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!

Giant, chiseled blond men wielding axes feature prominently in my hopeful expectations for my maiden voyage to the ancestor-land, Sweden. Fortunately we plan to visit Foteviken, the Viking living history museum near Malmö. I am sooooo pumped. The Museum is a reconstructed Viking village in which the inhabitants recreate medieval handicrafts, occupations, culture and way of life. Villagers engage in traditional 12-century activities, including shipbuilding, sailing, archery, tanning, pottery, smithery, and music. They make their own clothing and build their own houses using medieval tools and materials. The Rough Guide to Sweden notes “the place has become a Mecca for people from all over Europe who want to live as Vikings, together with a not inconsiderable number of characters, sporting wild beards and lots of beads, who firmly believe they are Vikings.”

It occurred to me that I should use this opportunity to research for a Viking romance novel, hence the title of today’s post. I should probably have prepared for my trip by sampling some of the many Viking romances here. I’ve read On a Highland Shore, which I gave three Hearts, but in general Men-In-Kilts float my boat more than barbarians.

My trip to Sweden is actually more conducive to the Great American Novel, should I care to write about depressing things. My mother and I are taking the trip together to walk in the footsteps of her grandparents. It’s a story about love and loss and the American Dream, full of immigration, culture shock, out-of-wedlock births, family abandonment, family secrets, adoption, suicide, you name it. Interwoven with the story of my great-grandmother is the story of our voyage to Sweden, visiting the places written about in the journal of my adoptive-great-grandfather, to search for the ghost of Dagmar and find out something about ourselves, our own identity as Swedish and American and Woman. Deep huh? Ah, Real Literature. Give me Happily-Ever-After any day.

We fly into Stockholm on September 13th, stay for three nights, then travel north to Uppsala for a day, where the 200 birthday of Carl Linnaeus, the Father of Modern Taxonomy, is being celebrated this year. Then we travel to Växjö to visit the immigration museum that has records of the 1.2 million Swedish people who left for the United States between 1850 and 1930, where, hopefully, the researchers will have uncovered some information about our long-lost relatives. Armed with places and names, we will visit the towns where my mother’s adopted grandparents and biological grandmother came from, potentially knocking on doors and introducing ourselves to hither-to unknown second cousins. Next we travel south to Lund, the oldest city in the country and south again to Fotoviken, before returning to Stockholm and flying home. Somewhere during the trip we plan to take a boat ride on the Göta Canal (connecting the North Sea and Baltic Sea), bicycle through the countryside, and drink Kaffe in little cafes while people watching.

I will attempt to blog about my journey when I can find internet cafes.

Ha det så bra!