time period for a romance novel. Maybe I should read a few viking romances and see how authors deal with the problem. Thursday we walked around the adorable town of Lund, viewing its famous cathedral and crypt with Finn the giant and his wife holding up the pillars, before driving south to the Foteviken Viking Museum. Perched on a hill overlooking a choppy sea between Denmark and Sweden, the viking village consisted of a handful of reconstructed viking houses inside an earthen rampart. It was very cold and very windy and only one viking was in attendance, though he was quite knowledgeable and spoke six languages. He let me hold his sword, but I didn’t get a picture.

Afterward we drove to Trollhättan, a pleasant city just south of Lake Vattern, on the Göta Canal, and stayed in a swanky hotel where we could send laundry out to be cleaned, since laundromats are not to be found.

Not only was my flight cancelled, forcing me to stay overnight in an airport hotel after sitting on the tarmac for five hours, but I ran out of romance novels three days ago and can’t find any more in English in the bookstores. Corpus Bones! I read the first third of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark on said tarmac, but it isn’t nearly as engrossing as the reviews say it is. Set in England during the Napoleonic War (a few years before the start of the Regency period), the novel is about two magicians politicking in a country of theoretical magic. It is written in that humorous British style full of asides and anecdotes, but it lacks any passion. There is nothing like a good passionate romance novel to speed away the boring confinement of flying. I shall quite simply go mad with boredom during tomorrow’s fifteen hours of plane flight. Hopefully tomorrow there will, at least, be a flight!