A feminist, multicultural reimagining of the Old Norse Sagas from the enormously talented duo Willow Smith and Jess Hendel.
The Black Shield Maiden trilogy is a feminist, multicultural reimagining of the Heimskringla, the best known of the Old Norse king's sagas. It's both a bildungsroman and a revisionist Viking-age epic, told from the perspective of women and people of color-the people who've been largely erased from patriarchal, Eurocentric historical media.
The first novel begins a few years before the Battle of Hafrsfjord and subsequent unification of Norway, when King Harald Fairhair was a growing but manageable threat to the other petty kings. It unfolds dual-protagonist style through the POVs of Yafeu and Freydis, two sixteen-year-old women from very different cultures whose unlikely friendship catalyzes their respective journeys to empowerment in ninth-century Norway.
Together, Freydis and Yafeu navigate their first loves, first losses and and first betrayals, and eventually overthrow the tyrannical regime of King Balli, Freydis's sadistic father. In Skiringssal's place, they found the African-Norse city of Yafreby-a multicultural Viking-age Wakanda, complete with a syncretized religion and pidgin language.
