I first heard and fell in love with this poem as a song. Joan Baez put Henry Treece's poem to music on her 1968 albumn: "Baptism: A Journey Through Our Time" and also found on her 1974 compilation albumn "The Comtemporary Ballad Book".

So when I found the poem as a book with beautiful threatening illustrations, I found it irrisistible. I go back to that book from time to time and sing it again, especially around Halloween.

All Henry Treece's adult works bring history to life with three-dimensional, essentially flawed characters, who evolve (for better or worse) throughout his books. His work can be sensuous, but never pornographic. His heros are not picaresque, but tend to be the subjects, rather than instigators or controllers of events.

Of particular note are his works based upon Ancient Greece (Jason, Oedipus Rex and, to a lesser degree, Electra).

The Dark Island deals with the advent of the Romans to Celtic Britain. Another work of note (The Golden Strangers) concerns the Celts and Iberians in Britain. 'The Great Captains' is an original, and convincing recreation of Arthurian Britain, light years from the romanticised versions.

It may be a perfectly nice book but whoever filed this in the category "Baby-Preschool" was hallucinating. It's a nice dense text-only non-illustrated book maybe for your 12 year old.

This was one of the first books I read by myself as a child of about eight. I loved it. Now, as an adult I have read it with my son and he loves it to. It started me on a life long passion for vikings.

As an adult I have gone on to read most of the viking sagas that are available in translation into english. Having done so I now see that Treece's style is in keeping with the genuine article. It is straight forward and direct. There isn't much room for sentimentality. Some characters die and the rest have to get on with it. The historical detail is good and it paints a fairly plausible picture of viking life in the late eighth century.

This is very much a book for boys. My wife and daughter have no interest in it. I would recommend it to any boy who is interested in adventure stories and has at least a passing interest in history.

This is the first part of Treece's Viking trilogy and it is by far the best part. The story is quite simple; a group of rovers form a crew in the western fjords of Norway and sail west, to Britain, in search of gold. The hero is Harald Sigurdson, a young boy who was intending to sail with his father, who is seriously injured in one of the early chapters. Thus Harald is on his own, and is forced to grow into a man very quickly by the hardship that he faces upon the waves. Watching Harald grow is like seeing the transformation of any boy to a man. But from the beginning there is more to Viking's Dawn than there is to some of Treece's other books about Vikings. It deals with a number of themes such as ambition and betrayal. The leaders of the expedition, Thorkell Fairhair and Ragnar Raven, are both berserks and powerful Vikings. They are also rivals that place the crew in great danger and lead to a somewhat tragic ending. Like the other Viking novels, Treece's language is simple and easy to grasp. He portrays the bold sea-rovers excellently, presenting them as they were, brave, cunning, generous, but also cruel and greedy. If you only read one piece of fiction about Vikings, make it this one!

This is the second part of Treece's trilogy about the Norwegian Viking, Harald Sigurdson. It's set in about the year 800 and tells a fairly typical adventure for a Norwegian Viking of the period, sailing to Ireland in search of treasure. Later, however, the tale gets a bit more fantastic, when Harald is shipwrecked and ends up in Miklagard (Constantinople), the capital of the Byzantine Empire. He serves there are a guardsman. He could be seen as a forerunner of the famed Byzantine Guard.

Treece's language is very simple in these books; its probably intended more for children or adolescents then for adults. However, it provides a good character study for the grim, brave Vikings,and it provides a fair smattering of Viking myths, stories, and jokes. All in all I found this enjoyable (though not as good as Viking's Dawn), but I'm a Viking fanatic. Not everyone's idea of a good read.