This may very well be on me and the fact that I spaced out my reading of the book for so long (it’s only like 200-something pages, if I recall correctly), but I found the story a bit slow until the last quarter-ish. It may have been a little too much for me had it been a non-incestuous union, but in this case, yeah. We get to have to read about their lovemaking, kissing, cuddling, yearning for one another, tickle fights, and all those tender moments. I found the amount of ink spent not only developing but emphasizing the love between Freda and Skafloc to be excessive.
Now it’s not really distastefully done it’s reasonable for the characters given that they’re unaware of their siblinghood it’s integral to the story. Ok, let’s just get this out of the way first. Anderson’s fluency with Scandinavian (and other) folklore is on full display, and though this one perhaps contributed less directly to the worlds of D&D and vanilla fantasy tropes than Three Hearts and Three Lions, that’s not for lack of creative and wondrous material. Throw in some Celtic godlings and crap while you’re at it! Cursed sword, changeling berserker, elf vs troll war, oodles of magic – get it all in! Why?! Because it’s fun and cool!!īefore we get into spoiler territory, let me just say that there’s a lot to unpack here. The Broken Sword is a skillfully crafted example of what a fantasy story can be when a talented writer just lets loose and does what he wants. Of the three I’ve gotten to thus far, my favorite has been the High Crusade ( which Gita just recently reviewed). The Broken Sword, perhaps the best known and most renowned of Poul Anderson’s novels, is the third book of his that I’ve read, and with that I put a notch in the last of his Appendix N entries.
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