Let us Talk of Many Things; of Books and Queens and Pirates, of Mystery and Kings...: Spotlight on Jane Harlond and The Doomsong Sword Saga Series

Saturday, 14 February 2026

Spotlight on Jane Harlond and The Doomsong Sword Saga Series

How a Viking battlefield led to a historical fantasy series

Long, long ago, before my second son went to live in Sweden, I had a contract to re-write various Norse myths and legends as short stories for an educational publisher. I was well into the project when the whole thing was cancelled. Disappointing, but these things happen, and if you are a writer you know background reading, research and early drafts are rarely wasted.

Midnight sun on the Baltic coast of northern Sweden.

A few years later, I returned to the Sigurd, the Dragonslayer story in the ancient Volsung saga and began to re-draft it as a novel using a fictional reluctant hero. The story came together well and was published as The Doomsong Sword. As fantasy the book didn’t fit very well with my two historical crime fiction series, though, so I largely ignored it until a couple of years ago, when a combination of factors inspired a second and then a third book in what is becoming a saga-like series.

The second book, The Doomsong Voyage, developed out of visit to a Spanish hill-top town in what used to be as Al-Andalus. This patio features in the story.

Apart from their infamous reputation for raiding for treasure and slaughtering innocents the Danes as they were called – even if they weren’t from Denmark – sailed huge distances ‘a-viking’ for trade, and then in search of warmer fertile lands, where they could farm and prosper far better than in the ice and snow of the Cold North. I was aware of Viking settlements in Cantabria and Galicia, (northern Spain) and how they traded in the Levant, but the visit to this small Moorish town on the southern Atlantic coast of Spain resulted in a nagging writer’s ‘what if’. The notion that Vikings had docked in a nearby port lodged in my mind and the outline of a historical-fantasy saga began to grow. This story, informed by Scandinavian history relating to a volcano and a verified climate disaster, plus my own travels, takes the reader from a tiny island on the Baltic Sea to Ibiza in the old Middle Sea in a trading knarr named Guillemot – after the small, indomitable birds who thrive in the worst of weathers.

Book 3, recently released, takes a few of the passengers and crew back to the Cold North, then on a return voyage south. They are pushed off course during a terrible storm and Guillemot takes shelter in the River Torridge (North Devon). This is where Scandinavian, British, and my own personal history come together – on a battlefield.

The stimulus for what happens here is probably connected to my age-related nostalgia for the bracing winds of a North Devon Atlantic beach. My Spanish husband and I now live on the Mediterranean, where beaches are narrow, gritty and rarely exciting. Perhaps for this reason I kept remembering where I grew up. Our house was built on a Viking battlefield and I used to walk our dog down Hubba Lane to the river. Most days I passed and took no notice of a monument on Bloody Corner (!) that says:

Stop Stranger Stop,
Near this spot lies buried
King Hubba the Dane,
who was slayed in a bloody retreat,
by King Alfred the Great

Historians doubt and disagree on what actually happened in the Battle of Northam, possibly because there was a second battle in much the same location in early Norman times, but this monument records the supposed defeat of invading Danes ‘by the men of Defenschire’ in 878. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

(That) winter the brother of Hingwar and of Halfdene came with twenty-three ships to Defenschire in Wessex; and he (Hubba/Ubbe/Hudd) was there slain…

Records of Northam, which was larger and more important than Bideford in those days, exist from around the 10th/11th Century, and tradition also says a fleet of 33, not 23, dragonships landed on the beaches around Appledore and sailed up the Torridge. This is the background to the third Doomsong story, which also includes aspects of Celtic traditions and legend because Devon and Cornwall maintained their Celtic heritage well into Norman times.

Fact, fiction, and mythical fantasy – because magic and the fantastical were a very important element of Viking, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon beliefs before science and electricity – have combined to become The Doomsong Saga.

Each of the books can be read as a stand-alone, but if you would like to start at the beginning with how the legendary sword named Doomsong and Truthteller came into the hands of a lazy boy named Davor begin with Book 1 The Doomsong Sword