Ivar the Viking

Ivar the Viking is a historical novel by Paul Du Chaillu (1831-1903), better known as the African explorer and writer who first scientifically described the gorilla. After his African work Du Chaillu shifted his interests to Scandinavian history and produced several books on the Viking age and on the broader history of northern Europe.

Ivar the Viking is set in the Viking period and follows the central character through the seafaring, exploration, and combat that characterized Viking life. The novel draws on Du Chaillu’s substantial research into Norse sagas, archaeological findings, and the historical sources for the Viking age that were becoming better understood in the nineteenth century as Scandinavian scholarship developed.

Du Chaillu’s later Land of the Midnight Sun of 1881 and The Viking Age of 1889 were substantial nonfiction works that established his reputation as one of the leading Anglophone popularizers of Scandinavian and Viking subjects. Ivar the Viking belongs to his fiction in the same general historical period.