The Shadow of the Gods

The Shadow of the Gods, the first book in The Bloodsworn series, is a competent Nordic-inspired fantasy that presents a fascinating world rife with monsters and violence, where characters learn to be brutal to survive. The novel, however, is let down by a problematic structure that makes some plotlines take too long to get moving, while others suffer from the lack of a proper conclusion.

The story starts with a hunt. While young Breca is preparing to throw a spear at a reindeer, his mother, Orka, teaches him that “Death is a part of life.” He misses the shot, however, because a wolf startles the deer: in The Shadow of the Gods, there will always be a creature lurking in the shadows, ready to ruin the plans of unwary people.

Orka – one of the three main points of view in the book – is a nihilist woman, who believes the world is one “of blood. Of tooth and claw and sharp iron. Of short lives and painful deaths.” There’s little hope in her regarding the state of the world, so she fears for her boy, being harsh to him in an attempt to ready Breca for the hardships to come. It doesn’t take long for her to be proven right, as they hear the sound of screams coming from where the wolf just appeared and decide to investigate, finding a ghastly sight: a man murdered, his eyes pecked out by crows; the corpse of his wife nearby, with her intestines spilling out to the ground. Their son – Breca’s friend – is nowhere to be found.

That is the main threat in Orka’s plotline: there are people stealing kids for some nefarious reason, which sends her on a quest for justice. Orka is defined by her anger, a woman driven by a single purpose, capable of the most unspeakable acts of violence to achieve her goal. When the story starts, she’s trying to live a peaceful life with her husband and Breca, but the child stealers push her back to the bloody game she used to play.

The second main PoV is Varg, a slave on the run after butchering his master. He is after revenge for the death of a loved one, but doesn’t know who did the deed. He seeks a witch to perform a ritual that will reveal the truth, which will lead him to join a warband called the Bloodsworn – the title of the series.

The narrative is successful in showing how Varg is marked by his time as a slave. When a man asks his name, Varg promptly answers honestly – when lying would have been wise – and the narrator remarks, “His natural response to command was to obey unthinkingly. On Kolskegg’s farm anything other resulted in a thump or the lash.” Besides obedience and knowing pain and oppression firsthand, Varg’s life as a slave also means that he is new to that world – having lived his whole life locked on a farm – so his inexperience allows for some exposition to arise naturally in the story as the members of the Bloodsworn teach him not only how to fight but also how some things work in their society.

Orka and Varg are both driven by a similar anger: they both are scarred by the violence done to their loved ones, but while Varg’s fury is muddled by his confusion and inexperience, Orka’s rage has ample room to burst. There’s a great scene early on where she stands in front of a spoiled warrior – who is kin of the local jarl – and she starts to shake. Being an arrogant fool, the man mistakes it for fear of his mighty presence, but Orka is scared of what she wants to do to him, afraid of setting herself loose.

The final main point of view is of the warrior Elvar. If Orka is hard on her son because she believes they live in a cruel world, Elvar’s father taught her the same lesson. “Kindness makes you soft,” he said to her. At the same time that Elvar wants nothing to do with her father, she also wants to live up to his views. She is a warrior who takes pride in being on the frontlines, in working harder than her companions, in killing for her warband. Violence for Elvar is a way of life, she sees glory in battle, the means to acquire “battle-fame” and become the subject of songs and sagas. Her journey will lead her to a place of myth, where she will learn the cost of glory-seeking.

After all, this is a society governed by jarls, where people gather in mead halls and drink from horns while listening to sagas by the sound of a lyre. There’s an early scene where Varg is lost in thoughts, listening to a saga about the serpent god who broke the world, and the
music is interrupted by the arrival of a prince, whose abrupt entrance foretells his hostile intentions: “Then the mead hall’s doors creaked open and a gust of cold swept in, setting torches flaring and crackling, its icy fingers dragging Varg from the skald’s saga-song.”

This is a world based on Nordic mythology set after a Ragnarök-like event: the gods are dead and their giant bones serve as the foundation of cities, their divine energy keeping monsters at bay, the so-called vaesen. An early fight with a troll sets the stage: Elvar’s Battle-Grim are introduced as a fearsome band of warriors, who take control of a village with ease, dispatching everyone foolish enough to stand in their way. But a single troll is able to slaughter many Battle-Grim in just a few minutes. The descriptions are visceral, focusing on the damage done to their bodies:

“She moved in from the side, running as the troll’s club whistled through the air and crunched down on the woman with the broken arm. A wet slap, punctuated with the crunch of bones breaking, and she was gone, unrecognizable, just a pile of shattered bones in a sack of skin. Blood hung in the air like mist.”

In The Shadow of the Gods, monsters appear suddenly and all encounters are deadly, with some characters suffering horrible wounds or deaths: one chapter has Elvar going to sleep with the Battle-Grim and waking up constricted by hundreds of worms, which are trying to choke her and enter her body. However, not all creatures are hostile, as Breca tries to teach Orka in the beginning, befriending a fierce tooth fairy after finding her hurt in the wild.

We follow two bands of mercenaries in the novel, the Battle-Grim, and the Bloodsworn. One is Elvar’s and the other is Varg’s, but the reader would be hard-pressed to tell which one is which after reading the novel, as the book fails to make these groups distinct, giving them a particular feel or group dynamic. Characters from both warbands become interchangeable and even their leaders appear to have the same personality: Agnar and Glornir are both fierce warriors marked by their loyalty to their comrades. There’s a key difference between them, but the twist comes too late to make a difference: the way they act towards their companions is the same throughout the novel, which leads to some repetition.

It doesn’t help that some stories take a while to get going. Elvar’s turning point – when she visits her father – is past the middle point of the book, for example. Meanwhile, Varg’s and Orka’s stories never reach a climactic denouement, finishing before anything is really settled: even Orka’s “sidequest” of assisting two brothers avenge their father is left without a proper conclusion. In other words, this is definitely not a book that can function as a standalone, as it tells just the beginning of a story, without providing much of an ending to anything besides Elvar’s journey to the mythic place.

Finally, for a world deemed too dangerous and unforgiven, it is also presented in a fairly straightforward manner, where characters are usually what they seem to be at first glance. If someone is introduced with negative adjectives, having a suspicious conversation, or provoking uneasiness in the main characters, they are indeed untrustworthy. Orka’s main antagonist even has a burned face to illustrate his wickedness. There are only hints of moral ambiguity at the end, which is too late for any kind of development.

Despite its shortcomings, The Shadow of the Gods is still a good introduction to the world of The Bloodsworn: let’s just hope the sequel will boast a better and more fulfilling structure.

January 12, 2024.