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The Fire in Winter: A Novel of Harald Hardrada, the Last Viking King
Paperback
Mystery & ThrillerHistorical Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 7 2026
Pages: 298
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.74 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Norway, 1066. As three hundred longships gather to invade England, the dying marshal Ulf Ospaksson dictates the story no skald will ever sing: the true life of his king, Harald Hardrada - the last and greatest of the Viking sea-kings.
Ulf was there for all of it. He watched a fifteen-year-old boy carried bleeding from the slaughter at Stiklestad swear an oath that would shake three empires. He followed him east to Kiev, then south to golden Constantinople, where under a false name Harald rose through the Varangian Guard - burning corsair fleets with Greek fire, storming Sicilian citadels, blinding an emperor, and escaping a dungeon to row his longship over the great chain of the Golden Horn.
He stood at Harald's shoulder as the penniless exile became the richest man in the north and seized the throne of Norway. And year by year - Hedeby burning, the midnight sea-battle of the Nisa, his own people's valleys put to the torch - Ulf watched the laughing young leader men would die for harden into Hardrada: the hard ruler, consumed by the lust for one last crown. England.
Ulf warned him: you are losing yourself - and a man who loses himself loses everything. Harald agreed with every word. And sailed anyway - to a hot September day at a bridge called Stamford, where the Viking Age ended with an arrow in the throat of the man who embodied it.
A sweeping epic of loyalty, ambition and the price of greatness, told with the intimacy of a deathbed confession, THE FIRE IN WINTER brings to blazing life the astonishing true story of Harald Hardrada: exile, mercenary, Varangian captain, King of Norway - the last Viking.
For readers of Bernard Cornwell, Conn Iggulden and Giles Kristian. Includes 24 full-page illustrations in a dark Nordic folklore style.
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